[Black Lion]

THE GLOBAL AFRICAN COMMUNITY H I S T O R Y N O T E S A TRIBUTE TO DR. IVAN VAN SERTIMA

By RUNOKO RASHIDI
The GLOBAL AFRICAN PRESENCE - Articles by Runoko Rashidi --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"We have come to reclaim the house of history. We arededicated to the revision of the role of the Africanin the world's great civilizations, the contributionof Africa to the achievement of man in the arts andsciences. We shall emphasize what Africa has given tothe world, not what it has lost." --Ivan Van Sertima

With absolute certainty it can stated that, due to hisconsistent and unrelenting scholarship over the pasttwenty-five years in the rewriting of African historyand the reconstruction of the African's place in worldhistory, particularly in the field of the Africanpresence in ancient America, Ivan Van Sertima hascemented his position as one of our greatest livingscholars. Indeed, during this turbulent and excitingperiod, he has been in the vanguard of those scholarsfighting to place African history in a new light.

Simply put, Van Sertima's clarion call has been: "Weshall follow the trail of the African in Europe, inAsia, and in every corner of the New World, seeking toset the record straight. This is no romanticexploration of antiquities. It is a search forroots." Ivan Van Sertima was born in Kitty Village, Guyana,South America on January 26, 1935. He was educated atthe School of Oriental and African Studies at LondonUniversity where he graduated with honors. From 1957to 1959, he served as a Press and Broadcasting Officerin the Guyana Information Services. During the decadeof the 1960s, he broadcasted weekly from Britain toboth Africa and the Caribbean. He came to the UnitedStates in 1970, where he completed his post graduatestudies at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Dr. VanSertima began his teaching career as an instructor atRutgers in 1972, and remained Professor of Africanstudies in the Department of Africana Studies untilrecently. Van Sertima is a literary critic, a linguist, and ananthropologist, and has made a name for himself in allthree fields. As a linguist, he is the compiler ofthe Swahili Dictionary of Legal Terms, based on hisfield word in Tanzania, East Africa in 1967.

As aliterary critic, he is the author of CaribbeanWriters, a collection of critical essays on theCaribbean novel. He is also the author of severalmajor literary reviews published in Denmark, India,Britain, and the United States. He was recognized forhis work in this field by being requested by the NobelCommittee of the Swedish Academy to nominatecandidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature from 1976to 1980. The cornerstone of Dr. Van Sertima's legacy willprobably be his authorship of They Came BeforeColumbus: The African Presence in Ancient America.

According to Van Sertima: "The African presence in America before Columbus is ofimportance not only to African and American history,but to the history of world civilizations. The Africanpresence is proven by stone heads, terra cottas,skeletons, artifacts, techniques and inscriptions, byoral traditions and documented history, by botanical,linguistic and cultural data."

They Came Before Columbus is a ground breaking historical work and a literary hallmark. The ideasand themes presented in They Came Before Columbus werenot novel. Indeed, many people had written on theAfrican presence in pre-Columbian America before VanSertima, notably Leo Wiener, Kofi Wangara, R.A.Jairazbhoy, Legrand H. Clegg II, and Floyd W. HayesIII, but Van Sertima's book was the first such work ofits type written by an African to comprehensivelyaddress the subject.

In his own words, Van Sertimanotes that: "What I have sought to do in this book, therefore, isto present the whole picture emerging from thesedisciplines, all the facts that are now known about the links between Africa and America in pre-Columbiantimes." They Came Before Columbus has now gone through morethan twenty printings. It was published in French in1981, and in the same year was awarded the Clarence L.Holt Prize, a prize awarded every two years "for awork of excellence in literature and the humanities relating to the the cultural heritage of Africa andthe African diaspora."

In 1979 Dr. Chancellor Williams received the Clarence L. Holte prize for theDestruction of Black Civilization. Following upon the publication of They Came BeforeColumbus, and equally momentous, in 1979 Dr. VanSertima founded the Journal of African Civilizationswhich quickly gained "a reputation for excellence anduniqueness among historical and anthropologicaljournals. It is recognized as a valuable informationsource for both the layman and student." The late St.Clair Drake described the Journal of AfricanCivilizations as "one of the most important events inthe development of research and publication from theperspective of Pan-African scholarship." Van Sertimaset the tone early on when he stated that: "The destruction of African high-cultures after themassive and continuous invasions of Europe left manyAfricans surviving on the periphery or outer ring ofwhat constituted the best in African civilizations. New facts that challenge this image create suchconsternation and incredulity that an extraordinarilyemotional campaign is mounted by some of the mostrespected voices in the scientific establishment toexplain away the new data.

That drift of dynastic Egypt from Africa has nowdramatically slowed. Recent archeological finds havecaught up with the mythmakers. More and more thehistory of Africa is being reconstructed upon thebasis of hard, objective data rather than upon theself-serving speculations and racist theories aboutthe black barbarians." From 1979 the Journal of African Civilizationspublished works by and about many of the world'sfinest Africanist scholars in a series of magnificentanthologies.

These works include;

Blacks in Science,

Nile Valley Civilizations,

African Presence in EarlyAmerica,

Black Women in Antiquity,

Egypt Revisited,Egypt: Child of Africa,

African Presence in Early Europe,

Golden Age of the Moor,

African Presence inthe Art of the Americas,

Great Black Leaders,

GreatAfrican Thinkers (coedited with Larry ObadeleWilliams),

and African Presence in Early Asia(coedited with Runoko Rashidi).

In 1998 TransactionPress produced produced Van Sertima's newesttext--Early America Revisited--the definitivestatement on the subject. On July 7, 1987 Dr. Van Sertima appeared before aCongressional Committee to challenge the Columbus myth. In November 1991 he defended his thesis in anaddress to the Smithsonian Institute. In this arenaIvan Van Sertima has emerged as an undefeatedchampion.

SOURCES:They Came Before Columbus and Early Early AmericaRevisited, by Ivan Van Sertima