This is not a romantic idea. Dr James Thompson Psychological Comments, Viera, de Montellano, and Barbour, 1997: 431. Columbus never claimed that he saw black people in the Americas. Snow continued, "The findings of professional archaeologists and physical anthropologists are misrepresented so that they seem to support the [Van Sertima] hypothesis". But Van Sertima always defended his book. And he started work, using his own money. Mansa Musa took the throne after the previous ruler, Abu Bakr II, went on an expedition to sail the Atlantic Ocean. Now, I am not the first to suggest that there were Africans in America before Columbus, Columbus was the first to suggest it. The researchers wrote a systematic rebuttal of Van Sertima's claims, stating that Van Sertima's "proposal was without foundation" in claiming African diffusion as responsible for prehistoric Olmec culture (in present-day Mexico). All Rights Reserved. It could be dark, bronze people from South America. Im pretty sure I had taken a World History course before. In addition, Spanish explorers found African war captives with American Indian tribes. Van Sertima tells of the emergence of the Mali kingdom and its seafaring ventures, thus providing evidence for sailing capabilities of West Africans. There is also a vast body of knowledge to be uncovered about Africa and America. Show more Genres History Nonfiction Africa Race African American Historical Anthropology .more 284 pages, Paperback First published January 1, 1976 1337 Words. Van Sertimas main evidence for his claims regarding a pre-Colombian contact between ancient Africans (Nubians) and Olmecs rests on the supposed similarities between Negroid facial features and the colossal Olmec heads. Ivan Van Sertima They Came Before Columbus : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive. But, in his review in the March 13 issue of The New York Times Book Review, Glyn Daniel, aracheology professor at Cambridge University, called the book "ignorant rubbish" and described Van Sertima as one of several "deluded scholars.". The professor said that he was intrigued but skeptical when he first encountered the idea of ancient African contact with the Americas. Polynesians/Melanesians went to the Americas before Columbus. Any other significant information about the history of my people tended to start with, we were slaves. We were taken from Africa, but who were we before slavery? The belief that Africans were in the Americas before the Europeans were makes sense to me. Most average 5-year olds with decent critical thinking ability can spot the cracks in the theory. This two-way trade never happened. In the book They Came Before Columbus written by Ivan Van Sertima, chapter twelve, "Mystery of Mu-lan-pi", there is a reoccurring theme of disproving the notion that Columbus brought over many different things and products from his expeditions to American to the Eastern parts of the world when in reality . To assuage the Christian conscience for the enslavement of a people, one could not believe that black people were intelligent enough and capable of such feats as the ancient Egyptians. Van Sertima even argued that in several writings Columbus suggested that Africans were in the Americas before he was. In They Came Before Columbus, we see clearly the unmistakable face and handprint of black Africans in pre-Columbian America, and their overwhelming impact on the civilizations they encountered. This was all that I could recall being formally taught. Wow, so you (your black ancestors) got there before the Indians and the Europeans? However, Afrocentrists then make the claim that the natives of Mesoamerica regarded them as gods, and so they sculpted these statues in order to honor them (sounds like Ancient Aliens, to me). But where did Menzies come up with the idea that it was Asians, not Europeans, who first arrived in America from other countries? Accidental stylazation could not account for the individuality and racial particulars of these heads. Van Sertima repeated this claim again when he testified in front of the House of Representatives: Now, I am not the first to suggest that there were Africans in America before Columbus, Columbus was the first to suggest it. Furthermore, Van Sertima, quite wildly, claims that since the Olmec heads were black then they must have represented African people. The occasion was his first visit to the United States from Britain, where he was working in 1970. A celebrated classic, They Came Before Columbus, dea. pre-Columbian contact between Africa and the Americas, "Goodbye Columbus? Experts have determined that the gourds floated across the Atlantic and washed ashore in the Americas to be adopted by Mesoamerican cultures. ". Van Sertima believed that Mali seafarers sailed across the Atlantic and landed in Mesoamerica. please donate https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=ZPEYVFR6AgeofReason198EKA be a monthly supporter https://www.patreon.com/. Other stone heads have been uncovered in Mexico. He died on 25 May 2009 aged 74. It was with the coming of Columbus that the twilight of the red and black races began. I have, 2600 words What do normativity and intentionality mean? Professor Ivan van Sertima, They Came before Columbus A review by Femi Akomolafe, 19 January 1995. Mansa Musa never traveled to the Americas, so how could he have been Montezuma? Required fields are marked *. One of the most baffling claims to me is the idea that the slave trade happened in reverse and that Native Americans were shipped to Africa, not the other way around. He published his They Came Before Columbus in 1976, as a Rutgers graduate student. I really have no idea. Van Sertima focuses specifically on the Olmec colossal heads, saying that the characteristics of the stone faces are "indisputably" African, while Mesoamerican experts such as Richard Diehl disregards this claim, as the statues are stylized and generally accepted as representing native Mesoamericans. What did I know or was taught? The mapmaker, Martin Waldseemller, named the New World "America," after the Italian Amerigo Vespucci, who had explored the coastline of South America and was the first to realize that it was a . [18] Ancient Egypt is regarded as one of the greatest earliest civilizations that has captured the attention and imagination of historians and laypeople alike for years. (Viera, de Montellano, and Barbour, 1997: 431). This view, of course, is seen as highly fringe in the field of anthropology. Alas, none exist. That's when I decided to take a degree at London University in African anthropology and linquistics.". How can these accounts be explained away? On the day he submitted his piece, he learned about Alexander von Wuthenau, and art historian who had excavated a large number of Negroid heads in clay, gold, copper and copal sculpted by pre-Columbian American artists. Haslip-Vierra, de Montellano and Barbour. Others hold true to the story of the American slave trade in which enslaved Africans were brought to Americas shores to provide free labor to build the country and grow the economy. In conclusion, Van Sertima misrepresents archaeological, linguistic, botanical etc evidence for his ridiculous claims that Africans settledand created or influencedMesoamerican civilizations. The psyche of blacks is raised. Evidence indicates that humans originated in Africa. Mike Harrington: His team looks good, even without Alex Tuch. There is a heated online debate about how Black Americans came to America. Keep reading with unlimited digital access. There is a lack of evidence for his claims and, the evidence he claims lends credence to his outlandish claims falls short since we know the origins of what convinced him that there was an ancient African presence in Mesoamerica. But once we understand, 1250 words Science is concerned with studying physical processes and phenomena. ( Van Sertima, 1972: xiv; They Came Before Colombus) Ivan Van Sertima is a fringe Afrocentric theorist (they all are), who argued that there was an African presence in America, long before Colombus set shore in the Bahamas in 1492. I don't buy it. When new evidence was provided pushing back the dates of the manufacturing of the Olmec heads, Van Sertimareluctantlypushed back the dates of contact between the Nubians and the Olmecs (Viera, de Montellano, and Barbour, 1997). They follow that quote with this statement: "In spite of the above evidence, education and curriculum development literature are generally silent on the Olmecs" (pg 5). [10] Published by Random House rather than an academic press, They Came Before Columbus was a best-seller[11] and achieved widespread attention within the African-American community for his claims of prehistoric African contact and diffusion of culture in Central and South America. Moreover, the slave narratives all make it very clear that the enslaved population in the Americas came from Africa so much so that in Cuba some enslaved persons committed suicide, in hope that their spirit would return to Africa. Their Negro-ness could not be explained away nor, in most cases, their African cultural origin. Occasionally, Ive been asked by my colleagues some form of the question, Where are you from?, No, like where is your family from? This is an inference that Van Sertima makes, but he presents his inference as a fact. Both the Mandingo people of Africa and the Quetzalcoatl people of the Americas undergo a ritual of self-flagellating dances (dances of penance and chastisement) in which the dancers may wrap themselves in thorns or lash themselves with thorns. Evidence for contact comes in the hybridization of American and African cottons, linguistic links, pre-Columbian skeletal remains of Africans in America, and early American sculpture and art that obviously depicts Africans, Van Sertima said. I saw Dr. Van Sertima lecture at Cornell University in 1979. In They Came Before Columbus, Ivan Van Sertima put forward the argument that African people were in the Americas long before Columbus was. [15] This is one of many examples of Van Sertima's theories that Mesoamerican mythologies are based on Pre-Columbian African contact theories. In the library of a Princeton professor, he came across three volumes, "Africa and the Discovery of America," written by a Harvard Linquist, Leo Weiner, and published more than 50 years ago. Laster that year he returned to this country to teach at Rutgers. Ocean currents such as the Guinea and Canary currents were likely to have aided Africans sailing to America as well. Get up-to-the-minute news sent straight to your device. Dwayne Wong (Omowale) is a Guyanese born Pan-Africanist and author. In doing so, he also attempts to combat the perceived inferiority of black Africans due to their perceived lack of technological or cultural advancements prior to colonialism in Africa. It sounds like someone chose to record himself reading the book and decided to upload the files to YouTube. The accounts of people such as Christopher Columbus himself, Spanish travelers, and Herodotus, though, are harder to debate. . There are some problems with this theory. First discovered by Charles Spearman in 1904, noting that schoolchildren, 1550 words Introduction The role of the Jews in the slave tradeand in the civil warhas garnered a great amount of scholarly attention. Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users. Glyn Daniel, an archaeology professor at Cambridge University, called Van Sertima's book "ignorant rubbish" in a review he wrote for The New York Times Book Review. Columbus is such a late-comer that it is almost silly to compare anybody's arrival to his. In this book, Ivan Van Sertima explores his theory that Africans made landfall and had significant influence on the native peoples of Mesoamerica, primarily the Olmec civilization. [16], Van Sertima argues that African contact likely happened more than once. According to Dr. Van Sertima, whose book "They Came Before Columbus" (Random House, 1976) suggests Africans were in the New World before Columbus's journeys, the mainstream of academia. How Large of a Role Did Jews Play in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade? Are some Black Americans trying to distance themselves from Africa and rewrite history by ignoring such evidence as DNA? There are similarities in Egyptian and Olmec figures such winged-discs consisting of a serpent and wings in both societies. But early African contact, by free peoples, is being viewed in school curriculum development as a source of pride for a large segment of the modern school population, to counter what Van Sertima termed "disrespect for the Africans" who had built early civilizations and empires in their own homelands long before European contact. Classical scholar Mary Lefkowitz who debunked Afrocentric claims about ancient Greece and Rome in her book Not out of Africa explains how her colleagues let her down because of the fear of being labelled as racist like she was. Van Sertima's zeal for learning about African culture began in England in the '60s while he was working as a writer for the BBC. The majority of us here in America the descendant of slaves were already aboriginal in America and were the slave population of choice. In this book, the author presents evidence and arguments for the existence of black Africans in America before the arrival of Columbus and the beginning of the Atlantic Slave Trade in 1492. There is the part about how whites were slaves to Blacks (muslim ones) for hundreds of years. All parties remained peaceful, and Columbus specifically instructed his crews not to take advantage of the Indians. In Koning's telling and in Zinn's, Columbus set out to enslave a uniformly gentle people for the sole purpose of enriching himself with gold. Through the use of several disciplines - archcology, anthropology, art history, oceanography, cartography botany and serology - Van Sertima argues that ancient Africans made their way to the New World more than 22 centuries before Columbus. Bro, are you serious now?Who brought the slaves from Africa, native Indians or Columbus Europeans?When did slave trade start that Red-Indians became yall history?So in a bid to stay off Africans yall tracing your ancestry to Indians?Mehn thats something else. Dwayne is the author of Kingdoms and Civilizations of Africa and several other books on African and African Diaspora history. Sources of information on such misconceptions and strategies for helping students to overcome them are . When the metallurgists in Spain assayed these spears, they found they were identical, not similar, but were identical in their ratio of gold, silver and copper alloys as spears then being forged in African Guinea.. I'm trying to follow all the rules but forgive me if this is a bit vague. Change). Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. (AP Photo). "While I was doing it," he recalls, "I asked myself why was I studying African writers in English.Why didn't I know an African language? pic.twitter.com/sKrVa4a2JQ, I figured you say something like that.Are these people mixed with "native American" or are they just Black indigenous indians? suddenly this stream widened, and they saw in the distance what looked at first like a drifting island of black menWe estimated on examination that there might be about one hundred and fifty at the most; they appeared very well-built, exceedingly black, and all clothed in white cotton shirts. 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