Ivan van Sertima
Encyclopedia
Ivan Gladstone Van Sertima (26 January 1935 - 25 May 2009) was an associate professor of Africana Studies
at Rutgers University
in the United States.
He is 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).
While his Olmec theory has "spread widely in the African American community, both lay and scholarly", it was mostly ignored in Mesoamericanist scholarship, or else dismissed as Afrocentric pseudohistory to the effect of "robbing native American cultures".
, when Guyana was still a British colony; he retained his British citizenship throughout his life. He completed primary and secondary school in Guyana, and started writing poetry.
He attended the School of Oriental and African Studies
(SOAS) at the University of London
from 1959. 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 honors.
During his studies, he learned Swahili
and Hungarian
.
From 1957 to 1959, worked a Press and Broadcasting Officer in the Guyana Information Services
During the 1960s, he worked for several years in Great Britain as a journalist, doing weekly broadcasts to the Caribbean and Africa.
Van Sertima married Maria Nagy in 1964; they adopted two sons.
In doing field work in Africa, he compiled a dictionary of Swahili legal terms in 1967.
In 1970 Van Sertima immigrated to the United States, where he entered Rutgers University
in New Brunswick, New Jersey
, for graduate work.
He published his They Came Before Columbus 1976, as a Rutgers graduate student. The book deals mostly with his claims of African origin of Mesoamerican culture in the Western Hemisphere, but among other things also writing that the kings of the 25th Dynasty of Egypt
were Nubians.
The book, published by Random House rather than an academic press, was a bestseller 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. It was generally "ignored or dismissed" by academic experts at the time and strongly criticized in detail in an academic journal in 1997.
Sertima completed his master's degree
at Rutgers in 1977.
He became Associate Professor of African Studies at Rutgers in the Department of Africana Studies.
In 1979, Van Sertima founded the Journal of African Civilizations, which he exclusively edited and published for decades.
He published several annual compilations, volumes of the journal dealing with various topics of African history.
His article, "The Lost Sciences of Africa: An Overview" (1983), makes claims for early African advances in metallurgy, astronomy, mathematics, architecture, engineering, agriculture, navigation, medicine and writing. He claimed that higher learning, in Africa as elsewhere, was the preserve of elites in the centres of civilizations, rendering them vulnerable in the event (as happened in Africa) of the destruction of those centers and the disappearance of the knowledges.
Van Sertima discussed such "African scientific contributions" in an essay for the volume African Renaissance, published in 1999 (he had first published the essay in 1983). This was a record of the conference held in Johannesburg, South Africa, in September 1998 on the theme of the so-called African Renaissance
.
After divorcing his first wife, Sertima remarried in 1984, to Jacqueline L. Patten, who had two daughters.
On July 7, 1987, Van Sertima testified before a United States Congressional committee to oppose recognition of the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus
's "discovery" of the Americas. He said, "You cannot really conceive of how insulting it is to Native Americans . . . to be told they were discovered".
Van Sertima retired in 2006. He died on 25 May 2009 aged 74. He was survived by his wife and four adult children.
His widow, Jacqueline Van Sertima, said she would continue to publish the Journal of African Civilizations. She also planned to publish a book of his poetry.
In 1997 academics in a Journal of Current Anthropology article criticized in detail many elements of They Came Before Columbus (1976). Except for a brief mention, the book had not previously been reviewed in an academic journal. The researchers wrote a systematic rebuttal of Van Sertima's claims, stating that Van Sertima's "proposal was without foundation" in claiming African diffusion as responsible for prehistoric Olmec
culture (in present-day Mexico). They noted that no "genuine African artifact had been found in a controlled archaeological excavation in the New World." They noted that Olmec stone heads were carved hundreds of years prior to the claimed contact and only superficially appear to be African; the Nubians whom Van Sertima had claimed as their originators do not resemble these "portraits". They further noted that in the 1980s, Van Sertima had changed his timeline of African influence, suggesting that Africans made their way to the New World in the 10th century B.C., to account for more recent independent scholarship in the dating of Olmec culture.
They further called "fallacious" his claims that Africans had diffused the practices of pyramid
building and mummification, and noted the independent rise of these in the Americas. Additionally, they wrote that Van Sertima of "diminishe[d] the real achievements of Native American
culture" by his claims of African origin for them.
Van Sertima wrote a response to be included in the article (as is standard academic practice) but withdrew it. 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. Instead, Van Sertima replied to his critics in his journal volume published as Early America Revisited (1998).
In a New York Times 1977 review of Van Sertima's 1976 They Came Before Columbus, the archaeologist Glyn Daniel
labeled 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 1981 Dean R. Snow, a professor of anthropology
, wrote that Van Sertima "uses the now familiar technique of stringing together bits of carefully selected evidence, each surgically removed from the context that would give it a rational explanation". Snow continued, "The findings of professional archaeologists and physical anthropologists are misrepresented so that they seem to support the [Van Sertima] hypothesis".
In response to Daniel's review, archeologist and engineer Dr. Clarence Weiant (1897-1986) wrote a letter to the New York Times supporting Van Sertima's work. Following his B.S. in anthropology
in 1937 from Columbia University, Weiant worked in excavation of Olmec heads in Mexico in 1938, and then as an assistant archeologist in 1939 for the first National Geographic Society
-Smithsonian Institution
expedition to Tres Zapotes, Veracruz
, where ceramics were discovered. Weiant's letter, published in May 1977 in the New York Times, asserted that Van Sertima's work was "a summary of six or seven years of meticulous research based upon archeology, egyptology, African history, oceanography, astronomy, botany, rare Arabic and Chinese manuscripts, the letters and journals of early American explorers and the observations of physical anthropologists...As one who has been immersed in Mexican archeology for some forty years, I am thoroughly convinced of the soundness of Van Sertima's conclusions."
In 1981, They Came Before Columbus received the "Clarence L. Holte Literary Prize". Sertima was inducted into the "Rutgers African-American Alumni Hall of Fame" in 2004.
Africana studies
In United States education, Africana studies, or Africology is the study of the histories, politics and cultures of peoples of African origin both in Africa and in the African diaspora....
at Rutgers University
Rutgers University
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...
in the United States.
He is best known for his Olmec alternative origin speculations
Olmec alternative origin speculations
Olmec alternative origin speculations are explanations that have been suggested for the formation of Olmec civilization which contradict generally accepted scholarly consensus. These origin theories typically involve contact with Old World societies...
, a brand of pre-Columbian contact theory, which he proposed in his book They Came Before Columbus (1976).
While his Olmec theory has "spread widely in the African American community, both lay and scholarly", it was mostly ignored in Mesoamericanist scholarship, or else dismissed as Afrocentric pseudohistory to the effect of "robbing native American cultures".
Biography
Van Sertima was born in Karina Village, GuyanaGuyana
Guyana , officially the Co-operative Republic of Guyana, previously the colony of British Guiana, is a sovereign state on the northern coast of South America that is culturally part of the Anglophone Caribbean. Guyana was a former colony of the Dutch and of the British...
, when Guyana was still a British colony; he retained his British citizenship throughout his life. He completed primary and secondary school in Guyana, and started writing poetry.
He attended the School of Oriental and African Studies
School of Oriental and African Studies
The School of Oriental and African Studies is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and a constituent college of the University of London...
(SOAS) at the University of London
University of London
-20th century:Shortly after 6 Burlington Gardens was vacated, the University went through a period of rapid expansion. Bedford College, Royal Holloway and the London School of Economics all joined in 1900, Regent's Park College, which had affiliated in 1841 became an official divinity school of the...
from 1959. 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 honors.
During his studies, he learned Swahili
Swahili language
Swahili or Kiswahili is a Bantu language spoken by various ethnic groups that inhabit several large stretches of the Mozambique Channel coastline from northern Kenya to northern Mozambique, including the Comoro Islands. It is also spoken by ethnic minority groups in Somalia...
and Hungarian
Hungarian language
Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....
.
From 1957 to 1959, worked a Press and Broadcasting Officer in the Guyana Information Services
During the 1960s, he worked for several years in Great Britain as a journalist, doing weekly broadcasts to the Caribbean and Africa.
Van Sertima married Maria Nagy in 1964; they adopted two sons.
In doing field work in Africa, he compiled a dictionary of Swahili legal terms in 1967.
In 1970 Van Sertima immigrated to the United States, where he entered Rutgers University
Rutgers University
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...
in New Brunswick, New Jersey
New Brunswick, New Jersey
New Brunswick is a city in Middlesex County, New Jersey, USA. It is the county seat and the home of Rutgers University. The city is located on the Northeast Corridor rail line, southwest of Manhattan, on the southern bank of the Raritan River. At the 2010 United States Census, the population of...
, for graduate work.
He published his They Came Before Columbus 1976, as a Rutgers graduate student. The book deals mostly with his claims of African origin of Mesoamerican culture in the Western Hemisphere, but among other things also writing that the kings of the 25th Dynasty of Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
were Nubians.
The book, published by Random House rather than an academic press, was a bestseller and achieved widespread attention within the African American community for his claims of prehistoric African contact and diffusion of culture in Central
Central America
Central America is the central geographic region of the Americas. It is the southernmost, isthmian portion of the North American continent, which connects with South America on the southeast. When considered part of the unified continental model, it is considered a subcontinent...
and South America. It was generally "ignored or dismissed" by academic experts at the time and strongly criticized in detail in an academic journal in 1997.
Sertima completed his master's degree
Master's degree
A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...
at Rutgers in 1977.
He became Associate Professor of African Studies at Rutgers in the Department of Africana Studies.
In 1979, Van Sertima founded the Journal of African Civilizations, which he exclusively edited and published for decades.
He published several annual compilations, volumes of the journal dealing with various topics of African history.
His article, "The Lost Sciences of Africa: An Overview" (1983), makes claims for early African advances in metallurgy, astronomy, mathematics, architecture, engineering, agriculture, navigation, medicine and writing. He claimed that higher learning, in Africa as elsewhere, was the preserve of elites in the centres of civilizations, rendering them vulnerable in the event (as happened in Africa) of the destruction of those centers and the disappearance of the knowledges.
Van Sertima discussed such "African scientific contributions" in an essay for the volume African Renaissance, published in 1999 (he had first published the essay in 1983). This was a record of the conference held in Johannesburg, South Africa, in September 1998 on the theme of the so-called African Renaissance
African Renaissance
The African Renaissance is the concept that African people and nations overcome the current challenges confronting the continent and achieve cultural, scientific, economic, etc. renewal. This concept has been popularized by South African President Thabo Mbeki during his term of office...
.
After divorcing his first wife, Sertima remarried in 1984, to Jacqueline L. Patten, who had two daughters.
On July 7, 1987, Van Sertima testified before a United States Congressional committee to oppose recognition of the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus was an explorer, colonizer, and navigator, born in the Republic of Genoa, in northwestern Italy. Under the auspices of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, he completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean that led to general European awareness of the American continents in the...
's "discovery" of the Americas. He said, "You cannot really conceive of how insulting it is to Native Americans . . . to be told they were discovered".
Van Sertima retired in 2006. He died on 25 May 2009 aged 74. He was survived by his wife and four adult children.
His widow, Jacqueline Van Sertima, said she would continue to publish the Journal of African Civilizations. She also planned to publish a book of his poetry.
Reception
Van Sertima's work has been strongly criticized by opposing academics, who describe his claims to be ill-founded and false. Van Sertima's Journal of African Civilizations was not considered for inclusion in Journals of the Century.In 1997 academics in a Journal of Current Anthropology article criticized in detail many elements of They Came Before Columbus (1976). Except for a brief mention, the book had not previously been reviewed in an academic journal. The researchers wrote a systematic rebuttal of Van Sertima's claims, stating that Van Sertima's "proposal was without foundation" in claiming African diffusion as responsible for prehistoric Olmec
Olmec
The Olmec were the first major Pre-Columbian civilization in Mexico. They lived in the tropical lowlands of south-central Mexico, in the modern-day states of Veracruz and Tabasco....
culture (in present-day Mexico). They noted that no "genuine African artifact had been found in a controlled archaeological excavation in the New World." They noted that Olmec stone heads were carved hundreds of years prior to the claimed contact and only superficially appear to be African; the Nubians whom Van Sertima had claimed as their originators do not resemble these "portraits". They further noted that in the 1980s, Van Sertima had changed his timeline of African influence, suggesting that Africans made their way to the New World in the 10th century B.C., to account for more recent independent scholarship in the dating of Olmec culture.
They further called "fallacious" his claims that Africans had diffused the practices of pyramid
Pyramid
A pyramid is a structure whose outer surfaces are triangular and converge at a single point. The base of a pyramid can be trilateral, quadrilateral, or any polygon shape, meaning that a pyramid has at least three triangular surfaces...
building and mummification, and noted the independent rise of these in the Americas. Additionally, they wrote that Van Sertima of "diminishe[d] the real achievements of Native American
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
culture" by his claims of African origin for them.
Van Sertima wrote a response to be included in the article (as is standard academic practice) but withdrew it. 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. Instead, Van Sertima replied to his critics in his journal volume published as Early America Revisited (1998).
In a New York Times 1977 review of Van Sertima's 1976 They Came Before Columbus, the archaeologist Glyn Daniel
Glyn Daniel
Glyn Edmund Daniel was a Welsh scientist and archaeologist whose academic career at Cambridge University specialised in the European Neolithic period. He edited the academic journal Antiquity from 1958–1985...
labeled Van Sertima's work as "ignorant rubbish", and concluded that the works of Van Sertima, and Barry Fell
Barry Fell
Barry Fell was a professor of invertebrate zoology at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. His primary research was on starfish and sea urchins...
, whom he was also reviewing, "give us badly argued theories based on fantasies". In 1981 Dean R. Snow, a professor of anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
, wrote that Van Sertima "uses the now familiar technique of stringing together bits of carefully selected evidence, each surgically removed from the context that would give it a rational explanation". Snow continued, "The findings of professional archaeologists and physical anthropologists are misrepresented so that they seem to support the [Van Sertima] hypothesis".
In response to Daniel's review, archeologist and engineer Dr. Clarence Weiant (1897-1986) wrote a letter to the New York Times supporting Van Sertima's work. Following his B.S. in anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
in 1937 from Columbia University, Weiant worked in excavation of Olmec heads in Mexico in 1938, and then as an assistant archeologist in 1939 for the first National Geographic Society
National Geographic Society
The National Geographic Society , headquartered in Washington, D.C. in the United States, is one of the largest non-profit scientific and educational institutions in the world. Its interests include geography, archaeology and natural science, the promotion of environmental and historical...
-Smithsonian Institution
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution is an educational and research institute and associated museum complex, administered and funded by the government of the United States and by funds from its endowment, contributions, and profits from its retail operations, concessions, licensing activities, and magazines...
expedition to Tres Zapotes, Veracruz
Veracruz
Veracruz, formally Veracruz de Ignacio de la Llave officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Veracruz de Ignacio de la Llave , is one of the 31 states that, along with the Federal District, comprise the 32 federative entities of Mexico. It is divided in 212 municipalities and its capital city is...
, where ceramics were discovered. Weiant's letter, published in May 1977 in the New York Times, asserted that Van Sertima's work was "a summary of six or seven years of meticulous research based upon archeology, egyptology, African history, oceanography, astronomy, botany, rare Arabic and Chinese manuscripts, the letters and journals of early American explorers and the observations of physical anthropologists...As one who has been immersed in Mexican archeology for some forty years, I am thoroughly convinced of the soundness of Van Sertima's conclusions."
In 1981, They Came Before Columbus received the "Clarence L. Holte Literary Prize". Sertima was inducted into the "Rutgers African-American Alumni Hall of Fame" in 2004.
External links
- "A Look Back at Slavery: Ivan Van Sertima On Cultural and Scientific Achievements in Africa", Democracy Now broadcast, 20 October 1999
- Journal of African Civilizations, Official Website
- Runoko Rashidi, "Ivan Van Sertima", The Global African Presence Website (Runoko Rashidid)