They Came Before Columbus: The African
Presence in Ancient America – Ivan Van Sertima (1976)
I
come from a small island named Puerto Rico.
The people of Puerto Rico are a magnificent blend of native Taíno
peoples, Spanish conquistadors, Africans, both slave and free, and a mish-mash
of many other people who made their way to my little island. I grew up my whole life with family and
friends whose skin-tones ranged from the darkest browns to the palest of
peach-pink, yet all were Puerto Rican.
While it is impossible to say that racism does not exist on my island,
it is not the entrenched endemic racism found in Europe or the United States. My people come in all colors.
I
say this because when my family moved to the USA in 1981 I began to read and
study American schoolbooks. In those texts,
it was a given that the superior European (i.e. White) brought civilization,
culture, science, and art to the New World, a land supposedly filled with
backwards savages that could barely subsist, much less create amazing
civilizations and engage in worldwide trade.
I found this so stupid, ignorant, and patently absurd. Consider
the fact that millions upon millions of humans lived throughout the Caribbean
and the Americas for tens of thousands of years, with various high
civilizations matching or dwarfing the achievements of contemporary cultures in
Africa, Europe, and Asia. For a textbook
to say a small group of Spanish and Portuguese mercenary seamen led by a syphilitic
and deeply ignorant Columbus “discovered” the entirety of the New World is
plain false. It aggrandizes a grade-A
asshole and diminishes the soul and genius of everyone in the New World.
Some
of the greatest anthropological discoveries made in the New World seem to point
to an influence from outside the New World centuries and even millennia before
the travels of Columbus. One would think
that such finds would resonate in the literature of world history as examples
of the ingenuity and resilience of the human spirit. There is one problem, however. The peoples that made contact with the New
World between 600 BC and 1400 AD were Africans, dark-skinned people, and most of
the researchers and historians, themselves raised under the blanket racist idea
that white Europeans created all that is civilization and science and art in
the world, could not bring themselves to accept that Africans could cross the
Atlantic Ocean safely. Africa not only
fostered civilizations the magnitude of anything in Europe, they essentially
created everything we hold to be the modern world. Our civil and religious systems, our science
and technology, our knowledge of animal husbandry, our ability to create
agriculture, and so much more came directly from the heart of Africa. Only the blind idiot racism of European
historians could deceive them from these facts.
Not only were African’s contributions to the world dismissed as
accidental, many of their achievements were, instead, assigned to later, whiter
civilizations, as if Africa was not the mother of all humanity.
Into
this world, in 1976, Ivan Van Sertima released this amazing book, They Came Before Columbus. From what I have read of its reception by
academia, many established historians were deeply butt-hurt! They could not imagine that Africans had the
ability, much less the organization, to engage in trans-Atlantic travel. Much of the contemporary criticism of this
book sought to dismiss it entirely based on one or two small and quite
meaningless points of contention. Imagine
you drawing a huge map of the continental United States using all your
available research and someone shoots it all down because you failed to include
some minor river or village.
Ridiculous. However, this is
exactly what Mr. Van Sertima experienced.
Non-white people of the world are used to being dismissed based on superficial
bullshit. Shit don’t change.
Based
on countless archeological, ethnographic, agricultural, and historical
examples, Van Sertima shows that there were at least 2 periods where Africans
came to the Americas, either as castaways on the trans-Atlantic current, or as
members of large expeditionary forces sent by great African kings. The oldest of these took place around 600BC,
and coincided with the rise of the Olmec culture, from which most of the later
native civilizations sprang. Everyone is
familiar with the giant Olmec heads, carved in basalt, which seem to portray
Africa/Negro individuals. Around this time,
the Olmec people started creating step pyramids similar to the ones created in the
Nubian kingdom that preceded the Egyptian dynasties.
A
second wave of African immigration to the New World occurred sometime between
1000 AD and 1200 AD, which coincides with the histories provided by West African
peoples. They spoke of massive fleets
sent out from western Africa heading west to a new world. This may seem weird, based on the false
notions we have been taught that state the African was backwards, ignorant, and
lacking in technological knowhow. In fact,
the desert-wandering Africans were the first people that understood navigation
by the stars, and how to use both longitude and latitude to determine
location. Their ideas and instruments disseminated
into the ancient Mediterranean by the Phoenicians who traded with these highly
advanced African civilizations. The
racism barely hidden in the history books tries to portray the Phoenicians as
the true innovators, relegating the Africans who sailed with the Phoenicians to
slave or menial status. Racism is a
bitch and demeans everyone involved.
I wish
I could write more and more about this book, but it is better read that talked
about. Much of the subject matter and
topics covered in this book has been ignored since its publication, as the
European historians seek to keep light-skinned folks as the primary drivers of
human innovation. It is a self-serving
load of shit. Any new finds that
corroborate the African presence in the Americas are either ignored, hidden, or
portrayed in such a light as to seem unimportant. Even in the very first voyages of Columbus
and his Spanish mercenaries, the natives would talk of dark-skinned visitors
from the “morning,” (the East, where the Sun rises). In Central America and the coast of South
America, the native peoples talked of villages of dark-skinned men that came by
boat over the water.
Even
today, much of the world lives under the lie that the ancient Egyptians were
not Black Africans, but light-skinned people.
The (white) world cannot accept that the original Egyptians, the
builders of the great Pyramids, the creators of a religion and culture that
lasted for millennia, were dark-skinned, Negro Africans. The fact that Nubia, and Nubian kings, ruled
over what is now Egypt is forgotten, or relegated to a mere happenstance. The empire of Mali, on the west of Africa,
was, in medieval times, larger, more prosperous, and far more advanced in every
way than the contemporary Holy Roman Empire.
They had the resources, capabilities, and knowledge to sail around all
of Africa, the Mediterranean, and, as Ivan Van Sertima has shown, all the way
to the New World. This is something to
celebrate alongside all other great human achievements, but racism and
prejudice prevents us from doing so.
What a shame. I highly recommend this
book.
(This book is available for download here: https://afrikin.org/books/Ivan-Van-Sertima-They-Came-Before-Columbus.pdf )
