(upbeat music) - Good evening.

Ask any youngster, or any adult, for that matter, when did Africans first come to America?

And the answer will be in 1619 as indentured servants.

Well, that answer is no longer valid according to Dr. Ivan Van Sertima, author of "They Came Before Columbus".

Dr. Van Sertima, an anthropologist and historian, is a graduate of London University and Rutgers Graduate School of Anthropology.

He is also a literary critic and has been honored by the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy by being asked to nominate candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature for the past five years.

Currently, he is professor of African Studies at Rutgers University.

Dr. Van Sertima, up until relatively recently, what had scholars been saying about Africans in the pre-Columbus period and the Americas?

- Well, there is a very profound distortion of African history.

Almost all of the books that have been written on Africa have been studies of primitives, of people in small communities just barely scratching the soil, people in jungles, et cetera.

There is no appreciation of the fact that after the conquest, or just around the time of the conquest and after, you have a tremendous breaking up of African societies.

It's not just a question of tearing these people out of their country, throwing them across the Atlantic as slaves, but the smashing of many things.

It's as if you had dropped several hydrogen bombs in Africa.

So that what you see afterwards is just the remnants, the ruins of the worst in Africa.

Therefore, the image of the African, the image of the African ancestor has been built up upon the lowest common denominator.

When we go back to European history, European heritage, we always go back to its great heroes, its magnificent achievements.

But when we go back into Africa, historians and anthropologists have always looked for the worst.

When in fact you begin to study African history seriously, and recent archeological discoveries have now throwing up remarkable things.

They have found within recent years, for example, that the Africans were producing steel in Tanzania, East Africa, 1500 years before the Europeans.

That they had not only entered the age of iron before Europe, but they had jumped into the age of steel.

Now, what has happened to this.

If you go back into Tanzania today, you cannot find this.

You cannot find that kind of development.

Therefore, you begin to be aware that colonization, the conquest of Europe didn't drag people up.

It actually smashed things that were happening then.

Now these things are coming out of the earth because archeology is beginning to recover these things.

African history cannot be recovered and even American history, early history cannot be recovered like European history because Europe has had the advantage after the conquest of having about five centuries of fairly settled history.

They can go to their libraries, et cetera, in spite of the wars.

But in Africa, the library is in the ground, the record of what has happened, the broken record lies there.

Now they're finding astronomical observatories.

Two years ago, they found that the Africans were involved in the most complex astronomy, that they had plotted a whole star system.

This is in Kenya, Namoratunga.

They found among the Dogon in West Africa that Africans had plotted an invisible star 700 years before it was discovered by European astronomers in the 20th century.

And that the plotting of the orbit and trajectory of this star, which is a white dwarf, an invisible star, Sirius B, the plotting of the orbits and trajectories are as accurate as that done by satellites in the 20th century.

Recently, yesterday, in fact, just before I came here, "The New York Times" brought out a startling article showing that the Africans had entered the domestication of cattle, in East Africa, 7,000 years before it occurred anywhere else in the world.

And this is one of the bases, this is one of the bases of civilization.

So that you have to look again at the African.

It is because the capacity of the African, the potential of the African has been reduced in our imagination and our consciousness by these studies of primitives, that we do not realize that the African was involved in things that are just as important, just as significant, and in some areas even more significant than what was happening in Europe before the Industrial Revolution.

- What is the main idea in your book, "They Came Before Columbus"?

- The main idea in my book is to show that early America, America before the coming of Columbus was a far more complex society than people imagined and that it involved Africans.

Africans came in here.

They came here on several occasions.

Sometimes these were accidents, sometimes they were on purpose.

And that they had an influence, an actual impact and influence upon the formation of certain American civilizations.

- And when you say pre-Columbus period, what are we talking about?

- We're talking about long before 1492.

It is absurd and only fools can still believe that Columbus discovered the Americas in 1492.

In fact, Columbus never even came to this continent.

Columbus wandered about in the Caribbean islands, just on the very edge of the great civilizations.

Cortes came here in 1519, and he entered Mexico.

When I speak of Mexico in this program, do not confuse it simply with the Mexico we know today.

That was a center of a civilization that spread over great part of this continent.

That when Cortes entered, he had come out of the heart of Europe.

And he said when he entered Native America, when he entered Mexico and he saw the pyramids and the palaces, and the floating gardens and the zoos, and the aqueducts and the running baths, he says, "I have not seen its like in Europe."

- So the main idea in your book, you were dealing with that initially.

- The main idea in my book is that there were visits to this continent from the Old World, that there were visits to the Native Americans in this continent, and those visits included Africans.

And two of the visits of Africans were major and significant, and they affected American civilization.

And American civilization was far more complex, far more advanced than was formerly believed.

Earth satellites a few months ago revealed that the Native Americans long before the coming of the Europeans had the most intricate network of irrigation canals ever discovered in agriculture.

- Okay, let us clear up one thing before we go any further.

In the book, "They Came Before Columbus", you used the terms Negro Nubian, Negro Egyptian.

Why?

- That in some ways is unfortunate.

I found it necessary to use the word Negro.

I no longer use it.

I'm now the editor of "The Journal of African Civilizations", and I use the word Africoid for African type skulls, et cetera.

The reason why I was forced to use the word, A, I had been trained in European anthropology and archeology.

All the books I had read used this term not necessarily with the social implications, which it has here.

They use this term to separate Africoid types of people from Caucasoids or Mongoloid types, Asiatic and European types.

Also, it is a word that has entered neutrally without any social significance in the languages of many people who do not have the same kind of prejudices as people in the Anglo-American and some of the Western nations who became colonial powers.

Like in some languages in Europe, they use the term niger, niger, simply meaning black without any of those connotations.

Furthermore, the problem lay in that the word black could not always be used because if you spoke of a black god, it may not be an African.

You can have a black god who is not an African.

Tezcatlipoca, for example, is a Native American god who is black, but he's not African.

But there is a god, Nahualpilli, who is both black and African.

He's not only black in a ritual or symbolic sense, but he has Africoid features.

So that was the problem I faced and I had to make those connections.

Because when people talked of Nubians, they didn't often realize they were talking about Black people.

- In the first few pages of "They Came Before Columbus", you write about when Columbus himself heard about the possibility of Africans having been here years before.

What about that?

- Yes, so Columbus is the first man to give historical witness and evidence of Africans in America before him.

In his journals, in his letters, you have evidence of this.

He mentions that when he came back from his first voyage, he went to see the Portuguese.

He didn't actually go there on purpose, a storm drew him into Lisbon, Portugal.

He'd been sent out by the Spanish.

The Portuguese invited him to the court and there he learned from the Portuguese, who were moving across Africa, who had set up the first fort among Europeans in Africa, that African sailors had actually crossed over the Western Ocean and had found a landmass in the south.

This was not what Columbus had found.

Columbus found islands, which are now known as the Caribbean islands, but he had not gone on the continental mass.

The Africans had found the actual continental mass.

And the Portuguese insisted that this continental mass in the south was 370 leagues, which is about 15 to 1600 miles away according to whether you count the league as four or four and a half.

There were differences in counting of a league, but it was about 1500 to 1600 miles away from Africa.

And they pointed this out.

And Columbus went back to Spain.

Because the Portuguese promised to help him, he insisted that they should draw a line across the world, and that this line should be drawn 370 leagues away from the Cape Verde islands across Africa, and that Spain would claim lands he had found on the other side.

And if Portuguese found land within that line on the other side, they could claim it.

And Brazil, which was visited by the Africans, was on the other side of the line.

And this line was drawn in 1494.

It was drawn up in June 1494 before any Europeans had come to South America on the basis of African knowledge.

- Let's get down to the crux of the matter.

How did these Africans come to the New World?

- Okay, now one of the things, as I have pointed out in the metallurgy, like the steel, et cetera, in astronomy, et cetera, there is a profound misunderstanding of African capacity.

The Africans had ships, this is one of them.

This is in East Africa.

This ship, this is just a model which I found in Fort Mombasa, in Kenya.

This ship is the seven-tee-tana.

Ships like these, in the 13th century, before Columbus, took elephants to China right across the Indian Ocean.

They had ships like this in East Africa before Christ, but there were ships in North Africa along the Mediterranean that were far more sophisticated than any ships the Europeans had.

European shipping is not even European.

The sail Columbus used comes out of the Arab-African world.

The astrolabe comes out of the Arab-African world.

They found in the desert...

In the period before Columbus, the Africans were using compasses and nautical instruments to navigate the desert.

They had these instruments which were used to navigate the sea.

They've done studies recently of navigation in West Africa, showing the Africans did have boats along the Niger.

The African had boats that could take three camels aboard ship.

They had cabins.

All of these along the Niger.

Which if you go down the Senegambia at a certain point, it opens out into the Atlantic.

And the Africans did have empires with an Atlantic border.

- This is a simple question.

It's gonna sound simple, but you're talking about Black people.

- Yes.

- Okay.

- And on several occasions, Africans were able to make that journey.

If you look at a map of currents, and we will look more closely at this later on in the program, you will see there are three currents that take you from Africa to America.

Africa is half the distance from America as is Europe.

Not only is it half the distance, it is far easier to get from Africa to America because the currents take you automatically.

In other words, you don't have to know of the existence of America.

Even Columbus was not aware of the existence of America.

He came off the North Atlantic.

Columbus thought he was going to India, and he struck out for the latitude of Japan hoping to land in India.

And he swore he was in India.

That is why people like myself are called West Indians.

I'm the Indian he found in the West, and Americans are called American Indians because he thought they were in India.

So that you have these currents which take you automatically.

European ships did not use these currents until the second voyage when Columbus used that knowledge which he got from the Portuguese about Africans.

On the third voyage, sorry.

On the second voyage, Columbus heard from the American Natives in Hispaniola, which is now known as Haiti and San Domingo, that Africans had come to the Native Americans.

The Americans told Columbus that.

He recorded it in his journals that Africans had come to them trading in gold-tipped spears.

Columbus sent samples of those spears.

They were studied, they were surveyed in Spain, and they were found to contain the same ratio of gold, silver, and copper alloys as those found in West African Guinea.

- So were these Africans swept along this current?

- Yes.

- Or did they come purposely?

- Initially it was an accident just like initially Columbus's so-called discovery, rather his coming here in a late period was an accident.

- [Host] What's the name of this current?

- There are several of them.

There's the South Equatorial Current.

There's the North Equatorial Current.

These currents come.

There's a current coming off the Senegambia coast.

There's a current coming off the Cape Verde islands.

There's a current coming up from the southern part of Africa.

These currents all move towards South America, into the Caribbean, into the Gulf of Mexico.

And there's a return current.

And we have evidence that the Africans not only went, but in a late pre-Columbian period they also returned, because we found American things which the Africans brought back.

Just as we have found African things in America, they have found American things which the Africans brought back with them, such as the cotton in the Cape Verde islands.

- Are these currents still currents, still in existence?

- Oh yes, for thousands of years these currents have been in existence.

This has been tested.

200 small boats, some of them smaller than the major African boats, have crossed the Atlantic.

There have been tests.

Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian explorer, got Africans to build a ship used long before the birth of Christ, used in Egypt and Ethiopia.

And this ship was made of papyrus reed, and the scientists said it couldn't float.

And Heyerdahl insisted in the Africans.

Abdullah Djibrine built this ship and it crossed the Atlantic successfully to America.

- [Host] From what part of Africa did these Africans come?

- The Africans came at various times from different areas.

The one that I want to deal with because most of the evidence exists for this, is Africans who came out of the Egyptian-Nubian world, I'll call it the Egypto-Nubian world, around 800 years before Christ.

I'll explain to you how I arrived at that date, how they arrived at that date, and I'll show you the types of evidence.

Now, I want you first to look at this head, this stone head.

- [Host] Okay.

- Now, this head, they found a dozen of these heads.

They found them in a very specific area.

Before we go to the area, look at the head carefully.

The very generous type of lips that you find in the tropical areas, the Africoid type.

The broad nose with the very broad flared type of nostril and the kind of flattened base.

The browridge, and look at the helmet.

That's a very peculiar type of helmet.

It does not occur anywhere else in America.

It has a strap along the face, falling along the ear, and it has a circular ear plug.

Those helmets, exact type of helmet were found in the Egyptian world in this period.

What period?

The period that has been dated by carbon 14 datings.

Now, how do they arrive at that dating?

They found these heads, and I want to show you the map now.

So it's to show you precisely where the datings were made by scientists.

- Okay.

- Now look at that map carefully.

That's the Gulf of Mexico.

I want to remind the audience, and I want to make it quite clear that when we're talking about Mexico we are not just simply talking about Mexico today.

This is something that happened 3,000 years ago, that's very recent in history.

America was peopled 50,000 years ago across the Bering Strait.

This is very recent in American history.

The United States is only 200 years old.

It spun the wheels.

So do not assume for a moment that we're talking about something outside of the United States.

That is a center of civilization that occurred around 1,000 years before Christ in that specific area.

And I want to go back to that map, because in that specific area I'll show you where they found stone heads.

Now you see that thing looking like a basin there.

That is the center of the first major American civilization.

And specific points marked by diamonds.

You may not be able to see the diamond-triangles so easily here, but in that specific area, at Tres Zapotes, at San Lorenzo, in Veracruz, and at La Venta, they found a dozen African type stone heads.

Vast heads, six to nine feet high, weighing from 10 to 40 tons.

The hugest things ever found in American sculpture, built of pure stone.

Stone, which had to be taken from quarries 60 to 80 miles downriver.

Suddenly these things begin to appear, and four of them appear at the place called La Venta within that basin area.

La Venta was the holy capital of the Olmec civilization.

And on the religious platform where those people worshiped, they found a wooden religious platform in which four of the heads were embedded.

The stone could not be dated, but the wooden platform was inextricably linked up with the stone.

The archeologists took nine carbon samples.

They dated it.

It gave a dating 814 plus or minus 134 BC.

Which means that anything between around 900-and-something BC right down to about 618 BC, you have some strange foreign movement, movement of foreigners into that area.

They not only found this type of head.

They not only found these type of features.

They not only found this type of helmet, but they found terra-cottas, that is clay portraits of Africans that did not have the helmet, where you could see the texture of hair quite distinct from the Native American head, because the Native American was an Asiatic coming across the Bering Strait.

And you have lots of sculptures of that Asiatic figure, and this figure was quite distinct.

And they found in the dry areas of the Olmec world, skeletons that could be linked with Continental African types, Africoid types.

Professor Rosinski, a Polish skull expert showed that these were African type skeletons.

- [Host] What purpose did these stone heads serve?

- They were religious.

They were the sorts of things that you do even today.

You make statues to commemorate things.

You see a series of those statues there.

The one in the middle is not American.

The one in the middle is an African king belonging to the same period.

He's Taharqa who reigned somewhere around 700 to 654 BC, and before him there was a whole line of African kings in Egypt.

Because that is a period from about 1054 BC right down to about 800 BC, you have Africans and Libyans reigning together, having a sort of what is known as the Libyco-Nubian dynasties.

And then you have the Nubian dynasties which run from 800 to 654 BC.

So during that whole period covered by the carbon 14 datings where Olmec culture and civilization appears in America, you have these people appearing in the Egypto-Nubian world.

And what is significant is that the same place and the same time these heads and skeletons and clay portraits appear with Africoid type hair and features and helmets, you have things suddenly occurring in the American world that do not occur before.

The first pyramid is built in America in that period.

It appears on the very same religious platform where the Africoid heads are from.

For the first time, the Americans are making these huge statues, when before they were making small things largely out of clay.

For the first time, they're working in monumental stone.

For the first time, the Americans are moving massive blocks of stone from quarries 80 miles away downriver.

Nobody, no one in the ancient world mastered the art of transporting vast blocks of stone downriver for sculpture as the Egyptians.

The Americans had never done it before.

And suddenly they're using a ritual orientation, north-south axis for their pyramids, for their religious platforms.

The north-south axis is an axis that was used only by the Egyptians at that time.

That north-south axis is absolutely important.

The Egyptians were so the African type I'm talking about because the Africans, they're now establishing, "New York Times" reported last year on March the first that they found Egyptian hieroglyphs in Africa before it moves up into Egypt.

And Egypt is in Africa, but south of Egypt, that is among the Black Africans.

They found there the palace symbols, the temples.

The religious and political symbols are found in the southern part of Egypt among the Ethiopians before it moves up later into Egypt.

The pyramids are built.

The most fantastic engineering ever done in the world until our present day were built by Africans.

- These stone heads, were there any non-African stone heads?

- There was one figure that was not as large as these.

He was on a slab of stone, and he had a beard and he had an aquiline nose, and he had a headdress which showed him to be Phoenician.

Now, the Phoenician figure is very important because both in the Egyptian world at that time, the Black Nubians were protecting the Phoenicians from the Assyrians.

The Phoenicians had also moved.

Princess Elissar had traveled with 300 Phoenicians down into North Africa, and they began intermarrying among Black Africans in North Africa just on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, from about 1000 BC right down until Carthage was built on the basis of that civilization.

Recently, archeological studies in Carthage showed that Carthaginian civilization, which included Hannibal and all those fantastic navies, that they were largely African.

Now they study the skeletons.

They have found it's a largely African civilization.

So all of these things were happening around this time.

And you get this Carthaginian type figure, this Phoenician type figure whom you find in Carthage of that period, and you find in the Nubian-Egyptian world of that period.

You see him among these Africoid types.

And people, because they're accustomed to the modern world, which is only 500 years old since Columbus.

They're accustomed to the Black being a slave and thought of as a primitive.

And they saw this fair-skinned figure with the aquiline nose beside him.

They said, "He's the master and these are his slaves."

If you go to the historical period, you find just the opposite, that that Phoenician was a hired navigator, because the Phoenicians were involved in the import and export trade of the Egyptians and the Nubians, and they were up and down the Mediterranean.

In fact, just a few years after this period, around 600 BC, we have historical records of the Phoenicians circling Africa, going right across the Atlantic and circling Africa.

- Okay.

Back to this controversy.

There is more to this controversy in connection with the stone heads.

Can you tell us some more about that?

The kettle pots, I think, it deals with.

- Yes, there are people who claim that those are football helmets or kettle cans, all sorts of things in order to reduce the significance of these figures.

But more important is the attempt by traditional conservative Americanists to dismiss this whole thing and say this is a mystery.

I was at the conference in Arizona recently.

And a Dr. Thompson who's written a book on the Mayan, he admitted after strong questioning by me that there was every human variety in pre-Columbian America.

But he said just a few minutes later, he's absolutely sure the African was not among them.

So I said, how could you have every human variety?

It doesn't include the African.

Isn't the African a human?

This is the sort of contradiction in which conservative Americanists are involved.

- We'll continue this next week, Dr. Ivan Van Sertima.

Thank you.

For those of you who are interested in finding out more about this kind of information, the book is called "They Came Before Columbus".

Dr. Ivan Van Sertima.

And that's our program.

Good evening.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues)