The controversial hypothesis that Africans arrived in America before Christopher Columbus further complicates the historical relations between Africans and the Ameri-indigenous.
In 2021, President Joe Biden became the first US president to officially commemorate ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Day’, initially and perhaps more colloquially known as ‘Columbus Day’, a federal holiday in the US.
Yet, challenges to the often-heroic narrative of Christopher Columbus’ so-called ‘exploration’ have not just come through the Ameri-indigenous or even Hispanic community.
Several African scholars particularly in the Atlantic have coalesced around the hypothesis that Africans were the first to discover the Americas, beginning with ancient Nubia. However, an even more circulated theory is that Africans arrived in the Americas in the mediaeval period, at the height of the Mali empire.
In African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, historian, Michael A. Gomez, relays the account of the fourteenth-century Malian king, Mansa Musa, where he came to power after his predecessor, Mansa Muḥammad b. Qū, failed to return from an oceanic voyage off the west coast of Africa.
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Muḥammad b. Qū’s voyage took place after an initial dispatch was more or less unsuccessful, with only one ship returning to report that the rest of the fleet had disappeared after encountering ‘a river with a powerful current.’
The account was recorded by mediaeval Arab historian and geographer, Shihāb ad-Dīn Aḥmad ibn Faḍl Allāh al-ʿUmarī, although Mansa Musa would describe the voyage to the governor of Old Cairo, Abū ‘l-Ḥasan ‘Alī b. Amīr Ḥājib, while on his famous hajj.
The implications of such an account, Gomez argues, at the very least points to the expansive mindset of Mansa Musa, who perhaps desired, ‘to transfigure his relationship to the wider world.’
Gomez argues that the ‘very ‘‘imagining’’ of the voyage is far more critical to the question of the Mansa’s state of mind than its verifiability,’ indicating Gomez’s ambivalence about the probability of the journey.
He writes: ‘The absence of supporting evidence certainly gives pause, but on its own fails to generate scepticism sufficient to completely dismiss the possibility, as corroboration for one element of the story derives from oceanographic studies.’
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Gomez suggests that the powerful current encountered might have been the Canary Current: A year-round movement of water flowing south along the West African coast from what is now southern Morocco to Guinea; then westward in the form of the Equatorial Currents to the Gulf of Mexico, where they become the Gulf Stream; then back across the Atlantic toward Europe and North and West Africa, its southern branch developing into the Canary Current, renewing the cycle.
However, the fact that the fleet(s) might have encountered the current does not necessarily mean that they were successful in actually reaching the land masses of the Americas.
Ivan Van Sertima's Contribution
Perhaps the most famous examination of the voyage is Ivan Van Sertima’s They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America (1976).
A landmark . . . brilliantly [demonstrates] has that there is far more to black history than the slave trade.”-John A. Williams They Came Before Columbus reveals a compelling, dramatic, and superbly detailed documentation of the presence and legacy of Africans in ancient America.
Examining navigation and shipbuilding; cultural analogies between Native Americans and Africans; the transportation of plants, animals, and textiles between the continents; and the diaries, journals, and oral accounts of the explorers themselves, Ivan Van Sertima builds a pyramid of evidence to support his claim of an African presence in the New World centuries before Columbus.
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Combining impressive scholarship with a novelist’s gift for storytelling, Van Sertima re-creates some of the most powerful scenes of human history: the launching of the great ships of Mali in 1310 (two hundred master boats and two hundred supply boats), the sea expedition of the Mandingo king in 1311, and many others.
One of the colossal Olmec heads, which have sparked debate about African influence in the Americas.
Historian, John Henrik Clarke, was among the first to positively review the book in the journal, Presence Africaine.
He writes that the text is, ‘a pioneering work that will help to bring about reassessment of the place of African people in world history,’ and that it, ‘calls attention to Africa’s ages of grandeur and the great adventurous spirit of the Africans that brought them to the worlds beyond their shores.’
At the same time, Clarke concedes that the first ‘formal investigation into this subject was started in 1920 with the publication of [Harvard University] Professor Leo Weiner’s massive three-volume work, Africa and the Discovery of Americas.’
Arising from this work is one key development in Van Sertima’s text, in which he asserts the presence of Africans in the Americas centuries before Muhammad b. Qu’s voyage-all the way to an expedition by ancient Nubia who encountered the Ameri-indigenous Olmec peoples.
The Olmec head sculptures have been the centre of much controversy for their supposedly phenotypically African features-full lips and a broad nose.
This is extended by Weiner’s argument that, ‘Nahuatl and Maya were connected to the mediaeval Mande languages of West Africa.’
Nevertheless, Clarke gave Sertima’s text a glowing review, inserting They Came Before Columbus into the annals of momentous works by Black authors, not the least because it rallied against those, ‘who could not free themselves from the influence of the massive anti-African propaganda in Western historiography and thus believe,’ that Africans indeed came before Columbus.
Indeed, as Clarke discusses, while Van Sertima’s work is seminal to modern Black thought, his work builds upon early critical works by other Black authors.
One of the most critical was Kofi Wangara (formerly Harold G. Lawrence)’s article, ‘African Explorers of the New World,’ published 1962 in the famous National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People periodical, The Crisis.
In the article, Wangara pre-emptively addresses Gomez’s later questions regarding the naval maritime capabilities of West Africans when he writes that from contact and:
…diplomatic relations with Morocco…advanced maritime techniques and the concept of the earth rotundity filtered into the fast growing empire.
This was made possible through the geographies and astronomical theories of such Arab writers as Abu Zaid, Masudi, Idrisi, Istakhri, Abulfeda, and those from the court of Harun-al-Rashid.
He then goes on to paraphrase Mansa Musa’s mediaeval account of the two separate voyages overseen by his predecessor.
Yet, Wangara does not stop there, but insists that such voyages resumed upon the rise of the Songhai Empire under Askia Muhammad I, evidenced by the fact that almost two centuries after Mansa Musa’s account and at the ascent of the Askia’s reign, Columbus was informed by some men, when he stopped at one of the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Africa, that Negroes had been known to set out into the Atlantic from the Guinea coast in canoes loaded with merchandize and steering towards the west.
Wangara then engages the material culture of the Americas, relaying the observations of early European colonialists who apparently witnessed ‘Negro [colonies]’ in Central America, South America and the southern United States, as well as striking similarities between what they were seeing in the Americas and what they saw in West Africa, before the first importation of African slaves to the Antilles.
This engagement with the reports on the material culture of early European colonialists would be foundational and instrumental to Van Sertima’s work and would even extend past his work.
In 1989, Cheikh Anta Diop engaged the topic in his text, The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: The Domains of Patriarchy and of Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity, when he wrote:
The fact that the expression used to name to pirogue or dugout canoe, that is to say, the sole element which could serve to link Africa and America is the same in several African languages (lothio in Wolof) and in certain Indian languages of pre-Columbian America seems to prove that there were maritime links across the Atlantic between the two continents.
Indeed, Anta Diop would cite Van Sertima’s They Came Before Columbus in this book, and even include from the text on the back cover, and just beneath a quote from Henrik Clarke.
Such endorsements from critical scholars like Henrik Clarke and Anta Diop would further solidify Van Sertima’s work as instrumental to Black thought.
Criticisms of Van Sertima's Hypothesis
However, Van Sertima’s work at large also received criticism.
Of the most critical refuters were Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, Gabriel Haslip-Viera, and Warren Barbour who co-wrote an article in 1997 entitled, ‘They Were NOT Here before Columbus: Afrocentric Hyperdiffusionism in the 1990s’.
While all were scholars of Meso-American history, Barbour was perhaps the only identifying ‘African American’ while the others were presumably Hispanic.
Nevertheless, they present a unified front in wholly rejecting the hypothesis Van Sertima had built over the last two decades.
They argue that the ‘speculation’ that Africans came before Columbus ‘probably began in 1862 with the discovery of a carved colossal stone head that appeared to have the idealized classic features associated with African Negroes,’ i.e., the Olmec heads.
Much like Henrik Clarke, the authors briefly outline the trajectory of scholarly literature that argues in favour of pre-Columbian African presence, before specifically and extensively addressing Van Sertima’s book.
The authors list at least five distinct challenges to Van Sertima, including faulty ‘chronologies,’ ‘cultural sequences,’ and ‘linguistic arguments’ as well as ‘outdated or questionable sources.’
The authors also challenge the material culture used as evidence by Van Sertima, namely ‘purple murex dye’ and ‘colossal stone heads and terracotta figurines.’
On the former, they provided a rebuttal to Van Sertima’s argument in his 1995 essay that Egyptian and Olmec elites shared, ‘the ritual use of purple as an exclusively royal and priestly colour,’ by asserting that there is scant evidence of widespread use of the dye in ancient Egypt, although neighbouring Crete had a, ‘considerable trade in purple dye from Ugarit in Syria during the fourteenth century B.C..’
At the same time, they argue, there is also scant evidence of widespread use in Olmec society, and when there was evidence of use, the dye came from Ameri-indigenous molluscs and insects, which are ‘distinct’ from the ‘Old World’.
Van Sertima’s evidence for the use of purple murex dye by the Olmec was a ‘patch of purple’ appearing on one of the ‘monumental stone heads’ at San Lorenzo.
Attention to these sculptures, the authors argue, is the ‘most belaboured aspect of the Afrocentric hypothesis,’ on which Ortiz de Montellano, Haslip-Viera, and Barbour expand in their 1997 Forum on Anthropology in Public entitled ‘Robbing Native American Cultures’.
They gather and offer alternative hypotheses to the appearance of the ‘negroid’ sculptures, including documented ‘idealisation of obesity,’ ‘connection to the cult of the were-jaguar,’ and ‘idealisation, stylisation, and symbolism that brings into question the interpretation of the colossal stone heads as “realistic” portraits in the strict sense of the word.’
They suggest that although:
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