[18] Its really that easy to explain the so-called similar appearances in nose shape between the Olmec heads and African noses. Other stone heads have been uncovered in Mexico. Maize has African origins. Or purchase a subscription for unlimited access to real news you can count on. 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 . He never returned, though some (including Van Sertima) argued that he arrived in the Americas. The occasion was his first visit to the United States from Britain, where he was working in 1970. Are broader financial markets in a massive speculative bubble? However, archaeological work has indicated that the foundations of Olmec cultureand indeed all of Mesoamerican culturehad its beginnings in Mesoamerica long before the Olmec appeared on the scence. The author gives pictures of examples of negroid statues in pre-Columbian America, often with black people in comparison. They were then shipped from Spain to Africa as commodity for African resources. Columbus was quoted before as noting that the natives sometimes painted themselves black, so for all we know the black people being referred to were people who were painted black as opposed to black skinned people. These strong currents, which Mali oral tradition describes as "rivers in the middle of the sea," could have helped propel African vessels to the American continents, he adds. 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 have, 2600 words What do normativity and intentionality mean? 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. They also claim slave ships are a myth. 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 . They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America originally published in 1976 was written by professor Dr. Ivan Van Sertima. 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. While his Olmec theory has "spread widely in African American community, both lay and scholarly", it was mostly ignored in Mesoamericanist scholarship, and has been dismissed as Afrocentric pseudoarchaeology[2] and pseudohistory to the effect of "robbing native American cultures". Black settlements developed at the end points of major currents from Africa, he contended. 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. 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. Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Sign up for our newsletter to keep reading. "The problem was not that the research hadn't been done," he says, "but that no one had examined the available documents and material and pulled from together.". He talks about the risk factors for Bitcoin as an investment asset including origin risk, speculative market structure, regulatory, and environment. GenresHistoryNonfictionAfricaRaceAfrican AmericanAnthropologyHistorical .more 284 pages, Paperback First published January 1, 1976 Book details & editions Saying slave ships are a myth is a whole new level of ignorance . 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. Columbus' "accidental stumbling into the Caribbean," theorist Ivan Van Sertima of Rutgers University said, followed incursions by native Africans who left traces in art, artifacts, maps, language, cultural influences and accounts related to early European explorers. Oral traditions of Native Americans, according to reported Mexican authority, Nicholas Leon, include the belief that the oldest inhabitants of Mexico were Negroes among other stories. Polynesians/Melanesians of today are obviously not Africans. Learn how your comment data is processed. Of course I was taken aback by the bold claim. That's when I decided to take a degree at London University in African anthropology and linquistics.". They noted that no "genuine African artifact had been found in a controlled archaeological excavation in the New World." In 1970 Van Sertima immigrated to the United States, where he entered Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, for graduate work. In Chapter 5, called "Among the Quetzalcoatls", Van Sertima narrates the arrival of Abu Bakr II to an Aztec civilization in Mexico in 1311, describing the Mali king as "a true child of the sun burned dark by its rays" in direct and explicit comparison to the Aztec "sun god" Quetzalcoatl, as Van Sertima writes. He arrived on these shores at about the same time that the Spanish defeated the Moors and destroyed more than 3,000 Arab documents and many libraries, Van Sertima toldThe Washington Post. A celebrated classic, They Came Before Columbus, dea. Barbour, the first African-American to earn a doctorate in archaeology, is an expert on Mesoamerican culture and associate scientific director of the African Burial Ground Project in Lower Manhattan. The description that Columbus gives certainly is not a description of black people in the Caribbean. [13] Van Sertima also discussed African scientific contributions in an essay for the volume African Renaissance, published in 1999 (he had first published the essay in 1983). Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Back in December of 2015, I published an article refuting the notion that the Olmecsand other pre-Colombian civilizationswere started by Negroid peoples. Are you prioritizing your cable entertainment bill over protecting and investing in your family? Reportedly, from American historian and linguist Leo Weiner of Harvard Universitys book Africa and the Discovery of America (Ill have to add that one to the list too) in one of Columbuss journals there is an account of a statement by the Native Americans saying that they had encountered black people prior to the arrival of Columbus. We need to know about the time when we had empires. They can find a billion year old dinosaur bone but cant find any slave ships, B.o.B wrote in a 2017 Instagram post. Columbus actually said in the journal of his second voyage when he was in Haiti, then known as Espanola, Native Americans came to him and told him that Black people had come in large boats from the south and southeast trading in gold-tipped metal spears. It has come to my attention that Van Sertimas (1972) bookThey Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America (TCBC)will soon be used in certain syllabi. In addition, Spanish explorers found African war captives with American Indian tribes. Moreover, how would he have known? A celebrated classic, They Came . (renews at {{format_dollars}}{{start_price}}{{format_cents}}/month + tax). 6 Pages. [5] They further noted that in the 1980s, Van Sertima had changed his timeline of African influence, suggesting that Africans made their way to the New World in the 10th century B.C., to account for more recent independent scholarship in the dating of Olmec culture. (LogOut/ On 7 July 1987, Van Sertima testified before a United States Congressional committee to oppose recognition of the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's "discovery" of the Americas. Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America at Amazon.com. Never seen a more deluded person. It could be dark, bronze people from South America. "'Roots' does not do that. Also, some other West African countries had been known to both fish by boat and sail. Probably Columbus did not believe this, and that fact in itself would not be enough because the so-called Black people could be any people. Van Sertima, 42, here Saturday for the concluding day of the third annual black writers conference sponsored by Howard University, said the pervious to original thought, who will letters exposed Daniel as "a man imnot even do honest battle with ideas he contends but tries to drown out in a sea of vituperation and abuse.". Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. 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). Not only because of the apparent Asian features of some of the Olmec sculptures, but Xu also attempted to draw a connection between the Olmec script and Chinese characters. Snow continued, "The findings of professional archaeologists and physical anthropologists are misrepresented so that they seem to support the [Van Sertima] hypothesis". [16], Van Sertima argues that African contact likely happened more than once. [6] Also in 1979, Van Sertima founded the Journal of African Civilizations, which he exclusively edited and published for decades.[6][12]. There is far more to Black history than the slave trade alright. The journal required that reprints must include the entire article and would have had to include the original authors' response (written but not published) to his response. Your email address will not be published. Columbus and his men encountered the naked Taino people on the island of San Salvador in the Bahamas, so named for the Savior whom Columbus believed had delivered him to land. However, Columbus actually sent back on a mail boat to Spain samples of these gold-tipped metal spears. They noted that Olmec stone heads were carved hundreds of years prior to the claimed contact and only superficially appear to be African; the Nubians whom Van Sertima had claimed as their originators do not resemble these "portraits". So basically the vast majority of scholars reject Afrocentrism, but are too afraid to say so in public. 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. It provides further evidence that all great civilizations and races are heavily indebted to one another and that no race has a monopoly on enterprise and inventive genius. They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America originally published in 1976 was written by professor Dr. Ivan Van Sertima. Van Sertima uses written, archaeological, and cultural evidence to support his thesis. When evidence came out refuting Van Sertimas storytelling, he concocted an ad hoc hypothesis to save his hypothesis from immunization. "How many of us know the African influence on ancient Greece and Rome? Change). Van Sertima asserts that this idea is false and explains how this belief developed. What meaning do these ideas have for 20th-century people? The Eurocentric view of history is being debunked by anthropologic research. [5], They further called "fallacious" his claims that Africans had diffused the practices of pyramid building and mummification, and noted the independent rise of these in the Americas. Van Sertima never explained why he selected this particular dynasty, but his reasoning for doing so is important because he later altered the date in African Presence in Early America to 948 or circa 1000 B.C. Van Sertima was forced to alter his thesis in light of new evidence which demonstrated that the Olmec civilization was older than was originally believed, which leads me to the next issue. Professor Ivan van Sertima, They Came before Columbus A review by Femi Akomolafe, 19 January 1995. 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. As I sought out sources to find out more, this book appeared several times as a must-read. Columbus wrote: Their hair is short and coarse, almost like the hairs of a horses tail. The African presence in America before Columbus is of importance not only to African and American history but to the history of world civilizations. No, these grown adults SERIOUSLY believe that there were Indians(that look like modern-day B Americans) that were here before Native Americans. 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). I read They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America by Ivan Van Sertima. I may hear about anything from the cultural revolution, to ancient Chinese dynasties, to Genghis Kan. "either completely ignored or generally dismissed by anthropologists, historians and other academic professionals." Columbus is such a late-comer that it is almost silly to compare anybody's arrival to his. "I felt like a man who had come upon a dozen clues to a sensational murder but did not feel too confident about the evidence," he has written. 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. Dwayne is the author of Kingdoms and Civilizations of Africa and several other books on African and African Diaspora history. He completed primary and secondary school in Guyana, and started writing poetry. 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 . A certain kind of shadow lifts. pic.twitter.com/GRHEgWZkZb. Many of the cultural pieces of evidence also provide intriguing support to Van Sertimas thesis, though many may legitimately be debated as coincidences or artefacts resulting simply from commonalities in how the human brain interprets the world. In the documentary, Umar Johnson claims that Africans were going back and forth engaging in cultural and economic trade before Columbus. Van Sertima repeated this claim again when hetestifiedin front of the House of Representatives in 1987: Now, I am not the first to suggest that there were Africans in America before Columbus; Columbus was the first to suggest it. 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 accomplishes this through chapters relying heavily on dramatic storytelling. Are some Black Americans trying to distance themselves from Africa and rewrite history by ignoring such evidence as DNA? There are various other cultural similarities between the Native American and West African peoples. What country did your, say, grandfather or great-grandfather or whatever come from?. On the cover of the book, John A. Williams writes that Van Sertima has demonstrated that there is far more to black history than the slave trade. Quite obviously, there is more to black history than the slave trade, but Van Sertimas storytelling is not it. Sertima then recounts the story of how Christopher Columbus came to venture to the Americas. [22], In 1981, They Came Before Columbus received the "Clarence L. Holte Literary Prize". He devotes Chapter 8 to discussing the beneficial innovations and flourishing of culture under Nubian rulers in Egypt. I am not completely dismissive of the idea that Abu Bakr could have in fact successfully arrived in the Americas. However, their African ancestors had survived relatively dark-skinned (carrying the old haplogroup C) in Oceania for over 100,000 years Continue Reading More answers below Rasager Aa In his book, "They Came Before Columbus," Van Sertima, a Rutgers professor, says that African influences can be found in an array of cultural similarities between Africa and the ancient Americas - pyramid construction, the use of boat litters, the parasol, the plumed serpent motif, bronze-casting techniques. They wear the hairs brought down to the eyebrows, except a few locks behind, which they wear long and never cut. 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. There is, again, a much more eloquent explanation:the Olmec heads were black because they were made from black stone! When the cheerleading coach broke the news to Katrina Kohel that she was the only one left on the cheer squad, Kohel was determined to compete anyway. Prehistoric stone heads and the spread of cotton from one continent to another became points of contention Saturday at Medaille College, as scholars argued whether Africans reached the New World before Columbus. "Some of these voyages are designed or planned; some are accidental," he said. Van Sertima added, How many of us know the African influence on ancient Greece and Rome? [6] He attended the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London from 1959. Many historians have worked at debunking the "They Came Before Columbus" and "Africans Were Already In America" myth. [6] He became Associate Professor of African Studies at Rutgers in the Department of Africana Studies in 1979. There are similarities between the Mandingo god the Dasiri of the Bambara and the god Quetzalcoatl of the Olmecs. Read more Print length 336 pages Language English Publisher Random House Trade Paperbacks Publication date September 23, 2003 Dimensions Some paint their faces, others the whole body, some only round the eyes, others only on the nose. ( 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. White ppll pulled up to America and realize the whole country was filled with black ppl. (Viera, de Montellano, and Barbour, 1997: 431). This interaction is not rooted in historical evidence and Van Sertima does not offer a cited source to back up his narrative. Between narrative chapters, Van Sertima develops his main claims about African contact with the Americas in an essay style and includes images of artifacts, which primarily consist of photographs of ceramic heads that Van Sertima says have African features. Show more Genres History Nonfiction Africa Race African American Historical Anthropology .more 284 pages, Paperback First published January 1, 1976 In fact, Columbus writes that they were not black. Experts have determined that the gourds floated across the Atlantic and washed ashore in the Americas to be adopted by Mesoamerican cultures. Van Sertima also argued it was Columbus himself who suggested that Africans were in the Americas before he was. Photo: These Sioux Indians in the Black Hills area of Custer, S.D. Critics in anthropology and archaeology have stated that They Came Before Columbus portrays Native Mesoamerican peoples as inferior and incapable of developing highly sophisticated civilizations, cultures, and technologies without the influence of Africans arriving by boat as gods in their eyes, as Van Sertima puts it. - Ivan Van Sertima 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). De Las Casas gave this description in his account of Columbus voyage: Wednesday, July 4, he ordered sail made from that island in which he says that since he arrived there he never saw the sun or the stars, but that the heavens were covered with such a thick mist that it seemed they could cut it with a knife and the heat was so very intense that they were tormented, and he ordered the course laid to the way of the south-west, which is the route leading from these islands to the south, in the name, he says, of the Holy and Indivisible Trinity, because then he would be on a parallel with the land of the sierra of Loa and cape of Sancta Ana in Guinea, which is below the equinoctial line, where he says that below that line of the world are found more gold and things of value; and that after, he would navigate, the Lord pleasing, to the west, and from there would go to this Espaola, in which route he would prove the theory of the King John aforesaid; and that he thought to investigate the report of the Indians of this Espaola who said that there had come to Espaola from the south and south-east, a black people who have the tops of their spears made of a metal which they call guanin, of which he had sent samples to the Sovereigns to have them assayed, when it was found that of 32 parts, 18 were of gold, 6 of silver and 8 of copper. [5] Instead, Van Sertima replied to his critics in "his" journal volume published as Early America Revisited (1998). There are similarities in Egyptian and Olmec figures such winged-discs consisting of a serpent and wings in both societies. Columbus actually said in the journal of his second voyage 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. These chapters serve to support his argument of the contributions African cultures, specifically black African cultures, have made to world cultures and civilizations.[15]. They are familiar with American history, right? Van Sertima quit and wrote the series for an independent company. I am of what you would call, recent African ancestry. I also work with many foreign-born Chinese people. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. [19], In a New York Times 1977 review of Van Sertima's 1976 book They Came Before Columbus, the archaeologist Glyn Daniel labelled Van Sertima's work as "ignorant rubbish", and concluded that the works of Van Sertima, and Barry Fell, whom he was also reviewing, "give us badly argued theories based on fantasies". Washed ashore in the Department of Africana Studies in 1979 is far more to black history the! Old dinosaur bone but cant find any slave ships, B.o.B wrote in a massive speculative bubble a archaeological. Sertima quit and wrote the series for an independent company in Egypt only African! Various other cultural similarities between the Olmec heads and African noses of the Olmecs made black! 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