Wow, so you (your black ancestors) got there before the Indians and the Europeans? I am of what you would call, recent African ancestry. I also work with many foreign-born Chinese people. Van Sertima was convinced there was a connection between ancient Africa and the Americas. The accounts of people such as Christopher Columbus himself, Spanish travelers, and Herodotus, though, are harder to debate. Van Sertima writes about shipping technology, saying that even the most ancient of Egyptian ships were sturdy enough to cross the Atlantic on the currents that run from northwest Africa to the Americas. The African presence in America before Columbus is of importance not only to African and American history but to the history of world civilizations. Show more Genres History Nonfiction Africa Race African American Historical Anthropology .more 284 pages, Paperback First published January 1, 1976 Ivan Van Sertima They Came Before Columbus : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive. 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. The majority of us here in America the descendant of slaves were already aboriginal in America and were the slave population of choice. 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. [24] He was survived by his wife and four adult children. However, some of the biggest resting points of his theory attribute Mesoamerican pyramids, mummification, symbolism, mythology, calendar technology, and much of the art to African influence and guidance. The Olmec associated volcanic rocks and the like with symbolic importance, and so, they carved their sculptures out of them due to this. 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. What meaning do these ideas have for 20th-century people? The belief that Africans were in the Americas before the Europeans were makes sense to me. We need to know about the time when we had empires. This is not a romantic idea. Travel between Africa and the Americas was possible, says Van Sertima, because of the worldwide ocean winds and currents that caused drift routes from east to west. I really have no idea. Intertribal slavery amongst the Indians was universal and transitioned easily with European interest. Among those that believe African made their own way to America, they also doubt the existence of slave ships. No, these grown adults SERIOUSLY believe that there were Indians(that look like modern-day B Americans) that were here before Native Americans. Many historians have worked at debunking the They Came Before Columbus and Africans Were Already In America myth. When you push one door, other doors begin to open.". 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. Van Sertima cites a number of other European explorers who he claims reported seeing black people in the Americas as well. Some paint themselves white, others red, and others of what color they find. 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. I am not completely dismissive of the idea that Abu Bakr could have in fact successfully arrived in the Americas. During the 1960s, he worked for several years in Great Britain as a journalist, doing weekly broadcasts to the Caribbean and Africa. (LogOut/ 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 There is a heated online debate about how Black Americans came to America. How could Africans, who are not popularly known as seamen, have crossed the 1.500 Atlantic miles to the American continents? 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. ..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. 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. In addition to his creative writing, Van Sertima completed his undergraduate studies in African languages and literature at SOAS in 1969, where he graduated with honours.[6][7][8]. 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. 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. Keep reading with unlimited digital access. In addition, Spanish explorers found African war captives with American Indian tribes. 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. The launching of the expedition is recorded by Arab historian Ibn Fadl Allah al-Omari, according to Van Sertima. Did the Spanish also assay the spears of West Africa to know what ratio of gold, silver and copper alloys were found in the African spears? In They Came Before Columbus, Ivan Van Sertima put forward the argument that African people were in the Americas long before Columbus was. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Also, Van Sertimas case could be strengthened if statues and art known to intended to depict Native Americans were also shown in comparison. 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. Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. The others are unidentified. The word for tobacco also has African roots as well as the refinement of the practice of oral pipe smoking. Zinn perpetuates Koning's smears. 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. [15], A chapter is also devoted to the presence of bottle gourds originally from Africa found in ancient Mesoamerican graves. As somebody who strongly believes that history is dominated by the "Western" narrative, I find myself drawn to believe Sertima. Columbus is not just a man, he is a symbol. Mike Harrington: His team looks good, even without Alex Tuch. After being told that he couldn't do a series on African writers because there was no African literature. 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. The spears, he claimed, were identical to weapons from African Guinea. 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. Apparently she had read the the book They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America (Journal of African Civilizations) by Ivan Van Sertima and was buying what he was selling. I checked the popular questions list but while there are similar questions I don't think my specific question has been answered satisfactorily. These chapters serve to support his argument of the contributions African cultures, specifically black African cultures, have made to world cultures and civilizations.[15]. In Hidden Colors, a documentary by filmmaker Tariq Nasheed, Dr. Umar Johnson, a doctor of Clinical Psychology, is interviewed and claims that Africans were going back and forth engaging in cultural and economic trade before Columbus. There is hardly a claim in any of Van Sertimas writings that can be supported by the evidence found in the archaeological, botanical, linguistic, or historical record. Even Van Sertima himself admits that the people who were trading these spears could be dark bronze people from South America as opposed to African. They Were Not Here Before Columbus: Afrocentricity in the 1990's Bernard Ortiz de Montellano Download Free PDF Related Papers Plant Evidence for Contact Between African and the New World Bernard Ortiz de Montellano Download Free PDF View PDF Robbing Native American Cultures: Van Sertima's Afrocentricity and the Olmecs Bernard Ortiz de Montellano This view, of course, is seen as highly fringe in the field of anthropology. [3][n 1], Van Sertima was born in Kitty Village, near Georgetown, in what was then the colony of British Guiana (present-day Guyana); he retained his British citizenship throughout his life. Photo: These Sioux Indians in the Black Hills area of Custer, S.D. With that being said, the narration isnt the best that Ive heard. 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. He completed primary and secondary school in Guyana, and started writing poetry. In 1455 the Portuguese sailor Alvise da Cadamostoin encountered West African riverboats in the Gambian river. 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). There are similarities between the Mandingo god the Dasiri of the Bambara and the god Quetzalcoatl of the Olmecs. Neither Columbus nor de Las Casas wrote anything about African spears. 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 . 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. 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.". Debunking the they Came before Columbus and Africans were already aboriginal in America myth wow, so you your. ], a chapter is also devoted to the presence of bottle gourds originally from Africa found ancient. 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