According to conventional history, Christopher Columbus “discovered”
America. The natives who had lived there for centuries did not matter.
Even then, centuries before Columbus ever stepped in any ship, Africans
had been to the Americas on expeditions, had lived among and traded with
the natives, and had in fact influenced the native American civilisations
in a big way. This is another history lesson to make you want to sit down
and read this slowly. Saafu Khpera reports.
The presence of Africans in North and South America (the so-called New
World) has until recently been ignored, if not kept secret, by historians
as part of the larger concealment of African history. The significant
difference, unlike Kemet (Ancient Egypt), is that the African presence
in America presents a rather more difficult challenge in as far as modern
history claims that a certain Christopher Columbus “discovered” America.
This would be right if “discovered” means “arriving centuries after
others had already been there”. First, the land now called the Americas
was not an uninhabited place. It had always been full of people, so Columbus
could not have “discovered” it.
Even then, Africans had travelled there for centuries before Columbus
ever set foot in any ship. When the Africans arrived, they infused their
culture into the existing cultural terrain of the native people and also
embraced their gods, a concept well established in Africa for thousands
of years. By so doing the Nubian-Kemets recognised the Amerindian gods,
which in effect acknowledges the Ameri-Indians as custodians and spiritual
title-holders to the land; the Africans did not discover America. The
land and its people were already there. The African presence there dates
as far back as pre-historic America [40,000 BC-6,000BC]. The Nubian-Kemmiu
[Egyptian] arrived in the Americas around 1200 BC, while the Mandinga
from West Africa arrived about 1307 AD. The Christopher Columbus era was
nowhere on the horizon at this time.
Studies by African-American scholars, such as Dr Ivan van Sertima (whose
book, They Came Before Columbus, was published to wide acclaim in 1977),
has unearthed startling evidence that point definitively to pre-Columbian
African presence in the Americas.
For Euro-American historians, the fact that Africans had been in the Americas
in ancient times, not as labourers but as a major influencing group, occupying
elite positions in society, and providing civilising elements carried
over from Africa, long before the 13th century (when the trans-Atlantic
Slave Trade began), is difficult to accept. Because it punches holes into
the widely accepted notion of “Negro inferiority” which was used to justify
the slavery of Africans from the 13th century onwards.
The Africa-Caribbean writer, Richard B. Moore, rightly points out in his
book, The Significance of African History, that: “The significance of
African history is shown...in the very effort to deny anything of the
name of history to Africa and the African peoples. For it is logical and
apparent that no such undertaking [falsifying African history] would ever
have been carried on, and at such length, in order to obscure and bury
what is actually of little or no significance.”
The Mandiga
Voyage, 1300 AD
Available archaeological evidence and definitive historical accounts point
to pre-Columbian West African expeditions across the Atlantic between
1307-1312 AD. The work of Al-Umars, a 14th century Islamic historian,
who recorded the visit of Mansa Kankan Musa I, one of the most remarkable
Mandinga emperors in Mali, when he stopped over in the Egyptian capital,
Cairo, enroute to Meeca in 1324 AD, testify to the Mandinga expeditions
across the Atlantic.
Umars’ account quotes Mansa Musa as saying that his predecessor had launched
two expeditions from West Africa to discover the limits of the Atlantic
Ocean.
Umari, writing a few decades after Mansa Musa’s visit to Mecca, states:
“I asked the Sultan Musa how it was that power came into his hands.
‘We are from a house that transmits power by heritage,’ he told me. ‘The
ruler who preceded me would not believe that it was impossible to discover
the limits of the neighbouring sea.
‘He wanted to find out and persisted in his plans. He had 200 ships equipped
and filled them with men, and the same number of ships filled with gold,
water and supplies in sufficient quantities to last for years.
‘He told those who commanded them: return only when you have reached the
extremity of the ocean or when you have exhausted your food and water.
They went away; their absence was long before any of them returned.
‘Finally, a sole ship reappeared. We asked the captain about their adventure.
Prince, he replied, we sailed for a long time when we encountered in mid-ocean
something like a river with violent current. My ship was last. The others
sailed on, gradually each entered this place, they disappeared and did
not come back. As for me, I returned to where I was and did not enter
that current.
‘But the emperor did not want to believe him. He equipped 2,000 more vessels
and conferred power on me and left with his companion on the ocean. This
was the last time I saw him and the others, and I remained absolute master
of the empire”.
Emperor Abubakari II [the immediate predecessor of Mansa Musa] was the
monarch who lunched the expedition with 2,000 ships. The expedition was
likely to have reached Attilles or other points bordering the Caribbean
and the Gulf of Mexico.
According to Muhammed Hamidullah, the Algerian scholar: “The fleet
[Abubakari
II’s expedition] could have reached the Caribbean by the time the captain
decided to turn his ship around”.
The art and technology of shipbuilding was well established in Africa
from Nubia to Kemet and to other parts of the continent. Al Kati, the
Timbuktu historian, informs us in the Tarikh el-Fettach that Askia Ishak
(1591 AD), the last of the Songhai emperors in West Africa, used over
200 vessels along the Niger River to evacuate his court from the advancing
Morroccan army.
Ishak states that “a thousand boats belonging to Askia which are found
in the same strait reach, I believe, the figure of six or seven hundred”.
Two-hundred years after Mansa Musa’s visit to Mecca, Christopher Columbus,
in his Journals of Christopher Columbus, testified to the continuation
of these Mandiga expeditions to the Americas. He said that West African
merchant fleets periodically left the Guinea Coast and sailed to Middle
America with gold and other merchandise and introduced the art of alloying
gold.
“The Indians brought handkerchiefs of cotton, very symmetrically woven
and worked in colours like those brought from Guinea, from the rivers
of Sierra Leone, and of no difference,” Columbus wrote.
The Mandinga traded gold and woven cloth called “almaizar” (a cloth often
made in various colours and used as a single garment from which other
garments were made) with the Amerindians.
Columbus knew the source of the clothes, hence his ability to express
an informed opinion in his dairy that the Indian “almaizar” was “like
those brought from Guinea, from the Rivers of Sierra Leone and of no difference”.
The Moors of North Africa who were in control of the southern part of
Europe, also traded with the Mandinga kingdoms. They introduced the “almaizar”
to Spain, hence Columbus was aware of the clothes.
Dr Van Sertima affirms in his book, African Presence in Early America,
that: “The Indians told Columbus and others who arrived in the West Indies,
shortly after 1492, that a black people, known subsequently as the Black
Guanini, brought gold to those islands. Important Antillean names for
gold had derived from earlier Mandinga forms.”
The following Antillean words for gold — goana, caona, guani, guanin —
came directly from the Mandinga words for gold — Ghana, kane, kani,
kanine, Ghanin.
Al-Bakri, an Islamic historian, writing in 1067 AD, notes that: “The people
[of Ancient Ghana] who follow the religion of the king wear cotton, silk
or brocaded breechcloth according to their means.”
A hundred years later, another Islamic historian, Al-Idrisi, observed
that the people of Silla, Takur, Ghana and Gao wore the “almaizar”.
Mungo Park, the Scottish explorer, while visiting Sansanding on the River
Niger in 1795, recorded: “This place is much resorted to by the Moors,
who bring salt from Beero [Walata] and beads and coral from the Mediterranean,
to exchange here for gold dust and cotton cloth. This cloth they sell
to great advantage in Beero and other Moorish countries, where on account
of the want of rain, no cotton is cultivated”.
The cloth-making industry existed in West Africa long before the arrival
of the Europeans. The Kente of the Akans of Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire was
not a European introduction, nor Arabic. Kente is not merely a cloth,
it embodies symbolism and the philosophy of a people with over 20 sacred
symbols expressing both moral and philosophical maxim whose canons are
easily identifiable with that of Kemet [Ancient Egypt].
In Honduras, the Mandinga clans, Jaras and Guabas, who were Moslems, called
themselves “Almamys”, the Mande form of the Arabic “al-imamu”, meaning
“leader”. When the Europeans first landed on the island of St. Vincent,
they found two distinct populations, of “yellow” and “black” complexions
who came to be known as “claifurnams”, a Mandinga variant of the Arabic
“Khalfatu-n-Nabi”. This was before the advent of the slave trade.
It is conceivable that the Mandinga who already occupied various places
on St. Vincent island and were familiar with the terrain, would have welcomed
(in the 15th century) fugitive Africans (their kith and kin) running away
from slavery.
Many islands in the Caribbean were used as “seasoning camps” — (“a physical
and mental process of subduing the will to resist, and self-worthiness
through intensive whipping, depravation of food, stripping [the slaves]
of their humanity and loyalty to self”]. This was the final phase of the
process that begun on the ships from the Guinea Coast, before the journey
to other parts of the “New World”.
The island of Jamaica was most notorious for the “seasoning camps”. Incidentally,
it was here that the African slaves fought protracted wars to liberate
themselves. Chief among them were the Maroons who occupied the high Blue
Mountains. It was here that the other Africans escaping from the “seasoning
camps” and plantation labour sought refuge.
One of the great leaders of the Maroons was General Cudjoe, a Coromantee.
(Coromantee is a variant spelling of the Kromante people of the present
day Central Region of Ghana; Cudjoe is a variant spelling of the Ghanaian
name Kojo or Kwadwo, meaning a male born on Monday).
The Maroons fought the British for nearly 10 years [in the Maroon Wars].
In the last of those wars, the British mounted an army of over 1,800 English
men plus a militia of 3,000 men. On 1 March 1739, the British granted
the Maroon their independence.
“For the first time in the history of the Americas, a metropolitan power
was forced to recognise the rights of its subjects to independence,” wrote
P. Sherlock, the English historian. “This happened half a century before
North America gained independence and 70 years ahead of the blacks of
Haiti.”
In 1791, the Africans of Surinam, led by their leader Captain Adu, (another
Ghanaian name, meaning 10th born), fought the Dutch for 36 years before
a peace treaty was finally signed.
It is likely that the blacks [the Mandinga] that Columbus met in America
would have faced the same extermination programme perpetrated by the Spanish
and the other European settlers, just as they had done to the native Amerindians
or would have subsequently been defeated and enslaved. In fact the Spanish
extermination of the Inca people and the burning down of their capital
city, Cuzco, in 1534 signalled an abrupt end to an accomplished civilisation
of the Americas.
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The Nubia-Kemet Voyage, 1300 BC
The earliest African presence in the Americas is that of the people of
Nubia and Kemet. This was proved by the discovery in 1858 of a gigantic
(head) self-portrait with Nubian features carved out of a single basalt
measuring 8ft by 18ft in circumference, and dating back to 800-600 BC.
It was discovered in the village of Tres Zapotes in Mexico. Seventeen
of these heads have since been discovered all over South America.
In 1869, Jose Meglar, a 19th century Mexican scholar, wrote a brief description
of the sculpture in the Mexican Society of Geography and Statistic Bulletin.
He stated:
“In 1862, I was in the region of San Andree Tuxtla. During my excursion,
I learnt that a Colossal Head had been unearthed a few years before.
“I asked to be taken to look at it. We went, and I was struck with surprise.
As a work of art, it is without exaggeration a magnificent sculpture.
What astonished me was the Ethiopian type [Negroid] representation. I
reflected that there had been Negroes in this country, and that this had
been in the first epoch of the world”.
This article, along with other publications that boldly put Africans in
association with Ancient America, was met with silence by Euro-American
scholars, despite the physical evidence on the ground, such as the Colossal
Head.
The taboo was finally lifted in 1939, when the American scholar, Matthew
Stirling, a researcher funded by the Smithsonian Institute and the National
Geography Society (both American institutions), led an archaeological
team to Tres Zapotes in Mexico and excavated the Colossal Head that Melgar
had mentioned 77 years earlier.
The sheer size of the sculpture moved Stirling to say: “It presents an
awe inspiring spectacle. Despite its great seize, the workmanship is delicate
and sure, its proportion is perfect. It is remarkable for its realistic
treatment. The features are bold and amazingly Negroid in character”.
Additionally, hundreds of images of Africans in terra cotta, made between
1500 BC and 1500 AD, have been unearthed in the Americas, affirming a
prolonged presence of African ancestors in that part of the world.
In September 1974, at the 41st Congress of Americanists in Mexico, Dr
Andrzej Wiercinski, one of the world’s leading experts on the Americas,
announced that African skulls had been found at the Olmec sites in Cero
de las Meassa, Monte Alban and Talatilco in Mexico.
Prof Alexander von Wuthenau, the German-born art historian, author of
Unexplained Faces in Ancient America, and chairman of the Pre-Columbian
Art History of the University of the Americas, has also made an impressive
collection of pre-Columbian terra cotta sculptures of African chiefs,
priests, dancers and drummers.
Indeed at one point, after stating his conviction of the trans Atlantic
voyage of the Africans, Prof Wuthenau was advised by his colleague, Dr
Erwin Palm, thus: “Wuthenau, never say Negro, always say Negroid because
then it would mean that the black specimens in pre-Columbian art are derived
from Melanesian Negritos and not from African Negroes.”
Wuthenau subsequently explained that his colleague meant well and “probably
intended to help me maintain my respectability in academic circles; because
orthodox scientists are beginning to admit the possibility of Melanesian
migration to America but are deadly opposed to that of contacts from Africa
across the Atlantic.”
One of the “orthodox” scholars, Dr Micheal Coe, the Harvard-educated chairman
of the Department of Anthropology at Yale University in USA, who is also
a leading authority on South America, has reasoned that the thick lips
and broad nose of the Olmec heads, including the Colossal Head, were due
to the fact that the sculptors did not want to create “protruding or thin
facial features that might break off”.
Coe’s incredible scholastic insight not only surpasses the efforts by
European scholars and broadcasters (the recent British Channel 4 series
on Ancient Egypt) to whiten the Kemetic (Ancient Egyptian) civilisation,
in degrees of sophistication. It also demonstrates a shared disdain for
the achievements and history of Africa and its people.
Europe, despite its relative late emergence on the historical stage of
humanity, is said to possess “archival and historical continuity”, but
what was at stake in the finding of the Colossal Head and the other sculptures
and terracotta in the Americas was an affirmation and evidence of the
continuity of the great African history that went as far back as Nubia
and Kemet.
Indeed, the beginning of Europe’s “historical continuity” began through
Africans whose presence and domination of Spain and Rome (Italy) are well
documented. More than five Nubians ruled Rome as emperors — Flavius Honorious
(395 AD) and Emperior Septimius Severus (193 AD) who erected Hannibal’s
statute in Rome, and in 202 AD visited Kemet.
The Olmec
civilisation,
1200-400 BC
Many of the written records left by the Olmec in South America were systematically
destroyed by the European “discoverers” of the New World. The very people
who burnt down the libraries of the African Moors in Spain were the same
people who destroyed the written records of the Olmec civilisation. (Olmec
is derived from the Aztec root, Ollin, meaning rubber, loosely translated
as people from the land where rubber is produced. La Venta in Mexico was
the capital of the Olmec civilisation).
Diago deLaanda, the Spanish bishop of Yucatan, wrote: “These people made
use of certain characters or letters with which they wrote their books
and their ancient matter and their science... We found a large number
of books. They contained but superstition. We burned them all which they
regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.”
Antonio deCuidad Real, the Spanish historian, also affirmed in 1588 AD:
“[The Spanish] burned many historical books of the ancient Yucatan which
told of its beginning and history”.
The earliest settlers in Central America date from 3000-2000BC, but the
major civilisation that preceded them all was the Olmec, which influenced
all the American civilisations, including the Atzec, the Mayans and the
Incas.
The Olmec civilisation in Meso-America had three major influences — the
first was the Mongoloid who blended almost indistinguishably with Ica
Age Americans, the second was the Negroid Africans, and the third was
made up of people with a Mediterranean strain.
But it was the Nubian-Kemetic presence that propelled the Olmec civilisation
to its heights, bringing about the unparalleled cultural influence carried
over from Kemet to the New World.
The Olmec civilisation [1200-400BC] was all pervasive, reaching Guatemala
and Honduras to the west, to central Mexico, Costa Rica and along the
Ancient American coast as far as Panama. Specifically, it was at La Venta
in Mexico that the Olmec lay the foundation of ancient America, marked
by pyramid complexes and hieroglyphic writing, a trait which was later
to be assimilated by other civilisations in the Americas, including the
Maya.
The debate now being waged in academic circles is not so much that Africans
occupied elite positions in the ancient American civilisations, but from
which part of Africa they came from thousands of years ago?
Africans, contrary to conventional historical accounts, had been sailing
not in dug-out canoes but ocean-going vessels from as far back as 3800
BC. A painting of an ocean-going vessel has been found from the era of
Ta-Seti, the first major African civilisation that preceded Kemet.
Thousands of ocean-going vessels in Kemet were required to conduct commercial
trade and domination in the ancient world. This was attested by the skill
and technology in Kemet for shipbuilding as well as in Carthage (Tunisia),
under the Phoenicians and later the Moors who were to trade with the West
African kingdoms in the 12th century.
King Necho II of Kemet ordered his naval commanders and astrologers to
circumvent the African continent as far back as 600 BC. The expedition
was a success and returned home to receive encomiums from the delighted
king.
Evidence now points to Nubia-Kemet as the place where the Africans first
left for the Americas, either as traders or as an armada of the Kemet
army.
The first pyramid in the Americas was built at a ceremonial location.
Commenting on the American pyramids, Dr Ivan Van Sertima says in his book,
African Presence In Early America: “The pyramids are placed on a north
south axis, as all Egyptian and Nubian pyramids are placed. [The] pyramids
combine the same double function, tomb and temple... [The] great pyramid
in Teotihuacan [225 metres sq] has a pyramidal base almost identical in
proportion to that of the bases of the Great Pyramid in Egypt [226.5 metres
sq]”.
In fact the same standard of measurements that was developed by the mathematicians
and astrologers of Kemet was employed in Ancient America. It follows that
the “foreigners” (the Africans) did find, or were welcomed by, a native
elite whom they could influence, hence the preservation of the African
elite in royal temples in the Americas.
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According to Dr Van Sertima:
“If we examine some of those helmets, we will find they are uncannily
similar to the leather helmet worn by the Nubian-Kemet military in the
era of Ramese and in the first millennium BC. They completely cover the
head and the back of the neck, and they have tie-ons attached to the crest
and falling in front of the ear. The details on some of them, almost 3,000
years old, have circular earplugs and incised decoration, paralleled lines
found on other colossal Nubian heads in the Egyptian seaport of Tanis.”
The striking similarities between the Olmec civilisation and Kemet can
be seen in the cultural and scientific arenas. For example, there is an
existing Olmec painting of a dignitary wearing a double crown. He is offering
an object with Kemetic symbols on it, to a person of distinctively African
appearance in the Temple at Cerro de la Piedre in Mexico.
The sacred boat of the kings of Kemet is also found in Olmec paintings
in similar appearance, function and name. The royal flail of Kemetic kings,
a symbol of authority, can be seen on an Olmec king sitting on a throne
at Oxtotitlan in Mexico.
The African Ankh symbol of life is identical with the Olmec sacred cross
both in function and name. The Olmec called it the “tree of life” —
To-naca-qua-hui-tl.
The Kemetic spiritual, ceremonial and sacred colours are identical with
that of Olmec who also used oxide dyes to evoke blackness, a colour they
used mostly to paint their sculptures.
Also, the pyramids in Mexico are identical in orientation to that of
Kemet.
During the Equinox, the interplay between sunlight and shadows forms triangular
patterns, creating images of serpents slithering down the northern staircase
of the pyramids as in Kemet.
Again, the nine gods of Kemet mentioned in the book of creation is equally
found in America and recorded in the pyramids in Mexico as the “nine lords
of the night”.
Says Dr Ivan Van Sertima: “It is important to understand what a great
burden of proof is required to establish a cultural influence, even when
there is a sound case for a physical presence and contact. Any one of
the above traits, standing by itself as a single parallel can be dismissed
as coincidence. When such traits appear as an interconnected cluster,
performing a single function and duplication nowhere else in the world
except where the Egyptian travelled or left their influence, then only
a dogmatic conservative or a bigot can deny the possibility of both physical
contact and cultural influence.”
In the context of the history of a people being a source from which could
be drawn gems of proven wisdom for advancement, (as enshrined in the Akan
philosophical concept of “Sankofa” — going back to retrieve that which
is valuable from the past to aid advancement), it is not so much that
the discovery of the presence of African ancestors in the Americas which
must be held in awe by modern Africans, but the inculcation of their spirit
of enquiry which took them to the Americas that must compel modern Africans
to seek the means of liberation from economic, mental and spiritual
servitude.
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