Van Sertima, Ivan Gladstone

Impact on the world

Published 'They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America' in 1976, arguing that Africans, including Nubian and Malian seafarers, reached the Americas and significantly influenced early civilizations such as the Olmec centuries before Columbus's 1492 voyage; the book spread widely within both lay and academic African American communities and was praised in some general-interest press coverage, but mainstream Mesoamerican archaeologists and anthropologists who have formally evaluated its claims have rejected them as unsupported by any controlled archaeological evidence, with a detailed 1997 critique in the journal Current Anthropology characterizing the theory as without scientific foundation and, in the view of several scholars, an account that denies Indigenous Mesoamerican peoples credit for their own civilizational achievements.

Life & background

Born in Guyana in 1935, Van Sertima worked as a press and broadcasting officer for the Guyanese government before relocating to London, where he worked as a freelance broadcaster and writer through the 1960s, then immigrated to the United States to join Rutgers University's faculty in 1970, eventually becoming an associate professor of Africana Studies. His central and most famous claim, developed over years of research synthesizing archaeology, linguistics, botany, and historical record into a single sweeping narrative, held that ancient Nubian Egyptian seafarers crossed the Atlantic around 700 BCE and substantially influenced the rise of Mesoamerica's earliest civilization, the Olmec, citing as evidence the Olmec culture's colossal stone heads, which Van Sertima and his supporters described as bearing distinctly African features. Specialist Mesoamerican archaeologists who examined this claim in detail found no genuine African artifact ever recovered from a controlled New World excavation supporting any such contact, noted that the Olmec heads were carved centuries before Van Sertima's proposed contact date, and concluded the theory had spread widely in popular and some academic circles specifically because it had never previously received the kind of sustained scholarly scrutiny a Current Anthropology article finally applied to it in 1997, two decades after the book's original publication. Van Sertima continued defending and refining elements of his broader thesis for the rest of his career, including a later book addressing chronological problems raised by critics, founded and edited the Journal of African Civilizations, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature between 1976 and 1980; he died in 2009, having become, by the account of sympathetic obituarists, one of the most widely read popular historians on the subject of ancient African civilizations despite his core archaeological claims never gaining acceptance within the specialist scholarly fields most directly equipped to evaluate them.

Sources

1. Encyclopedia.com; Goodreads; Hall of Ma'at (Current Anthropology critique summary); Washington Post archive (1977); Revolutionary Democracy (obituary)