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

In this segment, we continue with Dr. Ivan Van Sertima, editor of "Blacks in Science, Ancient and Modern, on African Genius in Science."

- But when you leave Egypt, come down now into the other part of Africa, and you find that Africans had also developed advanced mathematical systems elsewhere.

The Yoruba, for example, invented an advanced mathematical system.

Claudia Zaslavsky, in her book, "Africa Counts, Number and Pattern in African Culture," has shown this.

And I particularly am struck by the fact that while she was doing this work, she met a Yoruba mathematician.

He is Yoruba, and he's a mathematician.

And he said, I never knew our people had mathematics.

And Zaslavsky, I think, pointed out to him because his brain was manufactured in Europe.

Because she had shown, quite clearly, that they had developed their own system.

And this grew out of the fact that the complex needs of the Yoruba, who were involved in intensive and extensive trading for centuries before the coming of Europe, they needed complex math, hence they developed a complex mathematical system, an advanced mathematical system.

Those people who were simple did not develop a complex mathematical system.

If you go to the Kalahari Desert and go among the bushmen, how can you find advanced mathematical systems?

If you go in certain primitive parts of Europe, you're not going to find anybody inventing radios.

The radio will diffuse to the primitive Europeans.

The TV would diffuse to the primitive Europeans.

You have to have centers where certain things occur, and then they diffuse to the edges.

Mali, for example, in its centers, like Djenne, they were performing eye cataract surgery in the 13th century.

They had people in Mali, the Dogon, who were plotting an invisible star, Sirius B, plotting the orbit and trajectory of that star right up to the end of the 20th century.

When were they doing this?

Seven centuries ago, right up to 1990.

And their diagram is identical as the diagram produced by our most advanced telescopes.

Do you know what that means?

Do you know what a furore that has led to when it was discovered?

Some gentleman, I don't remember his name now, I usually forget people I grow to dislike intensely.

(audience laughing) He suggested that since the Africans are apt to make up myths, since they have no scientific knowledge of the world, they're apt to make up many myths.

Perchance they made up so many myths that they struck on the truth by mistake.

(audience laughing) He adds to this, because, these are his words, the Africans have no business knowing any of this.

They knew not only where the star was, they could have worshipped the parent star, Sirius A, which everybody could see is one of the brightest stars in the night sky, but no, they paid particular attention to a star so small that it is utterly impossible to see with the naked eye.

They not only saw it, they spoke of its mass, they showed that it was an imploded star, which we now call a white dwarf, and that although there were stars around it much larger and brighter, this star was heavier, had more mass, compacted mass, than the stars around it.

Do you know what it means to discover that?

And they were able to show that there was something near the region of this imploded star, Sirius B, something contracting and expanding.

Do you know the Einstein orbiting satellite found that out two years ago?

The Africans knew that seven centuries ago.

The Einstein orbiting satellite discovered two years ago that there was something contracting and expanding-a supernova within the region of Sirius B.

They showed that it had an elliptical orbit of 50 years around the parent star, Sirius A, and an orbit of one year on its own axis.

We have established that Africans were correct about the 50-year elliptical orbit.

Our telescopes have not yet established a one-year orbit on its own axis.

We haven't caught up with that one yet.

(audience laughing) When I say we, I'm talking about modern science.

And I say we because lots of these things you call Western science, we are involved in it.

Because when you learn of the death, the great death, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the founding head of European science owed to the Egyptians, the founding head of African science, you are amazed.

You are really amazed because all the great Greek scholars, when Greece invaded Egypt, all the great Greek scholars came to Africa.

Thales of Miletus, Democritus, Pythagoras, Eudoxus, all of them came and Eudoxus came to study planetary motion.

You can't study planetary motion among low-class people.

When I say low on the level of technology, Pythagoras came in there and spent seven years.

Some people said 22, which is probably an exaggeration.

They were studying geometry in Egypt.

They were studying the mysteries.

They were studying medicine.

And the impact of the Egyptian medicine on Greek medicine was great.

Even the theory of harmony and opposites.

And you hear the father, the so hippocrates, the so-called father of medicine, takes things away from the Egyptians.

You see chapters from the medical papyrus.

And these things are still there.

The earliest books in the world are African.

They're still with us.

They haven't disappeared.

There's no question about it.

The two most famous papyri, the Ebers Papyrus and the Edwin Smith Papyrus, one of them is still in the New York Academy of Sciences.

It's still lying there.

These things haven't disappeared.

There are at least ten major medical papyri which are still in existence, written in African hieroglyphs.

And we know the Africans created the hieroglyphs because Bruce Williams, who will be here on Saturday, he's the man who discovered Ta Seti, the Nubian kingdom south of Egypt, where the beginnings of the hieroglyphs were found.

And it's a kingdom earlier than the first Egyptian dynasty, at least 200 years earlier.

All the major elements of Egyptian civilization are found there.

All the political and religious symbols, the falcon god Horus, the boat litter of the kings, the palace facades, the beginnings of the hieroglyphs, et cetera.

And you have these books, medical papyri as well as mathematical papyri are still in existence.

They're just fragments and parts of things that have been largely destroyed, but they're still with us.

We still have the living documentary proof of these things.

There is absolutely nothing I am saying here tonight, absolutely nothing that is speculative.

It's all hard proven fact.

Those of you who need to see the pictures again when they're shown here, who need to see the knowledge in detail, it's all in this book, "Blacks in Science, Ancient and Modern."

And scientists, about 24 scientists have contributed to this work.

In medicine, we are stunned by the sophistication of the Egyptians.

Dr. Finches pointed out that they had a kind of socialized medicine.

The state paid for the medical needs of the people.

There is evidence that they seemed to have standardized doses, that they had pharmacies.

There is evidence that they had, as Herodotus points out, specialists for every organ.

At the time when nobody had medical specialists, a doctor was a doctor was a doctor.

They had specialists for the ear, the nose, the eye, etcetera, just as we have today.

They'd worked out a whole lot of things in their medicine.

For example, you have, let me point to some chapters in one of their books.

In medicine, the Edwin Smith papyrus is 2600 B.C.

The Ebers papyrus is 1500 years before Christ.

There are chapters on intestinal disease.

This is 3,500 years ago.

This is an African medical book.

3,500 years old.

Chapters on intestinal disease, helminthiasis, ophthalmology, dermatology, gynecology, obstetrics, pregnancy, diagnosis, contraception, dentistry, surgical treatment of abscesses, tumors, fractures, and burns, section under the movement of the heart, the pulse, diagnostic percussion, et cetera.

And Gagliungi, making an assessment of this papyrus, says, in fact, it proved the existence of an objective and scientific medicine devoid of theories, and magic except in one case and based on the tentative, and repeated observation of the patient on bedside experience, and on a hitherto unsuspected knowledge of anatomy.

No people, for example, had mastered bandaging like the Egyptians.

The Egyptians bandaged so well that there are bodies that died in Egypt thousands of years ago that are still with us.

I don't think anyone, except perhaps, well, we don't know, but even in spite of all the advances in medicine, who do you know was here 200 years ago whom you could still have a good look at?

(audience laughing) The Africans are still with us.

They're still sitting in state.

A few years ago, one of them developed an infection in his leg.

Imagine a dead man developing an infection in his leg.

Scientists came all over to stop the infection.

Do you know when they looked at the rapins inside his belly, when they opened up his belly to see the things that were put in his belly?

They found tobacco.

I said so in my book.

I said so in my book that it is not true.

It is not true that the Africans got tobacco from America.

That the Africans had their own tobacco.

So that if they found this tobacco buried there thousands of years ago, if it is true, they haven't even opened the question.

I asked Cheikh Anta Diop, because he had written me a letter and he says, here is one of the proofs that Africans came to America before Columbus.

I said, no, no, no, that's not a proof.

I'm sorry, because I do not believe, and I can show, that Americans had their own tobacco, and the Africans had their own tobacco.

Because if you check it out, you find that when the Americans used the word taba, or tawa, or tabakum, they are using it for the pipe, which is strange to them, and they're using it for the act of smoking through the mouth, which is strange to them.

They do not use it for the plant, tobacco.

Tobacco is never used in America for the plant.

They had other words, native words, for the plant, which means they had their own plant.

Whereas in Africa, you have the words in the Arab and African world, it's carried forward in America, right down the tribes.

Even the word for smoking, juli, and jema, jemba, and jema, all carried right down a whole series of languages in South America and in Mexico.

You find these words cropping up, which are African and Arab words.

And I had tracked that down.

And then they opened this mummy, and they find it there.

And the mummies are, some mummies are incredibly preserved.

At the University of Oklahoma, an African princess, Princess Minnie, was so well preserved, that in 1963 or 64, scientists found that the cells in her hand were still so well preserved, it was almost that you could take it out of the flesh and put it in a solution and transplant it.

Thousands of years old.

Could you understand the quality of medicine, the quality of chemistry?

Their refined mummification formula, which, the most refined mummification formula, which occurs around 900 and something B.C., has been found in Peru.

The identical formula, the combination of substances, et cetera, found among mummies in Peru.

They have found the level of medicine highly advanced also among other Africans.

I will show you a picture of the Caesarean operation among the Banyoro surgeons in East Africa.

They pioneered in the Caesarean.

In the 1870s, when they witnessed this operation, Dr. Felkin, who reported it in the Edinburgh Journal of Medicine, that Africans were performing the Caesarean with routine skill.

They were using the cautery iron, which at skill, there was extremely minor tissue damage.

No one, no woman on whom the Caesarean was performed in Europe in the 1870s survived.

The woman invariably died.

In Africa, the woman came out of the operating theatre four or five days afterwards, hale and hearty.

They have pictures of the stitches, the instruments used, et cetera, and they noticed that the Africans were using anesthetics and antiseptics in their operating theatres at a time when antiseptics had only been introduced by Lister two years earlier in Europe.

They have noticed the Africans pioneered in the use of tetracycline.

They found it in Nubian bones.

14 centuries ago, we only began using tetracycline in the 1950s.

The African population was using it 14 centuries ago.

They found a yellow-green flash of tetracycline in their bones, and it was an indication that they were using it in measured conscious doses, because while it may initially have been an accident, as most discoveries are, they found that where they were using it, there was the lowest incidence of infectious disease in an ancient population.

They found the Africans had their own aspirin.

You were using salix capensis, which yields salicylic acid, which is the main ingredient in aspirin.

The Africans were the first to invent vaccines.

They'd come upon the vaccine through puncturing the skin, beautification and identification markings.

They pioneered also in the use of drugs to deal with hypertension and psychotic disorder.

Reserpine is one of the drugs that came into Europe out of Africa.

A whole range of things like that.

They found people like the Zulu who had mastered the medicinal use of 700 plants.

The Egyptians had 1,000 plant and animal and other medicines in their materia medica.

So, you have a range of these things.

And when you go to things that are almost on the edge of the modern world, you find they're the first to invent the steam engine.

They have a steam... Only one.

They have one.

They found it.

They call it the aeophyll.

They found that the Egyptians had invented an aeroplane.

Now, it's a glider.

We don't know that it had any power.

We don't know of that for certain.

But they found it, Saqqara, 300 B.C.

And it's marked...

They say, well, that's the Greek period.

It could have been invented by a Greek.

No, sir, it was marked Paddy Amon, son of Amon, the African deity.

No Greek ever signed him the name son of Amon.

(audience laughing) And they have found that.

And do you know it was sitting in a glass case at the end of the 19th century classified as a bird in the Cairo Museum until someone who knows a little about aeroplanes found that birds have legs, and this doesn't.

(audience laughing) And that birds do not have the kind of wings that an aeroplane has.

And it doesn't have rudders.

They had a hole cut in it for a rudder.

The tail plane had disappeared.

They have now found several of these objects.

And NASA got involved in this.

And this brings me to something that I find extremely interesting because I spent some time at NASA some years ago looking at what blacks were doing in space science.

I don't want to get into the modern period, but I must say something about space science because I was one of the few people who was invited by NASA to witness the blast-off of Bluford, the first black American to be sent into space.

I never forget that experience because we were standing in the desert of Cape Canaveral.

We were standing 5 1D2 miles from the spaceship.

It's an enormous thing.

It's larger than a skyscraper.

You can't imagine it.

You can't just look at it on TV.

You have to be there to see what an enormous thing this is.

It's bigger than this building.

It's enormous.

It just stands there high up in the sky.

And it's all lit, and you see all this strange smoke coming out of it.

And they started the countdown.

And first of all, they didn't tell us it would rain.

We thought there would be stands and things like that.

We all got drenched.

There was lightning and thunder, and they waited for a while, and there was a little red plane going around to check visibility and weather and so forth just in case there was an accident because it's a very...

When it takes off, it's a tremendous task if something goes wrong to bring it back down to Earth without being totally destroyed.

And there are millions of gallons of fuel, and one little thing could throw it off.

So, they started the countdown, and they went until 20, and suddenly they stopped.

Something went wrong, and they fixed it.

Then they started the countdown again up to 20.

Something went wrong, and they fixed it.

Then they started the countdown, and they went to 10.

And then they announced that if they start it again, man cannot stop it.

The computer is in complete control when you start again, so there's nothing you can do.

So, everyone stands with bated breath, and they start, and everyone shouts the numbers down to zero.

And the most unearthly explosion... Now, I have heard a lot of things.

I never heard anything like that.

The blood ran right up into my ears and bubbled under my eardrum.

The shock is so great that everything for about 500 yards around every bird, every worm, every creature that lives on the earth dies.

500 yards around.

The shock kills everything.

It pulverizes it to death.

Even an ant in the ground is killed.

And then it goes off in tremendous light that stretches from Atlanta to the Caribbean, stretches as far out as Atlanta and as far out as the Caribbean.

And you can read, they say, the newspaper for about one minute by that light.

It happened about 2, 4 to 5 in the morning.

And off goes Bluford.

But Bluford was only one of many scientists at NASA who were black.

Few of us are aware of the modern period.

True, we can be excused for not knowing what has happened in the history of metallurgy, what has happened in the history of agriculture, what has happened in the history of cattle rearing.

We were the first to rear cattle 15,000 years ago.

What has happened in the history of medicine, aeronautics, navigation, et cetera.

But not to know anything about the modern period.

The first camera to take a picture of this planet from another celestial body was invented by a young black in his 30s, Dr. George Carruthers.

Ultraviolet ray spectrograph.

That the leading technical astronaut in the space... And they haven't sent him up yet.

Probably afraid to lose him.

Leading technical astronaut in our space team is a black who's supposed to pilot one of the space shuttles sometime late this year.

It's already late in the year.

It's probably next year.

They've deferred it again.

He did not go up.

He was to be the first black American to go up, Colonel Gregory.

I met him at the Kennedy Space Center the day before the blast-off.

How many of you are aware that the leading...

The two leading doctors in space medicine are black women?

Dr. Cowens and Dr. Long, who've invented a machine which is almost like the quantification of yoga, which enables you, after six weeks of training, to bring your heart rate down or lift it up, to bring your blood pressure down, lift it up, et cetera?

How many of you are aware that the man who organized, who presided over, who put together, who integrated the work of our space scientists to produce the first space shuttle, who saw it from babyhood, the blast-off, is a black American, the leading black at NASA, Dr. Major Gilliam IV.

How many of you are aware that in the Bell Laboratories, which is the largest private laboratory in the world, the major work now being done, the greatest probes in glass, the development of glass fiber light guides, the laying of those fiber light guides along the great oceans of the world, the development of glass that could stretch from four feet to six miles, all of these are done by black scientists that you never hear anything about?

One can go on to deal with quite a number of things.

I'm going to end by dealing with navigation, something that interests me tremendously because I have spent most of my life on rivers, and I am very much at home in the water.

One of the things that astonished me was anthropologists assuming that it is impossible to cross the Atlantic.

It is harder to cross the Sahara than to cross the Atlantic, much harder.

The Atlantic has three natural roads leading from Africa to America.

When I say natural roads, if you are caught in a ship or a large boat 100 miles off Africa and you fall into one of the great currents, there's one off the Cape Verde, there's one off the Senegambia coast, there's one off southern Africa, you have to come to America unless the fish get you first.

(audience laughing) Those are natural sea routes.

They actually project you towards America.

They thought of that as a dead sea.

Hyde Isle showed, for example, in an Egyptian boat which Africans built, the Boduma people in Lake Chad, rebuilt one of the boats used by the Egyptians centuries before Christ, and it crossed from Safi in North Africa right into the Caribbean.

By itself, by itself, the knowledge of where America was was not important because the rudders broke on the first day, so that a rudderless boat came by itself into America following those currents.

People have done more than that.

Lindemann and Bombard, Alain Bombard took an African dugout which no African would be mad enough to use in the Atlantic because Africans invented at least seven types of boats in the Niger and about 17 types of boats on the Nile and on the Indian Ocean.

But taking a dugout which is a basic building block for African boats because the reason why people think that the dugout is all that Africans have is because when the Europeans went to Africa they would turn to an African and say, look, I want to cross this river.

I want a boat.

And the African says, how soon do you want it?

He said, three days.

They would give them a three-day boat and they would assume that that embraced their technology.

There were boats with sails.

There were boats that had cabins above and below the decks.

There were sewn plank boats that were just as sturdy and durable and maneuverable as Carthaginian ships, just as high a keel.

There were boats that were lush log rafts.

There were boats that were enormous dugout canoes like the power canoe holding 48 men on board, 24 resting, 24 rowing, a whole range of boats.

And above all, and let me end on this note, one of the remarkable things about Egyptians, although they were not great seafarers, they have found Egyptians right up in Hawaii.

They have found them as far as Spain.

They found Egyptian villages in Spain.

They found Egyptian scripts in America.

They found it on the Davenport's Teller.

And people said it was found in 1874, you know, where the Egyptian calendar, there's a description in Egyptian, in Libyan and Iberian Punic.

And they said it was a forgery until Dr. Fell pointed out that in 1874, no one in the world could translate Libyan or Iberian Punic.

That was found later.

Only Champollion had already deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs, yet there was Libyan and Iberian Punic underneath the Egyptian and saying the same thing, and no one in the world could have deciphered that in 1874.

How could it be a forgery?

(upbeat music)