(light upbeat music) - Good evening, and welcome to the second part of our interview with Dr. Ivan Van Sertima, anthropologist and historian and author of "They Came Before Columbus."

Dr. Van Sertima, in part one, we talked about how Africans came to the new world.

Can we continue along this line, please?

- Yes, I was speaking about the type of currents that take Africans into the new world.

Now, I lived in South America.

I was born in South America on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, and every year, in fact, I realized that when I was a boy of 10, that many things would come in on the currents along the Atlantic, and some of the things that I found came from Africa.

Scientists have found, botanists have found, for example, that the bottle gourd, which is African, can float by itself to America.

- [Listervelt] The bottle gourd?

- The bottle gourd, yes.

It's known in botany as Lagenaria siceraria.

Now, several things come out of Africa, not just men and ships, so that a man, once you enter that current, once you enter one of those currents, you automatically come to America.

In fact, that is the way South America was rediscovered by Europeans, Alvares Cabral, the Portuguese explorer was going along Africa, winds came up and blew his ships to South America.

It's so close, really.

So that this was a kind of journey that it could have been made thousands of years ago.

There is no difficulty about the journey.

The reason why people thought it was impossible is because it involved Africans.

And since Africans were thought to be the lowest human being, nobody could think they had the capacities or the abilities.

That is the reason why I am not only concerned with establishing this kind of contact and this kind of influence on American civilization, but showing what were the true potentials of Africans before the conquest?

Now, not only do you have these currents, but you have evidence of boats.

You have boats that take you, the Africans had been developing boats in the Niger.

They'd been developing boats on the Mediterranean.

Now people have asked why should they move out of the Mediterranean?

But if you study the period in which these herds are found, in which the African presence is found for the first time in America, you will find there was a war on.

Asia was moving down, you see this ship, for example here, this ship was used before Christ.

- [Listervelt] When was this particular ship built?

- [Dr. Van Sertima] This was built in 1969 by Africans who crossed from North Africa at the Port of Safi, a North African port, and went right across the Atlantic moving more than 2,000 miles until they reached the edge of Barbados.

Now, this is something that scientists said was impossible to get water locked.

It was sinked, and they took the papyrus reed and they put it in a laboratory tank and it sank and Hidal said "Nonsense, the Queen Mary's made of iron, "and if I took a piece of the Queen Mary "and put it in laboratory tank, it would also sink."

- [Listervelt] This ship is made of what now?

- [Dr. Van Sertima] This is made of papyrus reed.

- [Listervelt] Oh, exactly what is that?

- [Dr. Van Sertima] It has no nails or anything.

It's a long sort of fibrous kind of thing.

- [Listervelt] That comes from what?

- It comes from papyrus.

That is the thing in itself.

- Okay.

- It grows like that.

- Okay, that's what I'm getting to.

- And after this, the Egyptians built many marvelous ships.

They even affected Phoenician shipping and the Phoenicians, who I spoke of the last time, many of them became black and mixed with blacks because they moved into the black world.

They became friends with the blacks, et cetera.

In fact, a Phoenician King was executed by the Assyrian Asiatics.

because of his conspiracy with the black kings.

Now, bear in mind these terms are difficult to remember for some people, but it's important to see the picture of the period.

That Assyrians started to move down the Asiatics who were led by the great powered Assyrians.

Not to be confused with the modern Syrians.

The Assyrians moved down and started to attack various people.

They attacked the Jews.

The blacks came and saved the Jews.

It's recorded even in the Bible that 700 BC Taharqa, the Ethiopian King, it's mentioned in the king in a chapter and verse in Kings in the Bible, where the Ethiopian king Taharqa came and saved the Jews on the Hezekiah.

When the Assyrians and Taharqa was attacking, and you have the blacks also saving not only the Jews, the blacks protected the Phoenicians, the blacks fought against the Syrians and pushed them and kept them at bay for a long time until eventually the Assyrians invaded Egypt and pushed the blacks back in the south and there was a north to south movement for quite a while.

Lots of battles going on, but because of this war, a lot of shipping, a lot of shipping traffic would push west down the Mediterranean towards the North Atlantic.

And because the Phoenicians and blacks had something going called Karchedon later to be called Carthage in the North Atlantic, they began moving their ships down, getting metals, which were so critical in the war.

They were getting these things copper and to make bronze, copper and tin, and they have evidence of Phoenician ships in the North Atlantic as early as this period.

So an accident could have occurred.

The ships did not intend to come to America, but they were well equipped to go on other journeys in the North Atlantic.

An accident occurred that drove them into the Mid-Atlantic, and then they moved along those currents into the Gulf of Mexico.

- We have a lot of other areas to cover, but what are some of the other evidences of African contact with America that you draw from?

Influences?

- Well, influences, the influence of Africans.

- Influences.

- Yes.

- Okay.

- They, you have, for example, they have found an American cotton.

I don't want to go into the complexities of it, but I have spent a whole chapter on that where you show that the American cotton, which has 26 chromosomes, 13 of the chromosomes are African, showing a marriage occurred between an American wild cotton and an African diploid cotton.

Botany, linguistic.

They found many African words in the languages of some of the South American people and some of the middle American people.

Leo Wiener a Harvard linguist in the 1920s established that.

Metallurgy.

They found that Africans...

They found that Native Americans in parts of the Caribbean were using African spears.

Metals which were forged by Africans, which were not in the Caribbean, which were never made by Native Americans.

This was established by Columbus himself in Spain.

He showed that these were African spears.

The mixture of alloys were African.

In the area of engineering.

They found certain like for example in the Olmec period, they found the ritual orientation of certain buildings and the kind of architecture that was involved and the kind of techniques that were involved were identical.

The use of the same heavy transport techniques, the same methods of moving the mass stones, the same method of quarrying.

You found evidences like that.

And what is most astonishing is that the very place where I'm talking about where you find these heads, and the skeletons, and the clay portraits, they found an African script.

Now, that is the most astonishing thing because most people do not even know that the Africans have several scripts.

They know of Egyptian, they know of the Meroitic, but they're not aware that Africa actually produced several scripts.

The Manden script or Manding script, nothing to do with the later Mandingo was found at La Venta.

- Do you have an example of that here?

- I don't have an example of that here, but I want to show you a more recent example.

Something which I myself found, which was translated by Harvard and by the Libyan Department of Antiquities in North Africa.

Now, look at this carefully.

- [Listervelt] Okay.

- It's difficult to see the whole of it, but perhaps you can pan across it so that you could see the whole of it.

Now, this note that there's an Arabic reading at the bottom, it runs right across a pool.

Now, you can actually go and see this.

You can actually go to United States, Virgin Island, St. John, the Reef Bay Valley, and on a dry day when the water does not cover it, you can look along the water line and you will see those markings.

Now, since 1888, about 100 years ago, anthropologists and archeologists have been going to that spot and they were looking above it at various markings, which they could not understand.

But when I got there, I noticed there were dots and crescent.

You see those things at the edges away from the sort of spiral figures on the head and so on the little dots and crescents.

- [Listervelt] Right.

- Now, there was peculiar formations that are extremely regular, and I was given permission by the Virgin Islands government.

I put my finger in there for two days, got the exact sort of depressions, took away the encrustations and the moss, put chalk in them, and they were photographed, and then they were taken.

Barry Fell at Harvard and the Libyan Department of Antiquities established that this is the 59th branch of a Libyan script and that this was used before Columbus.

Some of it was even used before Islam.

It was used before Columbus, and it has been given a translation.

It's right above a pool and it has a specific translation that was given.

- What is that translation?

- It is plunging the cleanse and dissolve away impurity.

This is water for ritual ablution before devotion.

- [Listervelt] You're saying that that's what that says.

- That is what that says, and they have shown this script.

It's not something you can deny.

It's not something that you can compute because they have shown the markings, these dot and crescent formations, they have established it to be a script in North Africa.

It was used before Columbus.

It was used by people in southern Libya.

It was used by blacks in the Sudan.

It was used by the Tuareg Berbers in Mali.

It was used by a 13th century cliff dwelling people in Mali.

All of these various black and mixed peoples made use of that script.

And so you have evidences like these.

- What about mummification?

- Well, mummification was found in South America.

Now that map, which we showed you at the beginning, that map, which has a sort of basin that leads down into South America, that shows you that in America, and we are very confused about the word America because when we think of America, we think of a very little place.

The United States, that's only about a quarter of the American continent.

America is one continent.

It's only at the beginning of the 19th century that it got a little canal between the two Americas.

You have connections between those two continents.

They have found, for example, the Olmec culture, I talk about links up with Chavin culture in South America.

And in South America they have found Egyptian influences.

- [Listervelt] Where would the Olmec culture be today?

The Olmec area?

- That is the Gulf of Mexico.

You can go to La Venta.

All you will see there now is the pyramid.

You'll see almost nothing else.

All these heads have been carted away.

They're in museums, Museum of Anthropology in Mexico.

One of them is in Washington.

They're all over the place.

But to come back to mummification.

- Right.

- Because one is so overwhelmed by the facts that one is gathered about this over the years, but mummification, they found very clear evidence of this in South America, the exact formula which nobody else in the world knew or could repeat the exact Egyptian formula.

Professor Rueda found that the same substances in the same combination, the same formula was being used in South America to mummify some of their things.

Now this was not found so easily in all Mexico because the area at La Venta is so swampy that the humidity is so corrosive that these things did not survive.

But they found it in the sculptures.

They found Egyptian type sculptures with the shroud, with the type of hair dress, with arms crossing like this with the fingers open.

They opened the fingers so that the dead could not grab onto their souls.

This was a sort of myth or ritual, and you find this repeated in the Olmec world.

Quite a number of rituals in fact that were Egyptian.

You find in the Olmec world the double crown rituals of the kings, the use of purpose and index of royalty.

- [Listervelt] In the book you talked about, you talk about a finding by the University of Oklahoma.

I think it is.

What about that?

- Yes, in 1963, the University of Oklahoma discovered that one of the Egyptian mummies, Princess Mene, was so well preserved that you could take some of the cells thousands of years after you could take some of the cells and transplant it in a body and it would still be able to be operative.

That is, it is almost as if you had like in the sorts of things they do today where they take out kidneys, et cetera.

Some of the cells were so well preserved.

It's almost as if they had lived in a block of ice as it were, that they could be transplanted into a body.

- [Listervelt] What about the influence of the African calendar on the New World calendar?

- Well, that is very complex because the New World had several calendars and Egyptians had several calendars, but one of them, one of them, contained identical symbols and also a body of things that indicated that it was Egyptian.

I don't remember the details because it's some years since I wrote the book, but the calendars are complex because you have so many types of calendars, but one of them, as Abe Harvas has established, one of them was identical with Egyptian and indicated an influence.

- You talked earlier about Egypt and Nubia.

What was the relationship between Egypt and Nubia?

- Well, the thing that you have to understand about that, you have to understand the early beginnings of Egypt.

It has now been established that Egypt in its first 1,000 years at least was almost completely and totally black African.

Those were the critical years.

Those were the years in which the pyramids were built.

Those are the years of high science in Egypt.

Those were the years in which the political, the administrative, the scientific structures were laid down.

Now in later periods, because Egypt had 3000 years of history, no people have ever had such a long history.

All civilizations come to an end and in a later period when you have invasions and you have other peoples coming in, the whole thing becomes mixed up and you have to study the periods closely to know which is the African element and which is not.

But in the critical years of the civilization, the African influence is dominant and overwhelming.

- Okay.

You have an example here, I think of mathematics developed by Africans, if I'm correct.

- Yeah.

I think.

- Now that... - I think we're getting a shot of it.

Okay.

- Now that if you could lift it slightly to go along the sort of bone, that's a bone that was found in the Congo.

It's known as the Ishango bone, and if you go further across, you will see it in a diagram indicating the first use of numbers in the world that is 8,000 years old.

That is the beginning of mathematics in Africa and the beginning of mathematics in the world.

You see later in Egypt, other developments during the African dominated period.

Now you see it is this, and I must stress this again and again.

We have a very, very poor idea of the African, both blacks and whites because blacks are just as influenced by the propaganda of history as any other people.

We have such a poor impression of the African because all of the studies of Africa have focused upon little people, people scratching the soil, people being worried by plague and disease and starvation, that we think that that is the African.

That's a small part of the African, and even in "Roots," the same sort of myth emerges.

You see this little Kunta Kinte coming outta some idyllic little village on The Gambia.

That's just a small part of the African.

There are other rooms to the African.

The African embraced all the civilizations.

Now they're discovering a whole range of complexity in the African.

- Well, lemme ask you this.

Why is this information just coming out or is it just coming out?

- It is only just coming out for two reasons.

The one reason that shouldn't arouse most passion is the fact the archeologists are only now catching up.

You see, archeology is fairly new.

Serious archeology is fairly new.

Carbon-14 was not used until 1946.

And Africa has been such a fragmented and shattered continent through the invasions and the disruption and the conquest that you can't go and pick up books from libraries and say, well, this is African history.

So most people who go out to Africa, they start for the simplest and easiest thing to study.

They find a tribe between five people or 100 people.

It's very easy.

It's not a complex society.

So you get the impression that that's what Africa is about.

Simple people.

And then they split up Africa and then eventually there are wars among people who shouldn't be in a certain kind of structure that they have made for them.

And they said, you see the African, he's chaotic.

He's never accustomed to great government.

So one reason is archeology.

The other reason obviously is cultural racism.

That you have to understand that after the African was turned into slave, it was absolutely important to make one's conscience.

The conscience of the European had to be assuaged.

They had to say to themselves, "Well, look, I have a right "to make this man to slave because he is primitive.

"He's not as good as I am.

"I have to look after him.

"Poor fellow, he's just a child in the world."

As Albert Schweitzer said, "The African is my brother, "but he's my younger brother by several centuries."

That sort of insult was thrown at the African people and people had to believe that the books told them it was true.

They didn't see the steel, they didn't see the astronomy, they didn't see the mathematics.

They didn't see the engineering.

They didn't see any of these things.

- You mentioned astronomy just then.

The last piece of illustration we want to deal with will deal with the star system- - Now look at this.

- [Listervelt] Okay.

- And it's a pity that we can't get a whole picture, but this is the Dogon, a West African people.

Giving you a map, a chart of the orbit and trajectories of an invisible star.

The Russians have recently discovered.

They're extremely secretive.

They have written me after I wrote, they came before Columbus, the New York Times made a big fuss of it.

Russians wrote me from their academy asking me for some information, but when I wrote them back and asked them for other information, they wouldn't give it to me.

But this the Russians discovered recently that the Africans had telescopes in ancient times.

Now that first one, the one on the left is African.

The one on the right is what our earth satellites produce in the 20th century.

They are identical.

Now, that's a white dwarf.

It's invisible.

Only with very skillful astronomy, complex astronomy.

And Africans did that 700 years ago that you could work out this kind of thing.

Do you know how they've tried to explain that?

They've written Kenneth Brecher, Massachusetts Institute of Technology said, "Africans have no business "knowing any of this."

And in England, Robert Temple, Royal Astronomical Observatory wrote a whole book, "The Sirius Mystery," because this is Sirius B the invisible star, the companion of Sirius A. Stating that space people came down and gave the Africans that knowledge.

So that is the way these things are being explained because of the profound contempt for the African ancestry.

- Well lemme let me just ask you this.

What is it about the mind, the psyche of some white scholars that compel them, that compels them to deny contributions?

- Part of it is habit.

Part of it is habit.

I have found to my astonishment that even black scholars behave like that.

I was astonished, for example, after I pointed out, and I'm not going to call his name because I don't want to embarrass him.

I pointed out to a famous African historian that he was wrong about Hannibal.

That there were recent archeological discoveries that he doesn't know about showing that the Carthaginian civilization was largely African.

Even the aristocracy was largely African, that they have found that the so-called Punic figure or Phoenician figure, which was supposed to be dominant.

There are very few elements of that, and they've checked it with skulls and skeletons in the Phoenician capitals, Tyre and Sidon.

And they haven't found that type in Carthage easily.

They found Africa type.

And I said, look at this, this coin, it has Hannibal on one side and it has the elephant in the other, and it's a negro figure.

Africanoid, sorry.

He says, "Well, you can't tell.

"It may be an elephant rider.

"It doesn't have to be Hannibal."

But I said, "Look, these people never made coins "of anyone but kings "or people in great authority.

"They never made coins out of little people."

Now suddenly they're starting to make coins out of elephant riders when that is Hannibal's victory with the elephants.

So both the archeological evidence points to it as well as the coin with Africanoid types.

And there's several coins with the Africanoid types, not the Phoenician type, and on the other side is the elephant struck in Carthage, and yet he would deny this.

It's a habit of mind, it's an assumption built upon years of a certain historical propaganda that this man is really a man, a half naked savage with bows and arrows going in the jungle.

Africa has less jungle than any other continent comparable with its land space.

There is almost no African kingdom or empire that was in the jungle.

The Mali Empire had no jungle.

The Egyptian empires, all of these things are not jungle empires.

Even most of these great West African, the Ghana, Sangai, et cetera, very little of that was jungle.

- So if we can summarize, if it is possible to summarize (chuckles).

- Yes.

- What do we know?

What can we say briefly about Africans in early America?

- What we could say is that there were several, there is evidence in many fields, botany, epigraphy, which is scripts, sculpture, linguistics, metallurgy.

In many fields, there's evidence of an African presence in various historical periods.

Some that came by accident, some came on purpose as in the Mandingo journeys in the 14th century.

We can show that in the very earliest period that Africans not only came because that is not important because other people came here as well.

They not only came, but they left a mark an influence upon a significant and advanced civilization.

And the the other point I want to make, and I want to close on this, is that it is only because we have thought of the African as a primitive, and there are African primitives, there are European primitives.

I've lived among European primitives.

I've lived all over the world except Asia.

And I've lived in villages in Europe, which today are more primitive than some villages in Africa still.

- Why don't you hear about those?

- Yeah, because people don't write.

Anthropologists don't go into European villages to write about European villages.

Anthropologists like to go among, so-called exotic peoples to study little tribal dances and little gestures and kinship systems.

So to give the impression, this is what the world was like at one stage among us.

So if you want to know your beginnings, you have to go back to these simple peoples.

We are the complex peoples and these are the simple peoples.

The people without technology.

Well, that is the greatest fiction that the Africans lack technology.

- Our time is running out.

You have undertaken a great task.

What is the point of it all?

- The point of it all is to transform the black psyche.

We have got to stop thinking of ourselves simply in terms of primitives and slaves.

We have got to walk outta this small room of history, this small room in consciousness into the larger house of man.

That is the purpose.

- Okay, okay.

Our time is real short now.

(chuckles) What made you write this book?

- Well that would take me a long time to answer, but I could sum it up by saying that I've always been haunted.

- I mean, when did you decide that you were gonna write this book?

- I decided to write that in 1971.

I began by writing against the thesis because I didn't believe in it.

And when I finished writing against it, I discovered evidence that it was indeed a fact.

- [Listervelt] What kinds of obstacles have you run into in the process of writing "They Came Before Columbus"?

- Well there are certain discoveries that I came upon, which I found great difficulty in pursuing, like the Smithsonian Institution, for example, who blocked the work I was doing in the Virgin Islands, where they found two African pre-Colombian skeletons.

- Why did they block it?

- They blocked it for reasons of their own.

I was to discover later what those reasons are, but I'm not at liberty to talk about that.

- Do you think that racism would be as rampant today if the world knew the true black man and black woman?

- I think that one needs more than that.

I think that peoples as a whole have to realize that no great civilizations came through any pure race, that people contributed to each other, that people owe a debt to each other, and that is the most important thing.

- And we owe a heavy debt to you, Dr. Ivan Van Sertima, author of "They Came Before Columbus."

The book is called, "They Came Before Columbus."

That's our program.

Good evening.

(upbeat music)