- Good evening and welcome to the fourth installment of the Nile Valley Conference, which was held at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.

Our guest in this segment is Dr. Ivan Van Sertima, associate Professor of African Studies at Rutgers University.

He is a literary critic, linguist and anthropologist.

Dr. Sertima studied at the London School of Oriental and African Studies.

He is editor of the "Journal of African Civilizations" and author of several literary reviews published in Denmark, India, Britain, and the United States.

Dr. Sertima has honored, or was honored for his work in this area by being asked by the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy to nominate candidates for the Nobel Prize in literature from 1976 to 1980.

Dr. Sertima's premier work is entitled, "They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in America."

In this segment, Dr. Sertima, editor of "Blacks in Science: Ancient and Modern," discusses some of the contributions that Africans around the world have made in the field of science.

Dr. Sertima also discusses some of the problems he has encountered along the way.

And he warns us against looking at history as something that is dead.

- One becomes aware when I left and I went into England and I studied anthropology, it was a very frustrating study.

Anthropology at that time, and to large extent, it is still the case, was the study of primitives.

In fact, one of my teachers made it quite clear to me, anthropology is the study of primitive societies, simple societies, and sociology is the study of advanced society.

So that is why they focused, all of my teachers focused on primitives.

I was very fortunate to be trained at the School of Oriental and African Studies, which is the only college in the world, I understand, which has more professors than students.

I had four professors.

I was the only one at that time in England who was doing Bantu linguistics and anthropology at the same time.

There was someone else studying with me, but he was doing Hausa.

And so I had four professors.

If I did not turn up for class, there was no class.

I was the only student.

(audience chuckles) So I had a chance to get to know my teachers intimately.

Don't misunderstand me.

(audience laughs) I got inside of their minds, I penetrated their brains, and there wasn't much there.

(audience laughs) Every one of these professors was a word authority on the booga booga or the looga booga, some irrelevant little African tribe on the edge of the world.

(audience laughs) They had to try and capture all the data they could about these little vanishing tribes before they vanished.

And they built fast theories about this, what you can learn about knowing who is the mother's brother's sister's son, and all sorts of detailed nonsense about kinship systems, et cetera.

Now, that perhaps was necessary at the first stages of anthropology, but these guys didn't intend to leave it at all.

They intend to spend all their lives studying little things.

When I was sent out to Africa, first of all, I kept very quiet because I learned from my political experience in Guyana that, in an empire, the moment you shout, sooner or later they're going to get you.

They got my father.

My father in fact was poisoned.

My friends were put in prison.

I saw so many people broken, and for two years I was not allowed a job.

I remember going to family to get meals.

I wasn't allowed job.

There was a systematic attempt to crush.

After our government was thrown out of power, there was a systematic attempt to crush us.

And the only, my aunt came to me one day and says, "Ivan, if you want to live, shut up."

And I shut up, I shut up for 10 years because I wanted to live.

But I wanted to find a way, no matter how long it took me, to get back at the people who tried to kill me.

And I shut up, and I made one mistake when I was in England.

I went to lecture in South Africa.

That was one thing that could still get my blood up because I had suppressed every bit of anger.

When I got angry, I used to get up and go into the bathroom and close the door and shout at myself.

I never allowed anger to show because I knew it was dangerous.

And I went to lecture in South Africa, and here was Shula Marks, a famous lecturer at the University of London School of Economics saying the reason why, they always speak with this marvelous, smug accent, you know, about things they know nothing about.

(audience laughs) The reason why the Europeans in South Africa own 87% of the land and the Africans only 13% is because when they got there, there were no Africans in that area, and those few who were there were conquered.

So it was just the natural process of history, conquest and entering territory, virgin territory, et cetera.

So there was a White African sitting next to me and he says, "That's right."

And I turned in him.

I mean, suddenly, I forgot myself.

I forgot where I was, I forgot my past.

And I said, "That's not bloody right."

I talked like that in that time.

(audience laughs) And Shula Marks said, "Don't interrupt my lecture."

I said, "I didn't interrupt it.

He did."

She said, "Shut up."

And I said, "I shall shut up when he shuts up."

And she said, "What is your name?"

And I said, "Ivan Van Sertima."

And she said, "Mr. Van Sertima, if I hear another word out of you, I'll have you taken out of this place."

And I said, "Do that."

And they did that.

(audience laughs) Well, I did not know that was reported back to my university.

The following two weeks later, in fact, not the following, two weeks later, I was given an examination in Swahili.

Now, I'm not particularly brilliant, but I'm good at languages.

I have a memory, and my memory was partly developed because one of my eyes were damaged.

I had more than 20/20 vision.

I could see seven miles across the river.

And one of my eyes was very badly damaged and the other one started to go bad.

So I learned that someday I may be blind.

So anything I read, I can only read it once.

I have to remember it.

I trained myself to remember things.

So languages, because it involved a tremendous amount of memory and organization, was just up my street.

So they gave me this thing without preparation, without announcement, they just brought this exam into the room and said, "Do this."

Well, I was about to go out to Africa.

You have mid-degree exams, and if you don't do well, you can't go out to Africa.

You have to speak Swahili fluently.

You have to translate the literature.

And it's very complex because a lot of words are Arabic.

It's not just the Bantu words, et cetera.

But I did well.

I counted after I came out to the room, and I checked everything in my dictionaries that I had at least 75%.

I was totally unprepared.

Then this woman came back to me and said, "Van Sertima, you failed.

You know what this means, you're going to be expelled from the university."

And I said, "I don't believe I failed."

But fortunately, they had given me an examination in anthropology, and I came first against all the other students.

So then Guthrie, who was in charge of Bantu linguistics, he brought me up to his office and he said, "Van Sertima, I understand that you failed in your language.

You can't go out to Africa anymore.

We can't send failures out there."

And I said, "Well, I'm pretty sure I haven't failed."

"You might say so, but I understand you have emotional problems."

(audience chuckles) I said, "I don't know of any emotional, special emotional problems I have.

To be human is to have emotions.

I don't know of any special emotions.

The only emotion I have at the moment is anger because I don't believe I have failed."

I would like to see my exam paper.

"Well, we'll do something about," you know, they couldn't find it.

They couldn't find the exam paper.

And as a result of that, case closed, teacher reprimanded.

The anthropology department fought against the linguistic department, and eventually I was sent to Africa.

What I did not know is that the head of the linguistics department, Wilf Whiteley, who's dead now, thank God, (audience laughs) he was the lover of the woman who had failed me.

And when I was in flying on a VC10 off to Tanzania, I looked out of the window of my airplane and I saw snow on top of the mountain.

Well, I never saw snow until I was 24.

So snow fascinated me.

I only saw it in films.

And I took out my camera to take a picture of Kilimanjaro, and my camera strap tore an envelope in my airbag, and I looked down with dismay and discovered it was my recommendation to Africa, Professor Weston.

So I said, "These people are going to think I opened the recommendation so I better look at it."

(audience laughs) So I opened it.

It said, "Dear Professor Weston, and Mr. Van Sertima is not one of our trusted students, and any help given to him would not be appreciated."

It is only then that I realized after all I was going to the spy school.

The School of Orient and African Studies is not just where you learn linguistics, those is where the spies are trained to go out into the colonies.

Even though this was the evening of the colonial world, it was still the spies school.

And I can't continue to describe what happened in Africa, except to say that I produced the first legal dictionary in an African language, in spite of all the opposition and the fighting, because I found Africans in Tanzania who were willing to help me and who were willing to break with this kind of Eurocentric hold on their history.

I say all this and I get very personal because I want you to become aware that the struggle for a new knowledge in which we are engaged here is not easy.

Many people who attack us and who will attack us, some of them have suffered, but they have very different views as to how to bring new knowledge into play and how to bring it into the mainstream of the modern world.

But some of us will be attacked forever because we have broken new ground.

We have produced things that really challenge, really challenge the history of the world, the whole way in which it is seen, the whole way in which it is taken.

We are seen as a people without science, without technology, even Blacks in Africa who should know better, who now have some measure of independence, though most of African independence is paper independence, it's only a first stage.

But even some of them speak of us as people who invented nothing, explored nothing.

This is far from true.

The five centuries of falsehood have been exploded in just about five years.

Within the last few years they've discovered, and I will, at the end of this lecture, show slides in which I will show you many of the machines I talk about.

Within the last five years alone, they had discovered Africans were producing steel, smelting steel in a machine in the middle of the Iron Age when everybody was mass producing iron, at best.

They were mass producing steel.

And they were doing it in the machine which achieved 1,850 degrees centigrade.

The highest temperature ever achieved in a blast furnace in Europe before the 19th century is 1,620 degrees centigrade.

The Africans had gone beyond Europe in this regard.

Not only that, not only were they producing it at higher temperatures, they were producing it in a single stage, whereas Europe, even in the middle of the 19th century, when Georg Wilhelm Siemens developed machinery for mass producing steel, the Europeans were going through a crude phase and then a second phase in which this was refined.

Africans did it in a single phase.

And they did it using less fuel, which was extraordinary.

Not only were they achieving higher temperatures and a better grade of carbon steel, but they were doing it with less fuel.

They had been forced into fuel-saving technology because Africans do not have all that many forests.

The high industrialization in the area where the producing steel had depleted their forest resources, so they were forced into fuel-saving technology and into technology, in the area of Tanzania where this was going on, into technology which was far in advance of their time.

They were actually involved in the production of iron crystals which calls for semiconductor technology unknown until the 20th century.

And they were doing this 1,500 years ago, 15 centuries ago.

Some people put it because the carbon dating falls within 1500 to 2000.

They were doing this just after the birth of Christ.

Europe did not begin to do this in any significant sense until the middle of the 19th century.

Soon after that, they discovered at a place called Namoratunga in Kenya, and this all what they call below the Sahara where Africans are not supposed to be involved in anything serious, as some people have said.

Even those who have admitted Egypt is in Africa and that Egypt is an African civilization have said, "Africa mounted to nothing outside of Egypt."

In Kenya in 300 BC, 300 years before Christ, they found that the Kushites, that they had plotted a calendar that was, they had a sort of Stonehenge, and that they had an alignment of 19 stones which linked up with certain stars and constellations.

And on the basis of this, these alignments of the stones, they had built one of the most accurate of prehistoric calendars.

It was not the first calendar built by Africans.

In fact, the first calendar of any accuracy in the world was built long before that by Africans, 4241 BC.

This was the first calendar, and it is the calendar which we use today with two minor modifications.

The Africans in Egypt and Ethiopia were the first to divide the day, the year, sorry, into 365 and a quarter.

They cut the months into 12, they cut the year into 12 months of 30 days each, and that end of the year, they had five days, five festival days.

They had a way of dealing with the quarter.

It is when the Greeks took over this calendar, then it was modified, and we now have a calendar in which they took the festival days and spread it among the months.

As a consequence, we now have 28 day months, 29 day months, 30 day months and 31 day months.

It needs a rhyme in order to remember which is which.

(audience chuckles) The Africans also were the first to start, Egyptians were the first to start a day at midnight.

Not all Africans do.

Some do, some don't.

I remember when I was in East Africa, I was waiting for train, which was at 6:15.

And I turned to a girl standing on the station and I said, in Swahili, "When is the train coming?"

And she said, "Kesho."

And I'd been taught by a Zanzibar speak in London that kesho means tomorrow, and that is how it appears in the Madan dictionary in Swahili.

But what I had not been told is that tomorrow begins at six o'clock.

(audience chuckles) So I walked away and I lost my train.

(audience laughs) But you have a fun concern for time among Africans.

This nonsense that I hear in America about colored people's time, that has nothing to do with Africa.

The Africans were the first to invent clocks.

In fact, here in America, the first man in this country to invent a clock that chimed is a Black man, Benjamin Banneker.

And in Africa, the first sun clocks, the first water clocks were invented by Africans.

They spent a great deal of their time, their scientists spent a great deal of their time studying the stars and the sun and the moon and the planets, et cetera because astronomy is an exact science.

And it is very important.

We are not talking about astrology now and mystic technology.

It's a bread and butter science.

If you do not know how the stars and the planets and the sun and the moon behave, you cannot plot with precision things like the harvest time and the agriculture and so forth.

It's all related.

Those things are very important.

They're very practical things.

They're not just involved in the mystical or religious aspect.

They're also very practical things, and Africans were very much involved in that.

So that calendar, the various calendars that have come out of Africa are tremendously important.

And the stellar calendar used by the Egyptians is far superior to the lunar calendar used by the Babylonians and so forth.

Professor Lumpkin, who's here tonight, has shown us the extraordinary work, she and Professor Saslavsky, extraordinary work done in mathematics and engineering by the Egyptians and other Africans.

The what went into pyramid building, for example, in Egypt, plenty of us hear about the pyramids, and all we think of is some vast mountain of stone.

And when you go to see the Hollywood movies, you see a lot of slaves being lashed about to build this tremendous monument.

It was not like that at all.

I think it was Professor Lumpkin who pointed out that, in some cases, lists were found in which it showed clearly that the army, the Egyptian army, which was not then in any great military campaigns and the peasants in their off seasons and the skilled artisans and the priests, these were the people who made up the great workforce that built the pyramids.

There was a certain amount of slave labor of about 5%, but there, again, we have to be very careful of what we mean by slave.

Because slave does not carry necessarily the same connotation that it carried in the Anglo-American world.

When the Black was made into slave here, he was a slave forever.

To some extent, I don't think many of us have stopped being slaves.

Chains have fallen away, but there's an invisible slavery here, a tremendous imprisonment of the mind.

And it's there particularly in our books- (audience applauds) is there in all we are taught.

It's there in all we are taught.

Those of you who want to get a modern, dramatic experience of what the Black man can do to the Black man as a result of that kind of training and imprisonment, you should see the film "A Soldier's Story," the tremendous destruction that has occurred as a result of the way in which knowledge is framed and presented to us.

It is absolutely important, and that is why all these studies that we are doing here in Egyptology in particular, all of these studies are so absolutely critical to the children in our schools, to everything, because the way people often ask when one is talking about methodology or medicine or aeronautics or agriculture, people say, "Well, what does it matter?

This happened a long time ago.

Why are you getting so head up about it?

It happened so long ago, is that you're talking about events 5,000 years old or 500 years old?"

Oh no, we are not talking about that.

We are talking about now.

What happened 5,000 years ago or five minutes ago or five seconds ago occupies the same time space in consciousness.

We are not 20 years old or 50 years old or 70 years old.

We are millions of years old.

This is just a small span of time in which we move.

Our attitudes, the way we treat people, the way we conceive of people, the way we are conceived of by people is determined by how they see what has happened in the past.

History, therefore, has nothing to do with 10,000 years.

History is a living thing.

We are ruled by the dead.

Most of the books we read are written by the dead.

Most of the buildings we walk among are built by people who are now dead.

Most of the things we inherit, the thoughts, the attitudes, the prejudices come to us from the dead.

So that to see history again is not simply to become involved in an academic exercise.

To see history is to see ourselves anew, to feel life anew.

When I came out of Africa, it is as if years, millions of years had passed.

When I was on that VC10 plane and I opened that recommendation and I saw that I was entrapped in a system where there was absolutely not a chance in hell that I would escape, because it seemed to me then, it is utterly impossible to escape the British empire.

I thought once again, like my father, I would die terribly.

I did not know that I could free myself.

When I sat down and I started to write that dictionary, I realized what an extraordinary power the individual has, that here is this massive establishment, all these great legal experts and linguistic experts, and they can't even write a dictionary and here am, I don't even have a BA.

I'm sitting here in Africa, and I'm writing the first major dictionary.

And then you begin suddenly to realize that one is not lost because knowledge is consciousness and consciousness is power.

(audience applauds) Because to know more about this is to become aware of extraordinary energies.

One found it, it is almost as if the psyche had locked off things inside.

I suddenly felt that I was at least 20 years younger, that regardless of whether I looked older or not, the energy that I could pump into my system was far, far greater because suddenly I had been released.

Five centuries were rolled away.

That knowledge therefore becomes a resurrection.

It has nothing to do with dead history.

It is not dead at all.

It has nothing to do with death.

It has to do with rebirth.

That is what this kind of knowledge brings.

When I began to read some of the things that came into the "Journal of African Civilizations," began to read about the pyramids, for example, the extraordinary genius of our people.

If he could only feel that, if he could only experience that excellence again, if he could only strive for it again with that religious zeal that charged the Egyptians to build a building that even today with all our modern technology, there is no equal to the Great Pyramid, nothing.

It was the "Crystalis" of ancient science.

The size of it is absolutely incredible.

If you were to take the stones that built the Great Pyramid and cut it into one-foot cubes, it would stretch two thirds around this planet.

It is so massive that you could take all the great monuments, the great religious monuments in Europe, many of those great cathedrals, and you could put it into that building and there'd still be room for more.

And when it was finished, it was not like what it looks now.

It had a beautiful, polished scaffolding so that you could stand in the Sahara hundreds of miles away and you could see it shining like a star across the Earth.

And not only the size but the precision with which it was built.

It is almost the perfect square, and you can see all the sides, the ratio of run to rise.

It is half the height of the Empire State Building, but then it takes up 12 blocks of Manhattan.

12 blocks, one building, one skyscraper takes up 12 blocks of Manhattan, and yet it is perfectly formed.

Stone much of the scaffolding, but yet you could see it in its ruins the remarkable massiveness of this structure.

And as I say, it wasn't just size, but what was it used for?

It wasn't just a tomb.

And even as a tomb, it is remarkable.

There are rooms, there have found rooms in the Great Pyramid which have remained eternally fresh.

What happened 5,000 years ago or five minutes ago or five seconds ago occupies the same time space in consciousness.

We are not 20 years old or 50 years old or 70 years old.

We are millions of years old.

This is just a small span of time in which we move.

Our attitudes, the way we treat people, the way we conceive of people, the way we are conceived of by people is determined by how they see what has happened in the past.

History, therefore, has nothing to do with 10,000 years.

History is a living thing.

We are ruled by the dead.

Most of the books we read are written by the dead.

Most of the buildings we walk among are built by people who are now dead.

Most of the things we inherit, the thoughts, the attitudes, the prejudices come to us from the dead.

So that to see history again is not simply to become involved in an academic exercise.

To see history is to see ourselves anew, to feel life anew.

When I came out of Africa, it is as if.