The Scholar
Ivan Gladstone Van Sertima was born on January 26, 1935, in Karina Village, Guyana, then a British colony. He would carry the hyphen of that colonial birth – Guyanese-born, British-educated, American-based – throughout a career that never fit neatly into any single national or disciplinary frame.
Van Sertima attended the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London beginning in 1959, graduating with honors in African languages and literature. SOAS, founded in 1916 as the School of Oriental Studies and expanded during the interwar period to include Africa, was one of the few institutions in Britain where African languages were treated as objects of serious study rather than colonial administration. Van Sertima learned Swahili. He compiled a dictionary of legal terms in the language. This linguistic training – formal, rigorous, grounded in comparative method – would later become the spine of his scholarly argument in ways his critics often failed to acknowledge.
Before his academic career, Van Sertima lived the life of a working artist and intellectual. He broadcast literary programs for the BBC. He wrote poetry. He worked on a novel called Blackhouse, which was filmed under the title The Black Prince. He published essays on Caribbean literature. This literary background mattered: Van Sertima approached evidence narratively, synthetically, with an eye for pattern and analogy. He was not a narrow specialist. He was a polymath who moved between linguistics, anthropology, history, and literary criticism – sometimes fluidly, sometimes with the seams showing.
In 1970, Van Sertima immigrated to the United States and enrolled at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, for graduate work in African Studies and Anthropology. He published They Came Before Columbus in 1976, as a Rutgers graduate student. He began teaching Africana Studies at Rutgers in 1972 and continued for over thirty years, retiring as professor in 2005. He died peacefully at his home in Highland Park, New Jersey, on May 25, 2009.
The Rutgers Africana Studies memorial described his mission in his own words: “to tell the true story of the African, to recover the essence of his early civilizations so that the tragedy of slavery, colonization, of myths about his fundamental inferiority may be destroyed forever.” That sentence does the work of a manifesto. Van Sertima understood his scholarship as a corrective project – not antiquarianism, not neutral inquiry, but the deliberate dismantling of a narrative structure that had been built to justify African subjugation by erasing African achievement.
The Work
Van Sertima’s bibliography divides into two streams: his own monographic scholarship and the edited volumes he produced through the Journal of African Civilizations, which he founded in 1979 and edited for decades.
Monographs:
- They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America (1976) – the work that defined his career. Published by Random House rather than an academic press, it became a bestseller and achieved enormous circulation within African-American and African diaspora communities. The book built what Van Sertima called a “pyramid of evidence” for pre-Columbian African contact with the Americas, drawing on the Olmec colossal heads, botany (Old World crop transfers including cotton varieties), maritime technology and navigation, linguistic parallels, and the medieval Mandingo oral tradition of Abubakari II’s westward voyage. The book argued that Africans – specifically Egyptians of the 25th Dynasty and later Mandingo navigators – reached the Americas and influenced Mesoamerican civilization, most visibly in the Olmec culture.
- Early America Revisited (1998) – Van Sertima’s direct response to two decades of criticism. Restated the physical, stylistic, and technical correspondences between Olmec sculpture and West African artistic traditions. Argued that mainstream archaeology had dismissed the evidence not on evidentiary grounds but because of Eurocentric bias. Defended his methodology and added new data.
Edited volumes through the Journal of African Civilizations:
- Blacks in Science: Ancient and Modern (1983)
- Black Women in Antiquity (1984)
- The African Presence in Early Asia (1985)
- Great Black Leaders, Ancient and Modern (1988)
- The Golden Age of the Moor (1991)
- Egypt: The Child of Africa (1994)
- African Presence in Early America (edited volume extending the argument of They Came Before Columbus)
The Journal of African Civilizations was itself a significant intellectual achievement. Van Sertima created an institution – a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the study of African civilizational achievement across disciplines and continents. It provided a publishing venue for scholars working on African antiquity who were excluded from mainstream journals. The edited volumes, assembled from contributions to the journal, functioned as anthologies that mapped entire fields: African science, African women in antiquity, the African presence in Asia, the Moorish period in Iberia. Each volume was an argument that African civilization was broader, older, and more influential than the standard narrative permitted.
The Golden Age of the Moor deserves special note. Published as Volume 11 of the Journal of African Civilizations in 1991, it collected scholarship on the Moorish period in Iberia – the period that the Archive’s “The Window” engages directly. Van Sertima’s editorial work on this volume preceded the Archive’s treatment of the Moors by decades. He was gathering the scholars and the evidence while the mainstream was still treating the Moors as a footnote to European history.
The Reception
Van Sertima’s reception is the most polarized of any scholar in this section – and the polarization reveals something precise about how the Western academy processes diffusionist claims when they originate from African scholars.
The core criticism came from Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, and Warren Barbour, who published a systematic takedown in 1997 titled “Robbing Native American Cultures: Van Sertima’s Afrocentricity and the Olmecs.” Their argument had three components: that the Olmec colossal heads do not display African physiognomy but rather indigenous Mesoamerican features; that genetic and linguistic studies show no African-Olmec connection; and that Van Sertima’s diffusionist model denies indigenous agency – that attributing Olmec achievement to African influence “robs” Native American cultures of their own heritage.
The critique had force. Van Sertima’s botanical evidence – the transfer of cotton varieties and other crops between continents – was contested on the grounds that independent domestication could explain the same patterns. His maritime technology arguments were challenged on the grounds that there is no archaeological evidence of African ships or artifacts in pre-Columbian Mesoamerican sites. The linguistic parallels were dismissed as coincidental. The Abubakari legend – the claim that a Malian ruler sailed west with a fleet in the 14th century – was treated as oral tradition unsupported by material evidence.
But the critique also operated on assumptions worth examining. The demand for archaeological evidence of African ships in Mesoamerican sites presupposes that trans-oceanic contact would leave the kind of material trace that survives millennia in tropical environments – a standard rarely applied to other contact theories, such as Norse presence in Newfoundland, where the archaeological evidence is also thin and contested. The genetic argument assumes that a small contact population would leave detectable genetic signatures, which is not necessarily the case for a brief, non-colonizing presence. And the accusation of “robbing Native American cultures” frames Van Sertima’s project as a zero-sum competition for cultural credit, when his explicit position was that “all great civilizations and races are heavily indebted to one another and that no race has a monopoly on enterprise and inventive genius.”
Van Sertima’s support came from outside the mainstream Mesoamerican establishment. Clarence Weiant, a distinguished archaeologist who had worked at the Olmec site of Tres Zapotes, endorsed Van Sertima’s research as “a summary of six or seven years of meticulous research based upon archaeology, Egyptology, African history.” Runoko Rashidi, the late historian and Pan-Africanist scholar, called Van Sertima “one of our greatest living scholars.” Cornel West praised the broader project of countering Hegel’s “irrational and erroneous caricature of Africa.” The book sold enormously – far beyond what an academic press publication would have reached – and became a foundational text in African-American education, community study circles, and the emerging field of Africana Studies.
The asymmetry of the reception is the thing to notice. Van Sertima published with Random House, not a university press. He was a graduate student when the book appeared. He built a multidisciplinary argument – linguistics, botany, maritime technology, art history, oral tradition – but the specialists in each individual field judged only the portion touching their expertise and found it wanting by their disciplinary standards, without evaluating whether the cumulative weight of the cross-disciplinary evidence constituted a coherent argument. The book was dismissed as “Afrocentric” – a term that functions in mainstream academic discourse as a near-synonym for “not to be taken seriously” – while diffusionist theories originating from European scholars, such as Barry Fell’s claims about Celtic inscriptions in America, received comparatively more respectful engagement despite equally thin evidence.
This doesn’t mean Van Sertima was right about everything. His chronology was sometimes imprecise. His reading of the Olmec heads as African relied on visual analogy more than on the kind of measurement protocols that physical anthropologists use. His botanical evidence was suggestive but not conclusive. But the mainstream response didn’t engage with the strongest version of his argument. It engaged with the weakest version and declared the project finished.
The Bridge to the Archive
Van Sertima’s relationship to The Wisdom Born Archive is direct and structural. His work informs two of the Archive’s collections and one of its most original essays.
The Not Cargo collection – which documents African presence, settlement, and sovereignty in the early Americas – operates within the evidentiary space Van Sertima opened. The Hemispheric Field, the collection’s essay documenting named African individuals in the Americas from 1492 to 1619, extends the timeline Van Sertima proposed: if Africans were present before Columbus, they were certainly present after him, and the colonial record confirms it. Van Sertima provided the theoretical frame. The Archive fills it with documentary evidence from the colonial period itself.
The Pyramid: Stones That Carry Thought Across Time engages the Olmec question directly – and honestly. The essay doesn’t claim that Africans built the Olmec heads. It asks why the pyramid form and the monumental sculptural tradition appear at the points they do, and whether the pattern is better explained by independent invention or by the movement of thought – cosmological, architectural, philosophical – across distance. Van Sertima’s “pyramid of evidence” methodology is the direct ancestor of the Archive’s approach: build multiple chains of evidence, let them intersect, and let the intersection speak.
But the Archive also learns from Van Sertima’s vulnerabilities. The Olmec heads are the weakest link in his argument – visual analogy is not measurement, and the mainstream critique on this point has real force. The Archive’s pyramid essay doesn’t rest its case on the heads. It uses them as one data point among many – Djoser’s Step Pyramid, Meroë, La Venta, Caral, Southeast Asia – and lets the pattern of “intent and purpose” do the heavy lifting. This is Van Sertima’s method refined: same multidisciplinary architecture, more disciplined evidentiary scope.
Van Sertima also contributes something less visible but equally important: the editorial model. The Journal of African Civilizations was an institution-building act. Van Sertima didn’t just publish his own work. He created a venue, gathered contributors, edited volumes, built a field. The Archive mirrors this structural ambition. It is not a single voice. It is a platform that houses multiple collections, multiple arguments, multiple scholars – held together by a shared mission and a shared method. Van Sertima showed what that looks like.
The Legacy
Van Sertima taught at Rutgers for over thirty years. The Journal of African Civilizations continues. They Came Before Columbus remains in print, continuously, since 1976 – nearly fifty years. It is one of the most widely read works of African historical scholarship ever published. It sits on bookshelves in homes that have no other academic titles, because Van Sertima wrote it for those homes.
His defenders and his critics agree on one thing: he changed the conversation. Before They Came Before Columbus, the question of African presence in the pre-Columbian Americas was not asked in any sustained way. After it, the question could not be un-asked – even by those who answered it negatively. Van Sertima’s deepest legacy may be the simple, stubborn act of asking. He looked at the Olmec heads and saw a face the academy refused to see. Whether he was right about that face remains contested. But he forced the confrontation, and the confrontation has not ended.
The Archive stands in that unfinished space. It asks the same kind of question – what if the pattern means what it appears to mean? – and it lets the reader decide. Van Sertima taught that the asking is itself a form of scholarship. The Archive agrees.