One could do worse. 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. It sounds like someone chose to record himself reading the book and decided to upload the files to YouTube. When I thought about it more, I realized that in high school and probably prior I had learned about American History, Western European History, the dynasties of China and Egypt, but what about where my people were likely from? The psyche of blacks is raised. So again, thanks. 2023 The Moguldom Nation. Van Sertima said: "Many people feel a certain kind of happiness when they read my book. Unfortunately, the scholarship that he has inspired has tended to be of a worse quality than Van Sertimas was. They are familiar with American history, right? (LogOut/ Are some Black Americans trying to distance themselves from Africa and rewrite history by ignoring such evidence as DNA? Dan Von Hoyel ~ Black Before Columbus Came: The African Discovery of America Odd Salon DISCOVERY: Six stories of rigorous inquiry and accidental revelations, [] [15] The claims in this book are not generally accepted in the scientific fields of archaeology and anthropology. 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. Hip-hop artist B.o.B,who is also a flat Earth believer. There are some problems with this theory. 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. 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). Saying slave ships are a myth is a whole new level of ignorance . Any other significant information about the history of my people tended to start with, we were slaves. Technically, Carthage was a part of Northern Africa too. Mike Harrington: His team looks good, even without Alex Tuch. 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. 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 . Get up-to-the-minute news sent straight to your device. There is evidence of African cotton seeds in America. In 1977, Van Sertima wrote "They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America," a controversial book now in its 21st printing. "How many of us know the African influence on ancient Greece and Rome? Dwayne is the author of Kingdoms and Civilizations of Africa and several other books on African and African Diaspora history. [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). 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. There is far more to Black history than the slave trade alright. Kenneth L. FedderKenneth L. Feder, a specialist in archaeological pseudoscience, addresses prevalent misconceptions about the settlement of the Americas, discussing how they are stimulated by ethnic pride and religious faith, propagated uncritically in the media, and accepted by students. Van Sertima's zeal for learning about African culture began in England in the '60s while he was working as a writer for the BBC. 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. In 1997 academics in a Journal of Current Anthropology article criticised in detail many elements of They Came Before Columbus (1976). 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. Van Sertima tells of the emergence of the Mali kingdom and its seafaring ventures, thus providing evidence for sailing capabilities of West Africans. [1], Van Sertima retired in 2006. There are many similarities between Egyptian civilization and Native American cultures. (LogOut/ Rhythm, flow, enunciation of some words could be improved upon, but again this seemed to be a random volunteer. I wasn't halfway through this book and I was thoroughly offended, but I finished it just to hear their point of view. She also planned to publish a book of his poetry.[25]. They noted that no "genuine African artifact had been found in a controlled archaeological excavation in the New World." He describes how Africans and Phoenicians probably made joint voyages to the Americas around 800 B.C., when the Olmec people lived in the coastal region near the Gulf of Mexico, evidence of African influence there, he said, can be seen in an array of material, including the four colossal Negroid stone heads found near La Venta, Mexico. Sertima then recounts the story of how Christopher Columbus came to venture to the Americas. Their Negro-ness could not be explained away nor, in most cases, their African cultural origin. 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. 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. https://twitter.com/BreeNewsome/status/1404242564585246720?s=20&t=Lv4XscKZw3SR_tmBhetmbg, https://twitter.com/tariqnasheed/status/1501640824576110595?s=20&t=Lv4XscKZw3SR_tmBhetmbg, https://twitter.com/RDCRaissa/status/1503381403836293127?s=20&t=Lv4XscKZw3SR_tmBhetmbg, https://twitter.com/JaKaB0i_116/status/1503133876637638663?s=20&t=Lv4XscKZw3SR_tmBhetmbg, The Genetic Ancestry of African Americans, Latinos, and European Americans across the United States. 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. In fact, that . ( 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. All parties remained peaceful, and Columbus specifically instructed his crews not to take advantage of the Indians. There have been a number of diffusion theories regarding the Olmec. Van Sertima also argued it was Columbus himself who suggested that Africans were in the Americas before he was. Now, I am not the first to suggest that there were Africans in America before Columbus, Columbus was the first to suggest it. 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. 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. The view is based almost completely on just observing the facial features of the Olmec colossal heads, as described by Van Sertima above. Both men supported their artistic theories with slides of the sculptures and modern Africans and Middle American Indians -- leaving the audience to decide for themselves between truth and the appearance of truth. [5] Except for a brief mention, the book had not previously been reviewed in an academic journal. [15], A chapter is also devoted to the presence of bottle gourds originally from Africa found in ancient Mesoamerican graves. Columbus is such a late-comer that it is almost silly to compare anybody's arrival to his. [16], Van Sertima argues that African contact likely happened more than once. Van Sertima was among those who argued that the Olmec had African origins, whereas others such as Mike Xu have argued that the Olmec civilization has Asian roots. It was with the coming of Columbus that the twilight of the red and black races began. I really have no idea. Van Sertimas scholarship was flawed in many respects, but he made an attempt to challenge the racist scholarship of his time. The occasion was his first visit to the United States from Britain, where he was working in 1970. There are Egyptian-like pyramids in the Americas and mummified persons similar to those in Egypt. This work was published by Random House and did not go through a peer review process. Learn how your comment data is processed. If I didnt look for it myself I was probably wasnt going to learn much more. The description that Columbus gives certainly is not a description of black people in the Caribbean. 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. Wow, so you (your black ancestors) got there before the Indians and the Europeans? Van Sertima answers that Africans were indeed sailors, that a division of Negro sea captains and mariners is reported to have been in the Egyptian navy of the 19th dynasty and the East Africans sailed between their countries and China in the 13th century. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. The ocean currents could account for the spread of plants, and the linguistic claims aren't as clear as Van Sertima believes, Barbour said. The truth is that Black Indians were shipped from America to Europe! White ppll pulled up to America and realize the whole country was filled with black ppl. . [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". A generation of work in this area had unearthed a large number of Negroid heads in clay, gold, copper and copal sculpted by pre-Colombian American artists. Van Sertima's Journal of African Civilizations was not considered for inclusion in Journals of the Century. 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. "Imagine Europeans putting slaves into their ships and saying 'hold onto your spears, brothers, you're going to need to trade them.' Though these features may be common among black people of African Ancestry, one cannot exclude that these features also exist to some degree in Native Americans. The mysterious origins of the Olmec civilization has invited a lot of speculation and in Van Sertimas case he speculated that the Egyptians sailed to the Americas and influenced the Olmec civilization, but there simply is no historical evidence to demonstrated this, which is why Van Sertima was forced to alter his thesis in some respects. Nowhere does de Las Casas suggest that spears he was referring to were identical or even similar to spears in West Africa. His article "The Lost Sciences of Africa: An Overview" (1983) discusses early African advances in metallurgy, astronomy, mathematics, architecture, engineering, agriculture, navigation, medicine and writing. But where did Menzies come up with the idea that it was Asians, not Europeans, who first arrived in America from other countries? 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. 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. Any other significant information about the history of my people tended to be random. Mention, the book and decided to upload the files to YouTube Africa rewrite! Recounts the story of How Christopher Columbus Came to venture to the United from... Even similar to those in Egypt x27 ; s arrival to his published! Gives certainly is not a description of Black people in the new World. a chapter is also devoted the... Also a flat Earth believer details below or click an icon to log in: you are commenting using WordPress.com! 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