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. Mansa Musa never traveled to the Americas, so how could he have been Montezuma? If you are experiencing difficulties logging in or are a subscriber getting a paywall, please try one or more of the following steps. Normativity has been distinguished between, If you have any suggestions for future posts, criticisms or praises for me, email me at RaceRealist88@gmail.com. And that is the basis for your ideology that black people from Africa don't deserve an opportunity in the land your "ancestors first" lived in? 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. In 1977, Van Sertima wrote "They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America," a controversial book now in its 21st printing. 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? But once we understand, 1250 words Science is concerned with studying physical processes and phenomena. He later discusses carved pipes found in Mesoamerican archaeological sites, suggesting that the use of pipes for smoking must have been an inherited practice from African or Asian visitors. [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". In addition, Spanish explorers found African war captives with American Indian tribes. 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. 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. 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. There is also a vast body of knowledge to be uncovered about Africa and America. Their coloration, fullness of lip, prognathism, scarification, tattoo markings, beards, kinky hair, generously fleshed noses, and even in some cases identifiable coiffures, headkerchiefs, helmets, compound earringsall these had been skillfully and realistically portrayed by pre-Colombian American potters, jewelers and sculptures. please donate https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=ZPEYVFR6AgeofReason198EKA be a monthly supporter https://www.patreon.com/. He argued that all the archaeology and all the excavations point to an indigenous American culture. EARLY PRESENCE OF BLACKS IN AMERICAS DEBATED. pic.twitter.com/GRHEgWZkZb. I checked the popular questions list but while there are similar questions I don't think my specific question has been answered satisfactorily. Sometimes the conversation will somehow, turn into a history lesson about China. Van Sertimas scholarship was flawed in many respects, but he made an attempt to challenge the racist scholarship of his time. He had left his native Guyana for London in 1959 to make his ways a novelist, but he was writing radio to make ends meet. Dwayne Wong (Omowale) is a Guyanese born Pan-Africanist and author. So, Van Sertima had his conclusion in mind first, and looked for evidence for itmeaning he was telling just-so stories. I can only assume that Van Sertima is largely responsible for this line of thinking which was largely debunked then and is especially debunked today . Also, some other West African countries had been known to both fish by boat and sail. I vaguely remembered images of figurines, masks, and pottery that also originated fromsome African countries. If there were an African presence in the Americas, he asked, "why do we not find more African stylistic artifacts?". "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.". Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. This work was published by Random House and did not go through a peer review process. [1], He was best known for his Olmec alternative origin speculations, a brand of pre-Columbian contact theory, which he proposed in his book They Came Before Columbus (1976). Many historians have worked at debunking the They Came Before Columbus and Africans Were Already In America myth. [5] Instead, Van Sertima replied to his critics in "his" journal volume published as Early America Revisited (1998). Click Here to Get Smart on Protecting Your Family and Loves Ones, No Matter What Happens. [9] Anthropologist-linguist Ivan Van Sertima has set ablaze a mini-controversy with his thesis that Africans set foot upon - and made significant cultural impact on - the New World 22 centuries before Columbus sailed into the West Indies. They also claim slave ships are a myth. 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. Van Sertima accomplishes this through chapters relying heavily on dramatic storytelling. After divorcing his first wife, Sertima remarried in 1984, to Jacqueline L. Patten, who had two daughters. 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. But Van Sertima always defended his book. This interaction is not rooted in historical evidence and Van Sertima does not offer a cited source to back up his narrative. 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. on Sept. 2, 1948. 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. Many historians have worked at debunking the "They Came Before Columbus" and "Africans Were Already In America" myth. Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney explained that if any African canoes reached the Americas (as is sometimes maintained) they did not establish two-way links. If these two-way links were established, Umar fails to cite specific examples because there are no examples. [10] Published by Random House rather than an academic press, They Came Before Columbus was a best-seller[11] and achieved widespread attention within the African-American community for his claims of prehistoric African contact and diffusion of culture in Central and South America. My best guess would be from somewhere(s) in west and/or maybe central Africa. Despite this, there were however, agreed upon black kings of the 25th dynasty such as Taharqa. I found an audio version of this book on YouTube. See Grove (1976) or Ortiz de Montellano (1997). THEY GAME GOLUM BUS The African Presence in Ancient America Ivan Van Sertima Ncruma] has demonstrated that there is far more to hlach history than the trade. It was also concluded that it was not likely that these seeds were carried by birds. 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. 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. Even Columbus, in his second journal, noted that Indians told him of black-skinned people trading in gold-tipped spears, Van Sertima said. However, Columbus actually sent back on a mail boat to Spain, samples of these gold-tipped metal spears. Barbour, who has studied more than a quarter million figurines from Mesoamerican areas cited by Van Sertima, said the depictions even more easily could portray facial types of native Americans, and no convincing evidence supports African influence on Mesoamerican architecture or culture. I really have no idea. 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 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. "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. So total is the Euro-Americans onslaught on black people that . Experts have determined that the gourds floated across the Atlantic and washed ashore in the Americas to be adopted by Mesoamerican cultures. 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. 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. Did we learn anything in there that I had simply forgotten? In doing field work in Africa, he compiled a dictionary of Swahili legal terms in 1967. In the documentary, Umar Johnson claims that Africans were going back and forth engaging in cultural and economic trade before Columbus. [16], Van Sertima argues that African contact likely happened more than once. 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. The African presence in America before Columbus is of importance not only to African and American history but to the history of world civilizations. 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. Professor Ivan van Sertima, They Came before Columbus A review by Femi Akomolafe, 19 January 1995. 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. This video is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Ivan Van Sertima who made is transition on May 25th, 2009. Any other significant information about the history of my people tended to start with, we were slaves. How about that. "either completely ignored or generally dismissed by anthropologists, historians and other academic professionals." Thus, historians of the time removed, ignored, or minimized any evidence of black contributions to ancient Egyptian civilization. The books showed an African and Arabic influence on medeival Mexican and South languages prior to European contact. All of these claims are incrediblewhich means that they deserve incredible evidence in order to verify them. From 1957 to 1959, Van Sertima worked as a Press and Broadcasting Officer in the Guyana Information Services. Nowhere does de Las Casas suggest that spears he was referring to were identical or even similar to spears in West Africa. Van Sertima was convinced there was a connection between ancient Africa and the Americas. (Viera, de Montellano, and Barbour, 1997: 431). I want to make a point of clarification here. Some paint their faces, others the whole body, some only round the eyes, others only on the nose. [5] Except for a brief mention, the book had not previously been reviewed in an academic journal. In 1455 the Portuguese sailor Alvise da Cadamostoin encountered West African riverboats in the Gambian river. Van Sertima, who stressed that he makes no claims that blacks "discovered" America or launched the ancient cultures of Middle America, said well-known ocean currents acted as a "marine conveyor belt" that brought early voyagers easily from Africa to America. Dismissed by anthropologists, historians of the time removed, ignored, or minimized any evidence black. Scholarship was flawed in many respects, but he made an attempt to challenge the racist of... This, there were however, Columbus actually sent back on a mail boat to Spain, samples these. The history of world civilizations to 1959, Van Sertima argues that African contact happened... 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