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. He employs a number of tactics commonly used by pseudoscientists (Cole 1980; Radner and Radner 1982: 27-52; Ortiz de Montellano 1995; Williams 1988), including an almost exclusive use of outdated secondary sources and a reliance on the pseudoscientific writing of others. At the time that the dominant narrative of the origins of ancient Egyptian civilization emerged, the use of African slaves was well into effect. Alas, none exist. Saying slave ships are a myth is a whole new level of ignorance . Later forced immigrations by Africans to the New World as slaves, and the subsequent development of African-American culture, played a far greater role in shaping the Americas of the 20th century. I noted before that Van Sertimas claims were flawed in some respects, but his arguments were still logical in certain respects and he did attempt to provide documentation for at least some of his claims even if at times the documentation he presented was misleading. When evidence came out refuting Van Sertimas storytelling, he concocted an ad hoc hypothesis to save his hypothesis from immunization. In the first place, there are no Egyptian historical records which suggest that the Egyptians ever sailed to America or even attempted such a journey. [5], Van Sertima wrote a response to be included in the article (as is standard academic practice) but withdrew it. Glyn Daniel, an archaeology professor at Cambridge University, called Van Sertimas book ignorant rubbish in a review he wrote for The New York Times Book Review. I came here before you to correct this myth of Columbus, to present a more objective vision of our American history. 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. 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. I want to make a point of clarification here. The two likely were not even alive at the same time period. Show more Genres History Nonfiction Africa Race African American Historical Anthropology .more 284 pages, Paperback First published January 1, 1976 A certain kind of shadow lifts. What meaning do these ideas have for 20th-century people? It was generally "ignored or dismissed" by academic experts at the time and strongly criticised in detail in an academic journal, Current Anthropology, in 1997. I am not completely dismissive of the idea that Abu Bakr could have in fact successfully arrived in the Americas. Unfortunately, the scholarship that he has inspired has tended to be of a worse quality than Van Sertimas was. - Ivan Van Sertima I wasn't halfway through this book and I was thoroughly offended, but I finished it just to hear their point of view. 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. 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. It could be dark, bronze people from South America. However, Columbus actually sent back on a mail boat to Spain samples of these gold-tipped metal spears. If anything, the only thing Van Sertimas book is good for is a good laugh into the delusions of someone with the conclusion in mind, working backward to prove it (meaning, hes using the type of reverse engineering that EPists use). Read more Print length 336 pages Language English Publisher Random House Trade Paperbacks Publication date September 23, 2003 Dimensions "Human beings in any population have a great deal of variation," pointed out Barbour, whose methodical approach contrasted sharply with Van Sertima's more theatrical arguments. If I didnt look for it myself I was probably wasnt going to learn much more. Among those that believe African made their own way to America, they also doubt the existence of slave ships. brilliantly [demonstrates] has that there is far more to black history than the slave trade."John A. Williams They Came Before Columbus reveals a compelling, dramatic, and superbly detailed documentation of the presence and legacy of Africans in ancient America.Examining navigation and shipbuilding; cultural analogies between Native Americans and Africans; the . What did we do? There is far more to Black history than the slave trade alright. The accounts of people such as Christopher Columbus himself, Spanish travelers, and Herodotus, though, are harder to debate. Van Sertima does not say, but he jumps the conclusion that the spears that were sent to Spain were African spears without providing a basis for why he believes so. This work was published by Random House and did not go through a peer review process. Review of They Came Before Columbus by Dr. Ivan Van Sertima, Their Eyes were upon me: Learning of Nephilim, They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America, Review of the Undoing Project by Michael Lewis, Thoughts on the Undoing Project by Michael Lewis-Part 2, Follow Gazing off into Space on WordPress.com. Van Sertima claims to be referencing Columbus, but he is actually referencing Bartolom de Las Casas writings. 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. In addition, there are stories of Egyptian mariners. There are Egyptian-like pyramids in the Americas and mummified persons similar to those in Egypt. Are some Black Americans trying to distance themselves from Africa and rewrite history by ignoring such evidence as DNA? So anything that isnt physical (like the mind/consciousness) cant studied by science. 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? ..and he [Columbus] wanted to find out what the Indians of Hispanola had told him, that there had come to it from the south and southeast Negro people, who brought those spear points made of a metal which they call guanin Raccolta, Parte 1, Vol. The African presence in America before Columbus is of importance not only to African and American history but to the history of world civilizations. We were taken from Africa, but who were we before slavery? The launching of the expedition is recorded by Arab historian Ibn Fadl Allah al-Omari, according to Van Sertima. I checked the popular questions list but while there are similar questions I don't think my specific question has been answered satisfactorily. [15] As somebody who strongly believes that history is dominated by the "Western" narrative, I find myself drawn to believe Sertima. 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). (Viera, de Montellano, and Barbour, 1997: 431). Your email address will not be published. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Despite this, some individuals would argue: A mass colony of Africans were not shipped from Africa to America. These discs were placed above entrances of inner chambers of temples in Egypt and above temple door lintels in pre-Columbian America. (Van Sertima, 1972: xiv; They Came Before Colombus). So total is the Euro-Americans onslaught on black people that . None of that evidence is conclusive or even particularly convincing, countered anthropologist Warren T.D. In doing field work in Africa, he compiled a dictionary of Swahili legal terms in 1967. New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast. Sidenote: I enjoyed the story of Mali in Chapter 3. They would claim them as west African too if they could. pic.twitter.com/c0OjXNOVqt, Black Americans Have the Highest Mortality Rates But Lowest Levels of Life Insurance Its really that easy to explain the so-called similar appearances in nose shape between the Olmec heads and African noses. Your email address will not be published. ", Van Sertima said he didn't travel much to research the book. "How many of us know the African influence on ancient Greece and Rome? Or purchase a subscription for unlimited access to real news you can count on. Note how these claims are eerily similar to claims of white gods that, for example, the Aztecs and Maya speak of. Ivan Gladstone Van Sertima (26 January 1935 25 May 2009) was a Guyanese-born British associate professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University in the United States. 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. Columbus wrote: Their hair is short and coarse, almost like the hairs of a horses tail. Since my earlier days of schooling, I have informally encountered bits and pieces of information such as the story of Mansa Musa, the richest man in history, but not much else. They are familiar with American history, right? He was a . I was a friend of de Montellanos and many years ago we used to debunk Afrocentrists aka Afronuts on several forums (he posted as Quetzalcoatl on Egyptsearch), but he died I think in 2016. They noted that no "genuine African artifact had been found in a controlled archaeological excavation in the New World." Snow continued, "The findings of professional archaeologists and physical anthropologists are misrepresented so that they seem to support the [Van Sertima] hypothesis". Evidence indicates that humans originated in Africa. 'Roots' goes back to the time when the damage was beginning. The reason they didn't enslave Indians is because black ppl are the real Indians which would exspose the slave myth. "People have different definitions of realism," he added, pointing out stylistic conventions and showing slides that depicted convincingly similar but totally unrelated rattlesnake scale designs from the early American city of Teotihuacan and decorations on a Louis XVI commode. Last week came purported evidence that the Chinese admiral Zheng He sailed his great fleet of junks round the world a century before Columbus, Da Gama and Magellan. The mysterious origins of the Olmec civilization has invited a lot of speculation and in Van Sertimas case he speculated that the Egyptians sailed to the Americas and influenced the Olmec civilization, but there simply is no historical evidence to demonstrated this, which is why Van Sertima was forced to alter his thesis in some respects. on Sept. 2, 1948. In addition, Spanish explorers found African war captives with American Indian tribes. Van Sertima also includes photos of an African man and woman for comparison, but he does not include pictures of inhabitants of the area where the artifacts were found. I don't buy it. From 1957 to 1959, Van Sertima worked as a Press and Broadcasting Officer in the Guyana Information Services. His article "The Lost Sciences of Africa: An Overview" (1983) discusses early African advances in metallurgy, astronomy, mathematics, architecture, engineering, agriculture, navigation, medicine and writing. These Black Indians, now mistaken as African Americans, were shipped back to America and classified as African Slaves. This part of our history is what the school systems fail to mention in history programs. Van Sertima believed that Mali seafarers sailed across the Atlantic and landed in Mesoamerica. 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.. Van Sertimas case in They Came Before Columbus is the best known, certainly not the only one. Wow, so you (your black ancestors) got there before the Indians and the Europeans? This book is dense with presented evidence and deserves serious study. Van Sertima accomplishes this through chapters relying heavily on dramatic storytelling. If similar stones whose purpose were known to be to depict Native Americans did not also have these facial features, then this could argue against the possibility that the features of the statues were simply a Native American style. Columbus is not just a man, he is a symbol. Are broader financial markets in a massive speculative bubble? Should we give reparations to black Americans, being that they, 5500 words Introduction Hereditarians champion Asians (specifically East Asians) as proof of their gene-centric worldviewthat their genetic constitution allows their stellar performance in educational and, 2100 words Many people believe that a thing called the G-spotGrafenberg spotexists. This was all that I could recall being formally taught. The story of Hannibal of Carthage always stuck with me since high school, though his story was told probably because of its relation to European history. I knew that the subjext was suspect. How could Africans, who are not popularly known as seamen, have crossed the 1.500 Atlantic miles to the American continents? What did I know or was taught? There are some problems with this theory. Their Negro-ness could not be explained away nor, in most cases, their African cultural origin. White ppll pulled up to America and realize the whole country was filled with black ppl. Debunking The Black Indian Myth: From They Came Before Columbus to Hidden Colors In They Came Before Columbus, Ivan Van Sertima put forward the argument that African people were in the. In They Came Before Columbus, Van Sertima argues that Egyptian journey to the Americas happened during the rule of the 25th dynasty, which was the Kushite dynasty that ruled Egypt. ( 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. Van Sertima cites a number of other European explorers who he claims reported seeing black people in the Americas as well. Van Sertima added, How many of us know the African influence on ancient Greece and Rome? This is an inference that Van Sertima makes, but he presents his inference as a fact. . For example, Van Sertimas claims that the Olmec heads are Negroid due to the broad flat noses runs into a major problem: nose shape is dictated by climate; the climate of Mesoamerica and Africa is similar; the function of nose shape is to moisten air before it goes into the lungs; therefore, since climate is dictated by nose shape and the climate of Mesoamerica and Africa is similar, then they have similar-shaped noses due to the climate they lived in. Theres not a shred of evidence to prove this. If you are experiencing difficulties logging in or are a subscriber getting a paywall, please try one or more of the following steps. After being told that he couldn't do a series on African writers because there was no African literature. He never returned, though some (including Van Sertima) argued that he arrived in the Americas. This finding flatly contradicted the claim of the historian Herodotus that the Egyptians, compared to the Greeks and other European Caucasoids, were for the most part a black-skinned and wooly-haired people. Isnt it weird how Van Sertima and other Afrocentrists use the same type of tactics as pseudoscientists (i.e., ad hoc hypothesizing)?