DID THEY OR DID THEY NOT COME BEFORE COLUMBUS?

PROMPTING A RESPONSE TO THE QUESTION OF PRE-COLUMBIAN

AFRICAN IN THE AMERICAS

Michael Toussaint

Academics have for some time been locked in a debate on the question of an African

presence in the Americas prior to the arrival of Columbus in the region. The debate has

attracted significant international attention, with scholarly inputs arrayed on many sides.

The Caribbean figures significantly in the discourse, as there are noteworthy

implications for our understanding of the history of the region. And yet, outside of the

flagship effort of the late Ivan Van Sertima, the historiography from the Caribbean has

been characterized by pronounced silence on the subject. Against this background, this

paper revisits the debate, by examining issues of particular importance to the Caribbean

and attempts to gauge the necessity for a Caribbean response.

Introduction

The question of Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact between the so-called Old

and New Worlds has been one of the most controversial issues of the last century. Over

the past two and a half decades, it has become increasingly so as the international

community sought to treat with the commemoration of the quincentennial of the arrival

of Columbus in the Americas (Sorenson 2004; Hyatt and Nettleford 1995). Currently,

the issue constitutes a virtual minefield of academic debate. Various individuals, groups

and institutions, operating out of different agendas and levels of research, have attempted

to proffer evidence of Old and New World contact prior to the arrival of the Europeans in

the Americas towards the end of the fifteenth century.

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Interrogating Columbus hegemony: an age-old debate

To many modern scholars, the very notion that Columbus could have discovered

the New World in 1492 seems absurd as full blown civilizations existed in the region

prior to his arrival (Rashidi 2003; Gleggs II 1975; Jairazabhoy 1974, 1992). Earlier

scholars like Anderson (1883) and Barron (1891) had argued that in any case Columbus

was not the first European to reach the Americas. Today many attribute this feat to the

Norsemen sailing from Scandinavia to North America circa 860 to 1001 A.D (Shippen

1951; Poertner 1975; Wahlgren 1986). In retrospect, almost immediately following

Columbus return from his first voyage to the Americas, there emerged claims that he had

learnt of its existence from contemporaries and others who had been there before him or

knew of the existence of the so called New World (Cohen 1969; Brading 1991;

Williamson, 1962:). Some writers have claimed that Irishmen made landfall in the

Americas before Columbus (Winter 1990). A number of scholars (Jeffrey 1953; Van

Sertima 1976; Fell 1980) have advanced data pointing to the presence of ancient Nubio-

Egyptians, and Muslims from North and West Africa, in the Americas over centuries

before Columbus arrival.

While the previous claims relate to pre-Columbian trans-Atlantic contact, others

point to Pre-Columbian trans-Pacific crossings. Jairazbhoy (1974) and Menzies (2003,

2008) have posited that the Chinese had reached the Americas by the early fifteenth

century. It has also been posited that Polynesians preceded Columbus to the Americas
 3

(Pratt 2009). For Mahadeo and Kumar (2007) there was an East Indian presence in the

Americas before Columbus arrival in 1492.

The foregoing explains why the issue of pre-Columbian Old World arrivants in

the Americas has become one of such great international significance over the years

However, despite the ongoing debates, Caribbean scholars have been reticent. In the

main, the regional voices have been too few and too distant to suggest either adequate

interest in the subject or cognizance of its implications. Still, simply to deny the region

the latter might be considered scurrilous or disingenuous.

Trinidad and Tobagos first Premier and Prime Minister, noted Caribbean

historian Eric Williams, was one of the first regional academics to comment on the

matter. In a 1977 lecture to the Baptist Community in Trinidad and Tobago he declared:

We [scholars/historians] have historical evidence that Africans came from West

Africa to the so-called New World. We have relics and evidence of their presence

in places like Mexico nobody could dream it; some of these sculptures portray

the very modern hairstyles that girls affect today.

Williams had made no specific reference to the Caribbean and it is doubtful

whether the audience might have appreciated the full significance of the comment. The

matter had not been discussed in the public domain, neither among historians of the

Caribbean nor among the people of Trinidad and Tobago. In his address Williams had

made only a passing reference to the subject, and had not explored the evidential basis on

which he made his claim. There is no evidence of his statement being taken up elsewhere
 4

by any local scholar or even Williams himself. Between 1942 and 1970, he had

published a number of seminal texts on the evolution of West Indian society and nation

states. In none of them did he raise the issue of Pre-Columbian Africans in the Americas

(Williams 1942, 1962, 1964, 1970).

The Van Sertima Overview

Williams statement came at a time which seems to suggest he might have been

influenced by the recently published work of another Caribbean scholar, Ivan Van

Sertima. In 1976, the latter, operating out of Rutgers University, had presented to the

world what has since become his magnum opus: They Came Before Columbus: The

African Presence in Ancient America. It would turn out to be one of the most

controversial texts of the last century, attracting what Van Sertima himself surmises as

the most extreme and vicious criticism as well as enthusiastic praise (Van Sertima,

1998:1). A redoubtable tour de force, it discusses wide-ranging evidence in support of his

claim that Africandescended people made their way to the Americas long before

Columbus, including:

1) Sightings of pre-Columbian New World Africans recorded in the journals of

European explorers, from Columbus to Pizarro;

2) The testimonies of native Amerindians written into the records left by

a number of Roman Catholic priests, some of whom were later chastised and

ostracised for their writings on the subject. Their publications were either

banned or burnt;

3) Records indicating the discovery by Columbus in the Americas of spears with

 5

tips made of guanine and other metals combined in proportions known then and

hitherto to be unique to certain nations of West Africa;

4) The oral traditions of West Africans which recorded claims that prior to

European contact with their nations, their people had journeyed on various

occasions to the other side of the Atlantic to conduct trade and, furthermore,

had provided the Portuguese with whom they later came into contact with

information concerning such travels. Records have since emerged of Columbus

contact with native West Africans, some of whom not only provided him

with similar information but also accompanied him on his voyages to the

Americas (Lydersen 2009);

5) The historical records of fourteenth-century Muslim writers and academics who,

through the nature of the relations between their states and certain West African

nations, were made aware of such navigational undertakings and routinely

recorded them in their historical and other accounts;

6) Data evidencing the sea-going capability and activities of the people of the

ancient Nubio-Egyptian Nile Valley high civilization and, later, that of West

Africans. The former is posited by Van Sertima et al as having been significantly

influential in the development of the classical Olmec and subsequent Middle and

South American civilizations of preColumbian times;

7) Archaeological evidence, inclusive of a number of massive stone heads

discovered and excavated in Mexico between 1858 and 1939. These carry a radio

carbon date of 800 to 600 B.C. and exhibit particularly Africoid phenotypical

features. The list of such features exhibited in the sculptures located at Tres
 6

Zapotes, La Venta, San Lorenzo and other sites includes an essentially Africoid

level of alveolar prognathism, broad noses, thick lips, corn row or braided

hairstyles and scarification;

8) Archeological evidence for marked correspondences in pyramidolgy and religious

(including eschatological) practices and calendrical systems. There are also

correspondences in paintings, other sculptures and extant terra cotta and fabric

design;

9) Data suggesting the pre-Columbian migration of cultigens and agro- technology

from West Africa to the New World. The list of cultigens suggested as having a

Pre-Columbian African origin includes cotton seeds, bottle gourds, jack beans,

tobacco, banana plants and West African yams;

10) Evidence suggesting Pre-Columbian correspondence between the linguistic

patterns of Nubio-Egyptian and West African societies on the one hand and

Meso-America societies on the other;

11) Fossil evidence, mainly two male, negroid skeletons discovered in Hull Bay in the

United States Virgin Islands in the 1970s, with a radio carbon date of around 1250

A.D. The dentition of these fossils, together with extant pottery and petroglyphs,

suggests the existence of an African-descended community in the territory more

than a century before Columbus arrival in the Americas. This raises new and

exciting questions about their co-existence with the Tainos, the dominant culture

of the northern Caribbean between 1200 to 1500 A.D. (Lydersen, 2009);

12) Data resulting from a number of experiments (conducted between 1947 and 1969

by Norwegian explorer and anthropologist Thor Heyerdhal, and the French

 7

physician and seafarer Dr. Alain Bombard) which tested positively the capacity

of ancient Nile Valley reed boats and also 14th century West African vessels to

cross the Atlantic;

13) Hydraulic data on the ocean currents and winds of the South Atlantic ocean,

the peculiarities and formidability of which have provoked skepticism concerning

Columbus ability to navigate the Atlantic without assistance from native West

Africans.

Between North Atlantic scholarly antecedents and present day continuities

Van Sertimas 1976 expos was not original. As he himself wrote, its aim was to

present the whole picture emerging from scholars in a number of disciplines, and all the

facts that were then known (at the time of his writing) about the links between Africa and

America in pre-Columbian times (Van Setima 1976: xv). Accordingly, he drew

significantly from the work of scholars representing a range of academic disciplines and

who, out of their efforts in their respective fields, had arrived at similar conclusions

regarding a Pre-Columbian African presence in the ancient Americas. More than half a

century before Van Sertimas 1976 publication, the Russian linguist, Leo Wiener, had

produced a three volume work on the grammatical patterns discovered in the Pre-

Columbian New World. It indicated an Afro-Arabic influence in medieval Mexico and

South America prior to European contact (Weiner 1920-22). The year 1962 saw the

publication of Harold S. Lawrences African Explorers of the New World which puts

forward the thesis that Mandingos from the Mali and Songhay empires had conducted

trade across the Atlantic with the natives of the Americas in pre-Columbian times. In
 8

1975, Alexander Von Wuthenau, a German professor of Art History at the University of

the Americas, published his Unexpected Faces in Ancient America. The unexpected

faces were those of Africans.

Following its first publication, They Came before Columbus has experienced

more than 23 re-printings. In 1981, it was published in French and awarded the Clarence

L. Holt Prize, which between I977-1986 was conferred bi-annually for scholarly

excellence in literature and the humanities relating to Africa and the African diaspora

(Rashidi, 2003). Various scholars have sought to corroborate a number of Van Sertimas

claims (Fell 1980; Jairazbhoy 1992; Gibb 2003). Various attempts have also been made

to discredit his work. His Early America Revisted, published in 1998, constitutes an

attempt to answer his critics, foremost among them Ortiz de Montellano, Warren

Barbour, and Gabriel Haslip-Viera, all of whom have questioned the prehistoric dates

suggested by Van Sertima for the initial contact between the people of the Americas and

Africa (Van Sertima 1998). They have also disputed the negroidness of the Egypto-

Nubian groups thought by Van Sertima to have established such contact, suggesting

instead that these groups might have been Phoenicians accompanied by their enslaved

Africans. Some have accused Van Sertima of rendering the Olmecs inferior to Africans at

the supposed time of contact, arguing, paradoxically, that had the Africans arrived in the

Americas during those prehistoric times, native Americans would have sacrificed and

eaten them (de Montellano et al 1997(a); Van Sertima 1998: 32). The supreme

contradiction is that the combined work of de Montellano, Barbour and Gabriel Haslip-

Viera, on which critics of Van Sertima rely, amounts to two short essays

misconceptualized and strewn with errors. By way of example, attributing to him claims
 9

he did not make, they sought to discredit his work as nothing more than imaginings

originating in Afro-centric thought, and, in attempting to disparage authorities on whom

he relied even misrepresented one of them as African-descended (de Montellano et al

1997a and 1997b).

Famed Welsh archeologist Glyn Daniel, too, Disney Professor of Archeology at

Cambridge from 1874-81, described Van Sertimas thesis as ignorant rubbish (New

York Times 1977; Van Sertima 1998: 178). He discounted it on the grounds that

although the prehistoric stone heads discovered in Mexico resembled blacks they were

not sculptured in representation of them as Van Sertima and others had suggested, and

further, that Van Sertima was not an archaeologist. Daniels criticism comes across,

however, as an admission of the Africoid nature of the archeological evidence, especially

given the high level of correspondence pointed out by Van Sertima and other scholars.

Further, Daniel himself was no authority on these artifacts. His attack on Van Sertima

was tantamount to shooting the messenger rather than the message. While Van Sertima

has been accused of using outdated theories and information, his predecessors, on whose

research he relied significantly, seemed not to have attracted the level of acerbic and

aggressive criticism to which he has been subjected. In 1987 he was summoned before

the American Congressional Committee to answer questions regarding his ideas on the

subject (Van Sertima 1992: 29-55). By then he had become the central figure in the

debate regarding Pre-Columbian explorers in the Americas.

 10

A Caribbean estranged from debate on its potential heritage

Race-related issues seem to play a significant role in the evolution of the debate.

Van Sertima and others have long argued that had a thesis based on similar data been put

forward in support of European or Asiatic precursors to Columbus in the Americas, it

would have been readily accepted (Van Sertima, 1998; Cleggs II, 1975). They argued

further that longstanding notions about the inferiority of African-descended people play a

major part in the unwillingness of academics to accept the hard evidence being unearthed.

Van Sertima and others attempted to address such matters through a range of

publications, including the Journal of African Civilization, which he edited and which

examines issues related to the emergence of African civilization and the African disapora.

Not surprisingly, critics of Van Sertima and others have been raising alarms about

Afrocentricity and the falsification of history. The relevance of the controversy has been

explored further in a 1995 publication, Race, Discource and Origin of the Americas: A

New World View of 1942, co-edited by Rex Nettleford, a former Vice-Chancellor of the

University of the West Indies (The UWI), and Vera L Hyatt, a Director of African and

Caribbean Programs in the Office of International Relation at the Smithsonian Institute.

Nettlefords involvement in the publication of this volume constitutes a much needed

endorsement of the importance of the discourse. Thus far, however, it appears to

represent the highpoint of The UWIs contribution to the debate. But this in itself is

disconcerting. Essentially, our regional scholars have remained disinterested. In fairness

to them, it might be said that the discoveries on which Williams commented in 1975 had

not been made in Caribbean but in Central America and South America. However, given
 11

all that has since been brought to the attention of the global community, the Caribbean

now appears to be central to a debate to which its academicians appear to be strangers.

In what way is this manifested? Caribbean scholars have mainly approach the

issue with distance, and unbridled caution if not trepidation. Claims to the effect that

Africans may have accidentally cross the Atlantic during pre-Colombian times have

become something of a regional fetish and byword, clichd even. And there are reasons

why such an approach is adopted. The emancipation of historiographical thought on

western hemispheric and related issues, particularly those related to the Caribbean, has

been primarily a recent and single-century issue; in the main, a post-colonial

development still in its infancy. Confronting Euro-centric conclusivity long backed by

almost global academic consensus is not the most welcomed challenge, however critical

or urgent necessities might be (Shepherd 2008:3-20; Fra). Moreover, the challenge of

researching the present issue itself can be daunting. It requires re-examination of global

history, new impetus and initiatives in historical methodology, archeology, linguistics,

cartography, the study of oceanography, and a host of other disciplines.

There are several issues that are worth considering. The debate on the possibility

of a pre-Columbian Africa presence in the Caribbean is a wider discussion than an

African-centric discourse per se. The list of suggested pre-Columbian trans-Atlantic

crossings is a long one which explores global history. Those most familiar to

historiographic authorities on the region might include the following:

a. St. Brendan and the Irish AD 400 to 600;

 12

b. The sailors (Eric the Red and the Icelanders or Norsemen) of the north who

founded Iceland in 867 and colonized Greenland in 985 (Bourne 1904);

c. The Vivaldi brother of Genoa who attempted to reach India by sailing round

Africa (Bourne 1904);

d. The British claim to discovery of the island of Brasil between 1840 and 1841

(Wiliamson 1962);

e. The notion of antecedent visits by Phoenicians/ Israelites;

f. The possible visit of the Japanese.

All of the above and more bear a commonality: They are no less speculative than

the question of Africans in the New World before Columbus: All suffer from lack of

historical records and documents that could date with absolute precision the development

of New World Indian culture in relation to the arrival of pre-Columbian foreigners. There

exists, however, a considerable range of parallels to suggest the influence of Egypt on

New World civilization. Most notable among them are the Egyptian-middle American

connections related to murals, sculptures, hieroglyphics, the use of linen, the use of jade,

pearls and gold, and mummification and its role in forestalling decomposition of corpse,

the Children of the Sun. The protagonists behind such correspondences range from the

stubborn French antiquarian and adventurer Augustus le Plongeon, to the Australian brain

anatomist Sir Grafton Elliot Smith, the brilliant Mexican cleric, Columbian historian

Abb Charles Stephen Brasseur de Bourbourg, and Indianborn R. A. Jairazbhoy. The

first two authors did not see Africans within an early Egypt-American context. But

Jairazbhoy saw the ancient Egyptians sojourners in early America as African-descended,

and de Bourbourg was among a number of priests who detailed accounts of groups of
 13

West Africans encountered by early Europeans in the New World, but whose presence

could not be accounted for by Western-led trans-Atlantic African migration. Some

authorities point to numerous territories named after the Mandinkas of Mali and Guinea,

via a tradition that seemingly predates European arrival. Meanwhile, proof of the

possibility of West African expeditions across the formidable Atlantic remains critical to

any discussion on the arrival of pre-Columbian groups to Americas. Fortunately for

history, however, this remains one of the rather testable domains of the discourse, and the

results consistently affirm that neither the ancient Egypto-Nubians nor West Africans can

be ruled out.

Where has scholarship in the Caribbean gone in respect of all this? And have has

it proceeded with the depth and profundity adequate to resolution of the issues.

Caribbean secondary school history texts occasionally draw attention to Abubakari II and

his alleged voyage to the New World. The Caribbean Examination Council has been

mounting questions for students on the arrival on various groups before Columbus, even

if these regularly focus on the Vikings. Such engagements merely raise the question of

how do Caribbean teachers and scholars meet the challenge of teaching any such topic

when in the region there continues to be virtually little or no research at, filtering from, or

connected to, our tertiary level educational institutions and their discussions and

academia.

Caribbean scholarship and responsibility: exploring the regional heritage

The question of the African presence in the New World raises a more

fundamental issue. If the data foregrounded by Van Sertima and others is correct it would
 14

mean that the migration of Africans to the Americas was not solely a matter of the galut

(or forced) migration but also one of tephutzot (voluntary) migration (Harris 1983: 46).

But to ascertain with merit the level of their self-induced involvement in the trans-

Atlantic enterprise with which we are concerned requires renewed probing into African

history, in particular that of ancient Egypt and Nubia, and Guinea belt. And Guinea, for

example, proposes a critical link between Columbus, Spain and Portugal and the Papal

Bulls that conferred on Portugal, with the latters basically unreserved assent, New World

lands it had never seen. This development itself re-signifies Portuguese-infiltrated

Guinea, bypassing also the muted historiography and obscurity characteristic of Western-

inspired history on Columbus sojourn there as a slave trader. A major challenge

therefore lies in rethinking Africa, about which, seemingly (it may not necessarily be so),

the Caribbean might be professing to know, while being limited in this regard by a distal,

almost Afro-phobic academe with the capacity to prevent our region from acquiring

greater knowledge about itself.

Meanwhile, several themes raised by Van Sertima and others should concern

Caribbean scholars. A current orthodoxy is that Old World contact with the Americas

began with Europeans making landfall in the Caribbean itself. However, from inception,

the Amerindians Columbus encountered spoke of African-descended people already

operating within their space (Thacher 1903; Van Sertima 1998:3). It is therefore

necessary to make distinctions between pre-Columbian Africans as a group and Africans

brought into the region as part of the trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans from circa

1501 (Lydersen 2009). Further, is it now more widely appreciated that pre-Columbian

Amerindians across the region were in closer contact with each other than formerly
 15

assumed. This prompts the necessity to examine how the culture of Pre-Columbian

Africans in the Americas might have been disseminated and adjusted, not merely in

Mexico, but also across the Caribbean. In this connection, the islands of Hispaniola

(constituting todays Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and Cuba assume special

significance. Lying astride Meso-America where most of the archaeological evidence for

a Pre-Columbian African presence might be located, these islands loom large in

Columbus records as territories in which native Amerindians drew his attention to the

presence of African-descended people amongst them (Thacher 1903; Van Sertima

1998:3). These islands help to form the north western extremities of the Caribbean

archipelago. They are likely to be rivaled in significance by the Virgin Islands which

form part of the northeastern limit of the region. The discovery of Pre-Columbian African

fossils in the United States Virgin Islands in the mid-seventies certainly necessitates

further enquiry into the historical circumstances which may have conspired to locate

them there at that time. What is more, these fossils might very well constitute the missing

link in a trail of evidence for a pre-Columbian African presence in Central America and

the northern Caribbean. But just how widespread might be the archeological heritage to

be explored at the regional level? In his papers of October 1492, Columbus recorded that

he saw a mosque atop one of the mountains of Cuba. On his third voyage to the

Americas, he and his crew made landfall in Trinidad, an island just seven miles off the

north eastern coast of South America. Later, when some members of his crew explored

the nearby mainland, they observed that the Amerindians there used handkerchiefs which

resembled the almayzars or veils used by Muslims from West Africa to Portugal

(Thacher 1903; Van Sertima 1976:16). Is there a treasure trove of archaeological data
 16

across the region waiting to be explored? And should not such exploration be undertaken

with urgency given that, with the passing of time, the risk increases that data which could

shed light on the regions Pre-Columbian past might be permanently destroyed?

These are not issues to which some institutions of higher education in our

hemisphere have been entirely oblivious. The Smithsonian Institute, for example, has

long been playing a pioneering role in researching and preserving archaeological data on

the issue. The UWI has paid scant courtesy to the challenge. Caribbean archaeology,

until recently, one of the neglected academic disciplines at The UWI, continues to exhibit

the accustomed taciturnity of the institution in the debate.

Conclusion

This current reality does not alter the fact that the issue under consideration has

tremendous implications for people of the Caribbean and how they might view the

evolution of their civilization. Should the evidence presented by Van Sertima (and other

similarly persuaded) stand up to the scrutiny to which it should be subjected, there will be

the need for significant revision of the epistemological and pedagogical foundations on

which Caribbean historiography has been based. Caribbean-centred academics therefore

have a responsibility to engage in meaningful investigation and value-decoded discourse

on the subject. It is not a matter of whether or not the claims of Van Sertima et al are

valid. More important is the basis upon which any such evaluation is being made. It is

therefore disturbing that West Indian scholars have not seriously invested in this

discourse. For more than three decades the Caribbean was represented by a single voice,

that of Van Sertima. It is left to be seen whether his passing in May 2009 will continue to

be honored by deafening silence from regional scholars, as though to categorize his

 17

work on the subject as baseless entreaty the region should do well to forget. A redemptive

starting point lies in determining whether the historical and literary evidence he has

advanced exist or are fictive creations of his imagination. To his credit, he has proven to

be overly meticulous in his reference to sources, although scholars certainly possess the

right to vary in interpreting them. Continuing debate and dialogue on the issue before us

should therefore be welcomed, and Caribbean academics ought to play their part

(Shepherd 2008). Only a commitment to thorough investigation of the related issues will

lift the region above its currently unavailing code of silence.

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