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African Presence in Early America
This volume presents what is presently known about the links between Africa and America before the age of Columbus. It makes a convincing case for pre-Columbian contacts between Africa and America before the era of the slave trade. The contributors draw upon the evidence of cultures in private collections and findings from excavations, and evidence of ancient African mathematics, astronomy, map-making, scripts, navigations, trade routes, pyramidal structures, linguistic connections, and technological and ritual complexes. The volume is profusely illustrated. Many readers will find the evidence presented here startling.
250 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1970
About the author
Ivan Van Sertima
26 books257 followersDr. Ivan Van Sertima was born in Guyana, South America. He was educated at the School of Oriental and African Studies (London University) and the Rutgers Graduate School and held degrees in African Studies and Anthropology. From 1957-1959 he served as a Press and Broadcasting Officer in the Guyana Information Services. During the decade of the 1960s he broadcast weekly from Britain to Africa and the Caribbean.
He was a literary critic, a linguist, and an anthropologist who made a name in all three fields.
As a literary critic, he is the author of Caribbean Writers, a collection of critical essays on the Caribbean novel. He is also the author of several major literary reviews published in Denmark, India, Britain and the United States. He was honored for his work in this field by being asked by the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy to nominate candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature from 1976-1980. He was honored as an historian of world repute by being asked to join UNESCO's International Commission for Rewriting the Scientific and Cultural History of Mankind.
As a linguist, published essays on the dialect of the Sea Islands off the Georgia Coast. He also compiled the Swahili Dictionary of Legal Terms, based on his field work in Tanzania, East Africa, in 1967.
He is the author of They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America, which was published by Random House in 1977 and is presently in its twenty-ninth printing. It was published in French in 1981 and in the same year, was awarded the Clarence L. Holte Prize, a prize awarded every two years “for a work of excellence in literature and the humanities relating to the cultural heritage of Africa and the African diaspora.”
He also authored Early America Revisited, a book that has enriched the study of a wide range of subjects, from archaeology to anthropology, and has resulted in profound changes in the reordering of historical priorities and pedagogy.
Professor of African Studies at Rutgers University, Dr. Van Sertima was also Visiting Professor at Princeton University. He was the Editor of the Journal of African Civilizations, which he founded in 1979 and has published several major anthologies which have influenced the development of multicultural curriculum in the United States. These anthologies include Blacks in Science: ancient and modern, Black Women in Antiquity, Egypt Revisited, Egypt: Child of Africa, Nile Valley Civilizations (out of print), African Presence in the Art of the Americas (due 2007), African Presence in Early Asia (co-edited with Runoko Rashidi), African Presence in Early Europe, African Presence in Early America, Great African Thinkers, Great Black Leaders: ancient and modern and Golden Age of the Moor.
As an acclaimed poet, his work graces the pages of River and the Wall, 1953 and has been published in English and German. As an essayist, his major pieces were published in Talk That Talk, 1989, Future Directions for African and African American Content in the School Curriculum, 1986, Enigma of Values, 1979, and in Black Life and Culture in the United States, 1971.
Dr. Van Sertima has lectured at more than 100 universities in the United States and has also lectured in Canada, the Caribbean, South America and Europe. In 1991 Dr. Van Sertima defended his highly controversial thesis on the African presence in pre-Columbian America before the Smithsonian. In 1994 they published his address in Race, Discourse and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View of 1492.
He also appeared before a Congressional Committee on July 7, 1987 to challenge the Columbus myth. This landmark presentation before Congress was illuminating and brilliantly presented in the name of all peoples of color across the world.
He was a literary critic, a linguist, and an anthropologist who made a name in all three fields.
As a literary critic, he is the author of Caribbean Writers, a collection of critical essays on the Caribbean novel. He is also the author of several major literary reviews published in Denmark, India, Britain and the United States. He was honored for his work in this field by being asked by the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy to nominate candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature from 1976-1980. He was honored as an historian of world repute by being asked to join UNESCO's International Commission for Rewriting the Scientific and Cultural History of Mankind.
As a linguist, published essays on the dialect of the Sea Islands off the Georgia Coast. He also compiled the Swahili Dictionary of Legal Terms, based on his field work in Tanzania, East Africa, in 1967.
He is the author of They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America, which was published by Random House in 1977 and is presently in its twenty-ninth printing. It was published in French in 1981 and in the same year, was awarded the Clarence L. Holte Prize, a prize awarded every two years “for a work of excellence in literature and the humanities relating to the cultural heritage of Africa and the African diaspora.”
He also authored Early America Revisited, a book that has enriched the study of a wide range of subjects, from archaeology to anthropology, and has resulted in profound changes in the reordering of historical priorities and pedagogy.
Professor of African Studies at Rutgers University, Dr. Van Sertima was also Visiting Professor at Princeton University. He was the Editor of the Journal of African Civilizations, which he founded in 1979 and has published several major anthologies which have influenced the development of multicultural curriculum in the United States. These anthologies include Blacks in Science: ancient and modern, Black Women in Antiquity, Egypt Revisited, Egypt: Child of Africa, Nile Valley Civilizations (out of print), African Presence in the Art of the Americas (due 2007), African Presence in Early Asia (co-edited with Runoko Rashidi), African Presence in Early Europe, African Presence in Early America, Great African Thinkers, Great Black Leaders: ancient and modern and Golden Age of the Moor.
As an acclaimed poet, his work graces the pages of River and the Wall, 1953 and has been published in English and German. As an essayist, his major pieces were published in Talk That Talk, 1989, Future Directions for African and African American Content in the School Curriculum, 1986, Enigma of Values, 1979, and in Black Life and Culture in the United States, 1971.
Dr. Van Sertima has lectured at more than 100 universities in the United States and has also lectured in Canada, the Caribbean, South America and Europe. In 1991 Dr. Van Sertima defended his highly controversial thesis on the African presence in pre-Columbian America before the Smithsonian. In 1994 they published his address in Race, Discourse and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View of 1492.
He also appeared before a Congressional Committee on July 7, 1987 to challenge the Columbus myth. This landmark presentation before Congress was illuminating and brilliantly presented in the name of all peoples of color across the world.
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May 18, 2026
VAN SERTIMA EXPANDS AND MODIFIES HIS ‘THEY CAME BEFORE COLUMBUS’ THEORIES
Ivan Gladstone Van Sertima (1935-2009) was a Guyanese-born associate professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University.
He wrote in the Introduction/Overview to this 1992 book, “It is now fifteen years since ‘They Came Before Columbus’ … was first published. It appeared from Random House in 1977 and is now in its 17th printing. Like most controversial works… its most voluble commentators have either read it superficially or have misread it, for it is often praised or attacked … for saying things I did not say, for advancing positions I would neither entertain nor defend. The time has come to present some of the new evidence that has emerged since then... It has also become necessary to clarify the stands I took nearly a decade ago and to reexamine the case … with a greater scholarly precision and lucidity.” (Pg. 5)
He continues, “Some critics … have referred to the dramatized openings of chapters in ‘They Came Before Columbus’ as ‘fictionalizations.’ … What I set out to do, however, was quite different…. I was galvanized by a desire to draw the reader into the living skin of lost times and thus adopted a dramatic mode of presentation. The facts were well researched, notes indicating the archival sources were always given, the skeletal data buried in musty volumes was fleshed and animated with startling but authentic moments of history… Used… with a respect for the authenticity of detail, it can make a difference between opening a door to the past and closing it to all but a few.” (Pg. 5-6)
He goes on, “I have restated the Olmec case in the essay ‘Egypto-Nubian Presences in Ancient Mexico’ republished in this volume. The most remarkable of the new finds is that of the Olmec head discovered since 1862 but which has never appeared in any work on the subject, outside of Mexico. It is not featured … in my own book…. It is a significant omission because it is the most persuasive evidence of an African type among all the stone heads found to date.” (Pg. 7)
He reports a taped conversation with German-Mexican historian and archaeologist Alexander Von Wuthenau, in which Van Sertima told him, “It is relatively easy for historians to reconstruct early passages of European history from the written document because Europe had the good fortune to maintain an archival continuity… Yet here, in America… you have a virtual absence of documents. As in the case of Africa, my friend, it was not the lack of writing as most people want to believe, but … an almost systematic destruction of documents…. So it has become necessary in the reconstruction of American history to concentrate on other areas of evidence…” (Pg. 9-10)
He adds, “I want to make it clear that [Rafique] Jairazbhoy’s work is of the utmost importance. No one has amassed such a staggering list of cultural parallels between the Olmec world and that of the Egyptian. Problems of dating, possible errors in some of his basic assumptions, does not invalidate the painstaking and microscopically observant work he has done both in Mexico and South America. Many of the ritual parallels cited in this work between Olmec and first millennium B.C. Egypt are taken from his work.” (Pg. 16)
In a lecture he delivered to the Smithsonian Institution on November 1, 1991 [as part of the symposium ‘Race, Discourse and the Origin of the Americas: New World View of 1492’], he outlines, “I would like to thank the Smithsonian Institute … for allowing me this opportunity to present… this highly controversial thesis… that Africans made contact with the Americas in more than one historical period before the discovery of ‘India’ in the west by Columbus… I would like to request … that I not be judged today on all the positions I held 15 years ago, but on what I say now… [But] let me also say that the elements of contestable data that I shed are minor and are replaced today… by new and more formidable evidence. The fundamental thesis, therefore, is in no way weakened, but reinforced.” (Pg. 29)
He continues, “The question arises: How could Africans cross the Atlantic? That is really a major question in most minds. Such a voyage seems incredible because early Africans have been studied primarily in one particular context.” (Pg. 31) Later, he adds, “Now the ocean always seemed to be an impassible barrier to travel and that is why conventional anthropologists have assumed that Africans could not make it. First of all, because we were studying primitives we assumed Africans had only dugout canoes and could not cross oceans… I did not know that Africa had two of the longest rivers in the world… and that … the French and others had noted huge boats, not just the canoe… trading daily along the Niger. And the Africans didn’t just sail on lakes and rivers. They had ocean-going craft. [Thor] Heyerdahl tested one of these… Heyerdahl… suggested that these ships were designed for ocean travel. Scientists mocked at Heyerdahl. A papyrus reed boat? Nonsense!… So Heyerdahl rebuilt the ancient Adrican reed-boat, which he called ‘Ra.’ … And in 1969 the Africans set out from … North Africa… It got as far as Barbados.” (Pg. 35-36)
He emphasizes, “I have not claimed, and this is something that I really resent, the accusation that I claimed that the Africans founded the first significant American civilization.” (Pg. 36)
He asks, “could an ancient fleet blown off course, driven toward America by wind and current power, survive that Atlantic crossing?… while Heyerdahl proved that such a journey had been possible … when papyrus boats were in use, the sophisticated Egyptian and Phoenician galleys of the first millennium B.C. were superior to these earlier models… one appreciates how easily an expedition into North Atlantic waters could be blown off course into the Gulf of Mexico. According to the … Maya people, in whose book ‘Popul Vuh’ records oral traditions going back to very ancient times, ‘black and pale-skinned people’ appeared from the east in boats…’” (Pg. 70)
He states, “It is my contention that a small but significant number of men and a few women, in a fleet protected by military force moved west down the Mediterranean toward north Africa in the period 948-680 B.C.… and got caught in the pull of one of the westward currents… Ignorance of this unknown sea in an ancient time, therefore, not navigational expertise or geographical knowledge, would explain both their unexpected arrival in this area as well as their inability to return home. But proof of contact is only half of the story… What cultural impact did the outsiders have upon Olmec civilization? A study of the Olmec civilization reveals elements that so closely parallel ritual traits and techniques in the Egypto-Nubian world that it is difficult to maintain all these are due to mere coincidence.” (Pg. 71)
Runoko Rashidi states in his essay, “It is generally agreed that the earliest movements of people into the Americas took place across the short span that is now called the Bering Strait… the first Americans wandered out of Siberia, crossed the narrow but frozen water barrier, and entered Alaska. It is entirely possible that a few of these early folk came to the New World in boats… This very first group of migrants, however, probably entered North American without even getting their feet wet… Almost certainly without any real consciousness of the significance that modern humankind would attach to their accomplishments, these people ultimately marched directly from Asia right into North America. These would have been the first people then, almost certainly Diminutive Blacks [i.e., pygmies, Little Black Men], to move onto American soil and wander the immense lands of the New World.” (Pg. 218-219)
In a 1979 essay, Legrand H. Clegg II wrote, “The history of the ancient New World will remain incomplete and will not be fully understood until the presence of the Black race, as an integral part of it, is first acknowledged by scientists and then brought to the attention of the lay public… Rarely considered in histories and treatises on the New World is the ‘Negroid’ race… Before Western scientists began the UNIVERSAL suppression of the history of Black people, several early scholars, primarily Latin American scholars, acknowledged and investigated evidence of an ancient Black presence in the Americas… many archaeologists … and historians are now LISTENING to the arguments of a growing number of experts on African and American history, and examining their evidence which confirms the presence of black people in the Americas between c. 800 BC and 1400 AD.” (Pg. 231-232)
This book will be of great interest to those interested in Van Sertima’s book, and related theories.
Ivan Gladstone Van Sertima (1935-2009) was a Guyanese-born associate professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University.
He wrote in the Introduction/Overview to this 1992 book, “It is now fifteen years since ‘They Came Before Columbus’ … was first published. It appeared from Random House in 1977 and is now in its 17th printing. Like most controversial works… its most voluble commentators have either read it superficially or have misread it, for it is often praised or attacked … for saying things I did not say, for advancing positions I would neither entertain nor defend. The time has come to present some of the new evidence that has emerged since then... It has also become necessary to clarify the stands I took nearly a decade ago and to reexamine the case … with a greater scholarly precision and lucidity.” (Pg. 5)
He continues, “Some critics … have referred to the dramatized openings of chapters in ‘They Came Before Columbus’ as ‘fictionalizations.’ … What I set out to do, however, was quite different…. I was galvanized by a desire to draw the reader into the living skin of lost times and thus adopted a dramatic mode of presentation. The facts were well researched, notes indicating the archival sources were always given, the skeletal data buried in musty volumes was fleshed and animated with startling but authentic moments of history… Used… with a respect for the authenticity of detail, it can make a difference between opening a door to the past and closing it to all but a few.” (Pg. 5-6)
He goes on, “I have restated the Olmec case in the essay ‘Egypto-Nubian Presences in Ancient Mexico’ republished in this volume. The most remarkable of the new finds is that of the Olmec head discovered since 1862 but which has never appeared in any work on the subject, outside of Mexico. It is not featured … in my own book…. It is a significant omission because it is the most persuasive evidence of an African type among all the stone heads found to date.” (Pg. 7)
He reports a taped conversation with German-Mexican historian and archaeologist Alexander Von Wuthenau, in which Van Sertima told him, “It is relatively easy for historians to reconstruct early passages of European history from the written document because Europe had the good fortune to maintain an archival continuity… Yet here, in America… you have a virtual absence of documents. As in the case of Africa, my friend, it was not the lack of writing as most people want to believe, but … an almost systematic destruction of documents…. So it has become necessary in the reconstruction of American history to concentrate on other areas of evidence…” (Pg. 9-10)
He adds, “I want to make it clear that [Rafique] Jairazbhoy’s work is of the utmost importance. No one has amassed such a staggering list of cultural parallels between the Olmec world and that of the Egyptian. Problems of dating, possible errors in some of his basic assumptions, does not invalidate the painstaking and microscopically observant work he has done both in Mexico and South America. Many of the ritual parallels cited in this work between Olmec and first millennium B.C. Egypt are taken from his work.” (Pg. 16)
In a lecture he delivered to the Smithsonian Institution on November 1, 1991 [as part of the symposium ‘Race, Discourse and the Origin of the Americas: New World View of 1492’], he outlines, “I would like to thank the Smithsonian Institute … for allowing me this opportunity to present… this highly controversial thesis… that Africans made contact with the Americas in more than one historical period before the discovery of ‘India’ in the west by Columbus… I would like to request … that I not be judged today on all the positions I held 15 years ago, but on what I say now… [But] let me also say that the elements of contestable data that I shed are minor and are replaced today… by new and more formidable evidence. The fundamental thesis, therefore, is in no way weakened, but reinforced.” (Pg. 29)
He continues, “The question arises: How could Africans cross the Atlantic? That is really a major question in most minds. Such a voyage seems incredible because early Africans have been studied primarily in one particular context.” (Pg. 31) Later, he adds, “Now the ocean always seemed to be an impassible barrier to travel and that is why conventional anthropologists have assumed that Africans could not make it. First of all, because we were studying primitives we assumed Africans had only dugout canoes and could not cross oceans… I did not know that Africa had two of the longest rivers in the world… and that … the French and others had noted huge boats, not just the canoe… trading daily along the Niger. And the Africans didn’t just sail on lakes and rivers. They had ocean-going craft. [Thor] Heyerdahl tested one of these… Heyerdahl… suggested that these ships were designed for ocean travel. Scientists mocked at Heyerdahl. A papyrus reed boat? Nonsense!… So Heyerdahl rebuilt the ancient Adrican reed-boat, which he called ‘Ra.’ … And in 1969 the Africans set out from … North Africa… It got as far as Barbados.” (Pg. 35-36)
He emphasizes, “I have not claimed, and this is something that I really resent, the accusation that I claimed that the Africans founded the first significant American civilization.” (Pg. 36)
He asks, “could an ancient fleet blown off course, driven toward America by wind and current power, survive that Atlantic crossing?… while Heyerdahl proved that such a journey had been possible … when papyrus boats were in use, the sophisticated Egyptian and Phoenician galleys of the first millennium B.C. were superior to these earlier models… one appreciates how easily an expedition into North Atlantic waters could be blown off course into the Gulf of Mexico. According to the … Maya people, in whose book ‘Popul Vuh’ records oral traditions going back to very ancient times, ‘black and pale-skinned people’ appeared from the east in boats…’” (Pg. 70)
He states, “It is my contention that a small but significant number of men and a few women, in a fleet protected by military force moved west down the Mediterranean toward north Africa in the period 948-680 B.C.… and got caught in the pull of one of the westward currents… Ignorance of this unknown sea in an ancient time, therefore, not navigational expertise or geographical knowledge, would explain both their unexpected arrival in this area as well as their inability to return home. But proof of contact is only half of the story… What cultural impact did the outsiders have upon Olmec civilization? A study of the Olmec civilization reveals elements that so closely parallel ritual traits and techniques in the Egypto-Nubian world that it is difficult to maintain all these are due to mere coincidence.” (Pg. 71)
Runoko Rashidi states in his essay, “It is generally agreed that the earliest movements of people into the Americas took place across the short span that is now called the Bering Strait… the first Americans wandered out of Siberia, crossed the narrow but frozen water barrier, and entered Alaska. It is entirely possible that a few of these early folk came to the New World in boats… This very first group of migrants, however, probably entered North American without even getting their feet wet… Almost certainly without any real consciousness of the significance that modern humankind would attach to their accomplishments, these people ultimately marched directly from Asia right into North America. These would have been the first people then, almost certainly Diminutive Blacks [i.e., pygmies, Little Black Men], to move onto American soil and wander the immense lands of the New World.” (Pg. 218-219)
In a 1979 essay, Legrand H. Clegg II wrote, “The history of the ancient New World will remain incomplete and will not be fully understood until the presence of the Black race, as an integral part of it, is first acknowledged by scientists and then brought to the attention of the lay public… Rarely considered in histories and treatises on the New World is the ‘Negroid’ race… Before Western scientists began the UNIVERSAL suppression of the history of Black people, several early scholars, primarily Latin American scholars, acknowledged and investigated evidence of an ancient Black presence in the Americas… many archaeologists … and historians are now LISTENING to the arguments of a growing number of experts on African and American history, and examining their evidence which confirms the presence of black people in the Americas between c. 800 BC and 1400 AD.” (Pg. 231-232)
This book will be of great interest to those interested in Van Sertima’s book, and related theories.
October 12, 2007
Van Sertima is awesome. Can't wait until I get to this one!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews