PART TWO: AFRICA'S GIFTS TO CIVILIZATION
Africans in the Western Hemisphere before Columbus
By Pat
Chin
Part 1 refuted the racist
Eurocentric view of African history. It looked at
ancient Africa's central role in the rise of
civilization--from the world's first use of fire to the
development of agri culture, metallurgy and the
complex sciences underpinning the building of vast
empires in Egypt, Ghana, Mali and Songhai. Part 1 also
analyzed Africa's decline in relationship to the voyages of
Christopher Columbus and the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave
trade and racism.
Many cultural parallels have emerged that point to the
presence of Africans in the Western Hemisphere well before
Christopher Columbus accidentally encountered the Americas in
1492.
There is ample evidence from anthropology, linguistics and
other scientific disciplines to support the view that the
ancient Africans used their knowledge of sea currents and other
navigation and boat-building skills to cross the Atlantic
Ocean.
These mariners came looking for trade. They brought with
them, among other things, plants, animals, cloth, their
knowledge of science, technology and the arts. Others may have
washed ashore accidentally after being caught in powerful
Atlantic currents.
Modern experiments have shown that ancient African boats,
including the "dug-out," could have been made seaworthy enough
to cross the vast waters. Boat builders in Central Africa's
Lake Chad constructed a papyrus craft that was sailed from
North Africa to Barbados in the eastern Caribbean in 1969.
Other similar journeys have shown that small boats can indeed
survive the crossing.
The pre-Columbian presence of Africans in the Western
Hemisphere has been deliberately suppressed to reinforce the
racist fiction of African inferiority. The Europeans invented
this myth to justify the growing slave trade.
But signs can be found in the oral traditions of Guinea and
other African countries, as well as in the Native American
nations--north and south. Documentary traces have also survived
in Portuguese and Spanish writings, including the journals of
Columbus.
In addition, "An overwhelming body of new evidence is now
emerging from several disciplines, evidence that could not be
verified and interpreted before, in light of the infancy of
archeology and the great age of racial and intellectual
prejudice," wrote anthropologist and linguist Ivan Van
Sertima.
In 1492 the Native people of Hispanola--now Haiti and the
Dominican Republic--gave Columbus proof that they had been
trading with Africans--proof in the form of spears they called
"gua-nin." The tips were made of gold, silver and copper, as
Columbus later discovered, no doubt to his greedy delight.
According to linguists, "gua-nin" is rooted in the Mande
languages of West Africa. Moreover, metallurgy was first
developed on that vast and ancient continent.
Columbus later used this information, along with knowledge
gained from Portuguese navigators, to sail the "Guinea Route"
in 1498 on his third voyage to the Americas. He landed first on
the Caribbean island of Trinidad, spotted the South American
mainland and called the region the "New World."
Days later, his men brought from a Venezuelan coastal
settlement cotton handkerchiefs woven in the colors and styles
of Guinea that were used in both cultures as headdresses and
loincloths.
This was one of the first documented traces of an African
presence in America. "Within the first and second decades of
the so-called 'discovery,' " noted Van Sertima, "African
settlements and artifacts were to be sighted by the
Spanish."
The historical record suggests that the European invaders
first spotted a Black settlement on an island off Cartagena,
Colombia. Africans also traded with Brazil and settled in
Panama and elsewhere on the mainland.
Peruvian tradition, for example, records a tale of Black men
from the east who penetrated the Andes mountains before
Columbus' arrival. More recently, Africoid skeletal remains
were found in pre-Columbian strata in the Pecos River Valley,
which straddles Texas and New Mexico
Interestingly enough, many of the early Black settlements
were found along the coast where the divisions of the powerful
trans-Atlantic Equatorial Current terminates.
The early African presence went beyond the mainland. Not
only did the indigenous people of Hispanola give Columbus proof
of their trade with African mariners--in 1975 archeologists
unearthed two Africoid skeletons in the Virgin Islands which
were carbon dated to A.D.1250.
"Black populations have been found in the midst of very
different nations," anthropologist Alphonse de Quatrefages
wrote of the region.
"Such are the Charruas of Brazil, the Black Caribees of
Saint Vincent in the Gulf of Mexico, the Jamassi of Florida.
... Such again is the tribe of which Balboa saw some
representatives in his passage of the Isthmus of Darien in
1513."
Some of the most striking evidence that Africans reached the
Western Hemisphere before Columbus are the realistic
portraitures of Black Africans in clay, gold and stone that
have been found in pre-Columbian strata in Central and South
America.
But Mexico bears perhaps the greatest and earliest imprints.
Skulls found there, along with numerous artifacts and the
pyramids, reinforce the view that Africans crossed the Atlantic
before Columbus.
Most impressive are the huge stone heads with African
features found in three different areas of the ancient Olmec
heartland--now Mexico--which flourished between 1500 B.C. and
600 B.C.
Each sculpture--11 in all--stands six to nine feet, weighs
up to 40 tons and has been carbon dated to at least 700 B.C.
They were built at least 2,000 years before Columbus' voyages
set in motion the European slave trade and "the colonization
not only of history," according to Dr. John Henrik Clarke, "but
also the information about history."
If history were written truthfully you would learn, for
example, that Africa seems to have had a strong and enduring
influence on Olmec culture. And that it peaked during the same
period that Black Egyptian culture ascended in Africa. The
first African clay masks, pyramids, mummies, trepannated
skulls, stelae and hieroglyphs found in America were also from
this era.
Documents in Cairo, Egypt, as well as Mandingo oral
tradition reflect the sea voyages of the great Mali Empire from
a later period. A year after sending an expeditionary fleet
across the Atlantic, in 1311 King Abubakari II sailed west with
a huge flotilla.
"Neither of the two Mandingo fleets came back to Mali to
tell their story," explained Van Sertima, "but around this same
time evidence of contact between West Africans and Mexicans
appears in strata in America in an overwhelming combination of
artifacts and cultural parallels."
They suggest that the Aztecs might have witnessed
Abubakari's landing and thought him to be the reincarnation of
one of their gods. "A black-haired, black-bearded figure in
white robes," noted Van Sertima, "one of the representations of
Quetzalcoatl, modeled on a dark-skinned outsider, appears in
paintings in the valley of Mexico, while the Aztecs begin to
worship a Negroid figure mistaken for their god Tezcatlipoca
because he had the right ceremonial color."
The pre-Columbian presence of Africans in the Americas is
also reflected in linguistic similarities and other cultural
parallels including rainmaking rituals, but these are just a
few examples of many.
Part 3 will look at the presence of Africans in early
Asia and Europe.
It will also analyze the links between capitalism, slavery,
colonialism and racism.
Sources: Clarke, John Henrik, Christopher Columbus and
the Afrikan Holocaust: Slavery and the Rise of European
Capitalism, 1993; Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt, The World and
Africa: An inquiry into the part which Africa has played in
world history, 1965; Josephy, Jr., Alvin M., 500 Nations, 1994;
de Quatrefages, Alphonse, The Human Species, 1905; Van Sertima,
Ivan, ed., Blacks in Science: ancient and modern, 1983; Van
Sertima, They Came Before Columbus, 1976.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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