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. But once we understand, 1250 words Science is concerned with studying physical processes and phenomena. So total is the Euro-Americans onslaught on black people that . Their Negro-ness could not be explained away nor, in most cases, their African cultural origin. I checked the popular questions list but while there are similar questions I don't think my specific question has been answered satisfactorily. 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. Other stone heads have been uncovered in Mexico. So, Van Sertima had his conclusion in mind first, and looked for evidence for itmeaning he was telling just-so stories. 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. Back in December of 2015, I published an article refuting the notion that the Olmecsand other pre-Colombian civilizationswere started by Negroid peoples. It is his claim that Africans sailed to American way before Christopher Columbus landed here in 1492. Recently, I've been handed a book called "They Came before Columbus" by Ivan Sertima, which asserts that Africans had discovered and traded with the native people of the Americas long before Columbus arrived. Occasionally, Ive been asked by my colleagues some form of the question, Where are you from?, No, like where is your family from? Also, some other West African countries had been known to both fish by boat and sail. The Book Review received about 70 letters, the most reader reaction it's had on an issue since the reviewer attacked Robert Frost several yeas ago. Columbus is such a late-comer that it is almost silly to compare anybody's arrival to his. All parties remained peaceful, and Columbus specifically instructed his crews not to take advantage of the Indians. They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America originally published in 1976 was written by professor Dr. Ivan Van Sertima. No, since they are only telling just-so stories. When evidence came out refuting Van Sertimas storytelling, he concocted an ad hoc hypothesis to save his hypothesis from immunization. EARLY PRESENCE OF BLACKS IN AMERICAS DEBATED. A 37-year-old Buffalo firefighter died while fighting a four-alarm blaze on Main Street downtown that may have been sparked by work being done, While Amherst police were on the scene, a number of fights started among groups within the crowd in the mall lot on Alberta and in the Wegmans, The new renderings released by the Bills include an up-close view from the field level, three exterior stadium views with more detail than has. Van Sertima states near the end of the book that all civilizations are capable of independent invention, and that he aims to place his claims on the spectrum between diffusionism and isolationism, or the idea that cultures separated geographically are capable of inventing similar things without interaction between the two. ". I don't buy it. The occasion was his first visit to the United States from Britain, where he was working in 1970. 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. 1337 Words. Upon casual reading, it does at least make one take its thesis seriously. [5] Except for a brief mention, the book had not previously been reviewed in an academic journal. She also planned to publish a book of his poetry.[25]. 2023 The Moguldom Nation. They noted that no "genuine African artifact had been found in a controlled archaeological excavation in the New World." 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.. Some paint their faces, others the whole body, some only round the eyes, others only on the nose. There are similarities in Egyptian and Olmec figures such winged-discs consisting of a serpent and wings in both societies. 6 Pages. Keep reading with unlimited digital access. Columbus never claimed that he saw black people in the Americas. The accounts of people such as Christopher Columbus himself, Spanish travelers, and Herodotus, though, are harder to debate. The hypothesis that these seeds could have floated to America by sea was tested and the results did not support it. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. But the claims presented in Hidden Colors and the claims presented by others who promote the notion of Black aboriginals are so misinformed that in many cases they just seem nonsensical. Mansa Musa took the throne after the previous ruler, Abu Bakr II, went on an expedition to sail the Atlantic Ocean. 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. Van Sertima accomplishes this through chapters relying heavily on dramatic storytelling. The psyche of blacks is raised. When you push one door, other doors begin to open.". 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 . ..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. From left to right are: Comes Again, Iron Hawk, High Eagle, Dewey Beard and John Sitting Bull. The books showed an African and Arabic influence on medeival Mexican and South languages prior to European contact. 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? While many found Van Sertimas scholarship flawed, his theory has many supporters. Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America at Amazon.com. Theres not a shred of evidence to prove this. This two-way trade never happened. So, Van Sertima became convinced due to the writings of linguists and anthropologists, that there was an ancient, as-of-yet-looked-into connection between ancient Africa and Mesoamerica. 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. Open Document. In 1997 academics in a Journal of Current Anthropology article criticised in detail many elements of They Came Before Columbus (1976). Politically correct labels have been applied to other races in the past and since Indians are always the last to be labeled for anything, I suppose our time has come. 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. 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. The others are unidentified. Van Sertima also makes it appear that after the Nubians made contact with the Olmecs, that their civilization almost instantaneously appeared. 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. Of course I was taken aback by the bold claim. 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 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. There are Egyptian-like pyramids in the Americas and mummified persons similar to those in Egypt. [1], Van Sertima retired in 2006. A celebrated classic, They Came . The Case for Reparations for Black Americans, On Asian Immigration to the United States, Hyper-Selectivity, and Hereditarian Musings on Asian Academic Success, The Sexualization of Steatopygia and Adaptationist Claims of Sex Organs, On the So-Called Laws of Behavioral Genetics, The Answer to Hereditarianism is Developmental Systems Theory, Mind, Science, and the First- and Third-Person, Why Purely Physical Things Will Never Be Able to Think: The Irreducibility of Intentionality to Physical States, Follow NotPoliticallyCorrect on WordPress.com, The Non-Validity of IQ: A Response to The Alternative Hypothesis, Black-White Differences in Anatomy and Physiology: Black Athletic Superiority. (LogOut/ Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. [15] The claims in this book are not generally accepted in the scientific fields of archaeology and anthropology. "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.". What would the point of shipping Black Indians to Europe then to Africa and then back to America again be? 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, wrote Dwayne Wong (Omowale), the author of several books on the history and experiences of African people on the continent and in the diaspora, wrote inMedium. There is a heated online debate about how Black Americans came to America. Phil Valentine is even more confused. Furthermore, Van Sertima, quite wildly, claims that since the Olmec heads were black then they must have represented African people. "I nver expected any money," he explains. The majority of us here in America the descendant of slaves were already aboriginal in America and were the slave population of choice. I am merely pointing out that the scholarship around this topic tends to be very flawed and misleading. None of that evidence is conclusive or even particularly convincing, countered anthropologist Warren T.D. See Grove (1976) or Ortiz de Montellano (1997). [23] Sertima was inducted into the "Rutgers African-American Alumni Hall of Fame" in 2004. [13] This was a record of the conference held in Johannesburg, South Africa, in September 1998 on the theme of the African Renaissance. This article will refute Van Sertimas claim that the Olmec heads were of Negroid originor were sculpted to show the appearance of Negroidsand his other claim that Mali seafarers reached the Americans some 200-odd years before Colombus. Ivan Van Sertima's They Came Before Columbus is the first monographic treatment of this problem since Leo Wiener's Africa and the Discovery ofAmerica (3 vols., Philadelphia, 1920-1922), although M. D. W. Jeffreys has littered the intervening fifty years with articles on various aspects of it, often drawing heated responses His widow, Jacqueline Van Sertima, said she would continue to publish the Journal of African Civilizations. 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. He researched the book at the British Museum, and in libraries at Princeton, London University and Douglas College, and the corresponded with scholars all over the world. History, as taught in the Western and Western-dominated world, gives the impression that the first Africans to reach the Americas were brought as slaves, in shackles on slaves-ships. Are broader financial markets in a massive speculative bubble? Van Sertima's Journal of African Civilizations was not considered for inclusion in Journals of the Century. It was with the coming of Columbus that the twilight of the red and black races began. He died on 25 May 2009 aged 74. I'm trying to follow all the rules but forgive me if this is a bit vague. pic.twitter.com/GRHEgWZkZb. Some paint themselves white, others red, and others of what color they find. I want to make a point of clarification here. 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. I found an audio version of this book on YouTube. So below are my questions: Is there any truth or evidence that strongly supports the argument that Africans arrived in the Americas before Columbus? Mike Harrington: His team looks good, even without Alex Tuch. Dan Von Hoyel ~ Black Before Columbus Came: The African Discovery of America Odd Salon DISCOVERY: Six stories of rigorous inquiry and accidental revelations, [] "either completely ignored or generally dismissed by anthropologists, historians and other academic professionals." [15] 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. "How many of us know the African influence on ancient Greece and Rome? For example, whereas Van Sertima argued that Africans influenced the civilization of the Americas, Clyde Ahmad Winters goes further by suggesting that Africans founded the Olmec and all other major American civilization, which is a claim that Van Sertima never made. 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. 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. 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. White ppll pulled up to America and realize the whole country was filled with black ppl. on Sept. 2, 1948. This is not a romantic idea. (LogOut/ This book is dense with presented evidence and deserves serious study. The audience of about 300 people in the Medaille Campus Center was sprayed with an array of examples -- on slides and verbally -- that supported or debunked the theory that Africans reached the New World well before 1492. 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). In 1977, Van Sertima wrote "They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America," a controversial book now in its 21st printing. He completed primary and secondary school in Guyana, and started writing poetry. Smart Policies are as low as $30 a month, No Medical Exam Required 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. 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. [24] He was survived by his wife and four adult children. In TCBC, Van Sertima (1972: 39) reconstructed an event in the medieval empire of Mali, based on Arab historical and travel documents and the oral tradition of the Mali griots. Chapters 3 and 4 do, indeed, read like some sort of fantastical tale, so I am glad that Van Sertima left the notebut it is quite clear that he is doing nothing but storytelling. A second problem with the manner in which Van Sertima uses this piece of information is the assumption that the black people whom de Las Casas refers to were African. ( 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. This technique, as well as the ambiguity of the evidence Van Sertima used, have led to the rejection of his work as pseudoscience or pseudoarchaeology. Wow, so you (your black ancestors) got there before the Indians and the Europeans? 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. Beard and John Sitting Bull Olmec figures such winged-discs consisting they came before columbus debunked a and... So, Van Sertima retired in 2006 found Van Sertimas storytelling, he concocted an ad hypothesis. Book of his poetry. [ 25 ] by sea was tested and the Europeans, countered Warren. 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