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The Gladwin thesis will serve as a very important piece in the puzzle of the peopling of the early Americas. It is, however, one aspect in the history of the Americas prior to the Columbus expeditions and one that still does not fully address the question of the African ocean voyages to this region in ancient and medieval times. It is believed in some circles that the Chinese mounted maritime expeditions to the Americas before Columbus did. While it is very likely that they did, they were, however, not operating in the Atlantic. Yet in spite of the evidence and in spite of the fact that the Atlantic is by no means as vast as the Pacific, there still remains a strong conspiracy of silence regarding the African maritime capability and of their exploits in the Americas.

Below are excerpts from Dr Ivan Van Sertima’s address to the Smithsonian Institute. Van Sertima has over the years accumulated and synthesised an overwhelming body of evidence showing the presence of African people in the Americas long before Columbus and even the Chinese ventured into this region.
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I’m not the first person to suggest there were Africans in America before Columbus…..Columbus himself was the first to suggest it. He says in his Journal of the Second Voyage, and this is quoted in many places, not just in his journal, that when he was in Haiti, which was then called Espanola, the Native Americans came to him and told him that black-skinned people had come from the south and southeast in boats, trading in gold-tipped metal spears. Here it is recorded in Raccolta, Parte I, Volume I: “Columbus wanted to find out what the Indians of Espanola had told him, that there had come from the south and southeast, negro people who bought those spear points made from a metal which they called “guanin”, of which he had sent samples to the king and queen for assay and which was found to have 32 parts – 18 of gold, 6 of silver, and 8 of copper” Now he may or may not have believed the story, but Columbus was meticulous enough to send samples of these spears back on a mail boat to Spain to be assayed and the ratio of gold, silver and copper alloys were found to be identical. Not just similar. IDENTICAL with spears then being forged in African Guinea.

Ther are at least a dozen or European explorers of the Columbus contact period who, within the first 50 years or so of the European encounter, saw black Africans among the Native Americans. Ferdinand Columbus, one of the sons of Columbus, reported in a book on the life of Columbus, that his father told him that he had seen Blacks north of the place we now call Honduras. Vasco Nunez de Balboa in Sept 1513, coming down the slopes of Quarequa which is near Darien, which we now call Panama, saw two Black men who were captured by the Native Americans, and he asked them, where did these Black men come from. They were not Black “Indians” or he wouldn’t have asked that. In fact, he used the word “negro”…….and the Native Americans said, “We do not know, all that we know is that they are in a large settlement nearby and they are waging war with us.” Peter Martyr, the first important historian of the European contact period, reports on this meeting……Martyr refers to them as Ethiopian pirates, he uses the word Ethiopian which was then a general word for African. Lopez de Gomara describes some of the Blacks they found in that area …. I quote him.” These people are identical with the Negroes we have seen in Guinea. L’Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg, reporting on Blacks in Panama speaks of two indigenous people, the Mandinga (Black Skin) and the Tule (red skin)…..Michael Coe, who is no friend of this thesis, nevertheless noted, in a letter to one of my students, that Alonzo Ponce had reported on Blacks landing on the American coast in pre-Spanish times. Ponce uses the term “Moors” here as a deliberate and racial reference. He speaks of a boatload of “Moors” who landed off Campeche in pre-Columbian Mexico and terrorised the natives. Alphonse de Quatrefages, author of The Human Species, speaks of distinct Black tribes among the Americanss – Black Communities like the Jamassi of Florida, the Chirruas of Brazil, and a people n St Vincent. He cites the works of Capt. Kerhallet. He actually presents a map drawn by the sea-captain Kerhallet, a map of independent black settlements along the South American coasts, where there were landfalls by Black Africans.

Ther were other reports and sightings. There is Father Pane, who speaks of Black “Guanini”, the gold merchants. There is Riva Palacio who speaks of the Jarras and Guabas, corresponding to the Diara and the Kabba, two Mandingo clans. We have evidence from the Smithsonian itself, the discovery of African skeletons in the US Virgin Islands. I think it was in 1974 or 1975….They said these skeletons were morphologically African (found) in a pre-Columbian grave at Hull Bay.

Linguistic evidence

The word for spears and several variants of this word appear in both language areas. Among the Mandinga we have “ghana, kane, kani, kanine, Ghanin”. In the Caribbean we have “goanna, caona, guani, guanine, guanine, etc.” There are even variants far removed from the “guanine” complex, which are almost identical. Another used to refer to gold, and metal with gold alloys, was, as Las Casas, reports, “nocay” or “nozay”. This is close to the Mande nege (pronounced nuh-GAY) and nexe (pronounced nuh-KHUH) which stands for any kind of metal or jewelry.

Botanical Evidence

The botanists have provided further corroborative evidence. The Portuguese were in West Africa, since about 1450, in fact before. The Portuguese found a cotton growing plentifully in West Africa and they took this cotton and planted it into the Cape Verde Islands in 1462. 30 years before Columbus. They assumed it to be indigenously African. When it was studied in the 20th century, they found it was not African at all. It was gossypium hirsutum var punctatum, which was grown in pre-Columbian C’bbean and in parts of South American. It is not African, yet it was transplanted to Africa and was growing plentifully there before Columbus. Not only that we’ve found zea mays in pre-Columbian Africa. American zea mays! Prof. MDW Jeffreys of Witwatersrand University, a brilliant South African linguist, showed how American maize had travelled to Africa. It is distinct from African sorghum. It had moved across the African continent and he traced it down meticulously through linguistic footprints. And the Russians picked it up as it moved from Africa into Asia…..They showed that American zea mays had entered Asia before the time of the Columbus voyages. All this we ignore.

……Take the banana! The banana is not African. It is an Asian cultigen. However, we do not find the banana on the Pacific coast, the “Asiatic” side of South America. It is found in east Peru and along the Amazon – the “Atlantic” side. We found the medieval Peruvians digging up bodies and reburying them, feeding them symbolically with certain fruit. In the graves of the reburied dead, in late pre-Columbian strata in South America, we find the banana….. All the African, as well as the Arab-African words for the banana run through the South American languages in recognisable form….There is also the plantain variety, the sister of the banana…..One thing is clear. There was no native South American banana. That has been clearly established. Its appearance in pre-Spanish Peruvian graves and the ubiquity of its sister, the plantain, along the Amazon in 1513, cannot be explained by an introduction after Columbus.
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What I have done was to introduce you to merely some of the evidence of pre-Columbian Africans in the Americas. However, this is only the linguistic, historical and botanical evidence, in Part II I will quote excerpts from Dr Van Sertima’s speech in which he throws light on another aspect in which Africans have been routinely been ignored and dismissed – the maritime capability itself.

this is great stuff!...ivan van sertima has done such great research!

GIMME SOME MORE


Keep it coming man!

This is what the Soca rat was referring to in his post People who looked like me discovered America.
We had this same exact dissucsion and he quoted all the infomation u just posted.

Yes, but I chose to go in a little more detail Vann Sertima's discoveries. I believe Soca Rat placed more emphasis upon the Gladwin thesis that what was done in the Atlantic by Van Sertima, Wiener, Wangara, Von Wuthenau and others

van sertima
clr james
ja rogers
chancelor williams
chiek anta diop
george gm james
yosef benjochanan
moore, sanders-African Presence In the Americas from AWP African World Press
las Casas- The destruction of the Indies.

is that a book.. i know casas was the voice the said let go to Africa for slave labor after the native indian population were dying..

so if that i book i would intrested to see what his excuses, were for basicly starting the atlantik slave trade.

he is an interesting fellow

For real

yes Bartholomew De las Casas
he was a Spanish man of de cloth that changed his tune when he saw and wrote about the atrocities and genocide of the Amerindians. VERY GOOD reading

Here are some other excerpts from Van Sertima's Address to the Smithsonian
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Ocean Travel

Now the ocean always seem to be an impassable barrier to travel and that is why conventional anthropologists have assumed that Africans could not make it. First of all, because we were studying primitives we assumed that Africans only had dugout canoes and could not cross oceans. That is one of the things I believed until I was 30. I was brought upon Tarzan. I did not know that Africa had two of the longest rivers in the world (the Nile dwarfs the Amazon) and that a lot of their trade was along those rives and that the French and others had noted huge boats, not just the canoe, of 70 tons burthen, trading daily along the Niger. And the Africans didn’t just sail on lakes and rivers. They had ocean-going craft. Heyerdahl tested one of these – an ancient pre-Christian craft. Heyerdahl felt that the sweep and curve of the ship, the sail, the great steering oar, suggested that these ships wee designed for ocean travel, not just confined to lakes and rivers. Scientists mocked at Heyerdahl. A papyrus reed boat? Nonsense! If you take a craft of papyrus reeds and put it on the ocean, it would soon get waterlogged and sink! And they actually tested this hypothesis. They built a tank and they put papyrus reed in the tank and it sank. But Heyerdahl reasoned thus: If one were take a piece of the Queen Mary, which is made of iron, and put it in a tank, it would also sink. So he rebuilt the ancient African reed boat, which he called the RA. He got the Buduma people on Lake Chad, under Abdullah Djibrine, to build the boat….And in 1969 the Africans set out from Safi in North Africa…venturing into the vast Atlantic. They had studied paintings on the walls of ancient temples. They used these paintings as models for the reconstruction. The Africans one or two mistakes. They made a mistake with the great steering oar which functions as a rudder. Eventually the rudder broke. But that was not the end of the journey. That made it even more remarkable. The boat in the final stages drifted to America by itself. It got as far as Barbados. How? The answer is simple to those who know the sea. So few anthropologists had bothered to learn even the basic lessons of oceanography. They just assumed that the Atlantic Ocean was a vast wilderness of wind and wave and the peoples along the Atlantic Ocean could not make contact with each other because it was a dead sea, a forbidden zone, until the caravels of Columbus came along. We have found, in fact, three powerful currents in the Atlantic which take you automatically, irresistibly, into the Americas unless you have engines to break the almost magnetic pull of the water………
I have not claimed, and this is something I really resent, the accusation that I claimed that Africans founded the first significant American civilisation……..There are one or two people who have stated that. Not me. I have never said so. Aboriginal or Native Americans were here for thousands of years. How could migrants crossing the oceans, save those who came later in a massive movement of millions, TOTALLY alter the face of their civilisation. I pointed to specific influences which the evidence seemed to suggest. Alien groups, however small, migrants from outside, can impact significantly on a native civilisation. This is true of all the world’s civilisations. Whether they be Africa, Asian, or European, they are affected by other civilisations…..The only peoplel who are not easily affected are primitives. They live in an impervious glass bubble. That’s why they remain fairly static and unchanged for thousands of years. In civilisation, though, there is a greater richness and variety and complexity due to the fact that civilisations reach out and draw things into their system….They make it their own. They have their own but they draw incessantly from others. This is natural. It has nothing to do with cultural inferiority or superiority.

So far we have been talking about African voyages in the 14th and 15th centuries. But there was a visit or visits which occurred much earlier, in the pre-Christian era…..First examine the Gulf of Mexico. This is the terminus or end point of the currents that sweep from Africa towards the Americas……This Gulf coast area was occupied and dominated by the Olmec, the first major high-culture or civilisation we know of in North America. It is considered the mother-culture of America. It was, in my opinion as in the opinion of most Americanists, a home grown civilisation. But I think only a very closed mind would assume it developed in total isolation. As the International Congress of Americanists declared in 1964, “There cannot now be any doubt but that there were visitors from the Old World to the New before 1492”……..

In 1858, peasants from Tres Zapotes found an enormous stone head which was described as having pronounced Africoid features. But in 1862 came an even more significant discovery……..

Look at the front and side of this head. A very broad nose, pronounced prognathism, very full-fleshed lips. But you cannot be sure of its Africanness just by examining the front because some anthropologists will argue to the death that it is just a plain clear case of the Asiatic……Michael Coe, author of Ancient Mexico, claims that the reason they have such broad noses and thick lips is because the tools the carvers used were blunt and they could not make the features any thinner…….But now look at the back of the head (Plate 4 – Head with seven braids)

Look at it very closely. You are seeing something hidden from public view for 50 years……This head, although covered by a helmet (as most of them) shows the hair. The carver(s) went to the trouble of representing the hair against the helmeted dome. Note the unique, extraordinary braids. THERE IS NO EVIDENCE BEFORE THIS, OR SINCE, OF ANY NATIVE AMERICAN WITH A SEVEN-BRAIDED HAIRSTYLE……..

No one who was on that site when the discovery was made doubted that they were seeing something different from the native. Even the natives themselves felt they were in the presence of something foreign. Jose Melgar, who excavated this head, wrote the first essay on an African presence in pre-Columbian Mexico. YET THE HEAD DISAPPEARED FROM PHOTOGRAPHIC COLLECTIONS……I had not seen it when I wrote “They Came Before Columbus”. Alexander von Wuthenau who had done the most exhaustieve work of excavation and classification of terracotta in ancient America , had never seen it…..National Geographic never published it. This photograph was kept in the dark (and I think the blackout was deliberate) for about 50 years.

Let us move on…..Here is another head, not far from where Jose Melgar found the one with braids. It is known as Tres Zapotes F. it is even more “amazingly Negroid” in its physiognomy (to use Matthew Stirling’s phrase for a La Venta head). MOST UNUSUAL OF ALL, THE STONE FROM WHICH IT IS CARVED IS OF A JET BLACK COLOUR. Unlike most of the heads, too, it has no helmet so the tuft of close-cropped hair is exposed…..Now study the helmet in the next slide……Note the main features of this helmet….Rafique Jairazbhoy has shown the same features on helmets which cap colossal heads at Tanis, the sea-going port in the Egyptian delta. Compare it with…..obvious similarities to the headgear of the Egyptian military in the same period.

Now we are not in the least suggesting that the Egyptians taught Native Americans their portrait art. But we are faced with some facts that do not fit neatly within the conventional isolationist model. For early Olmec art shows no transition from the beautiful little pieces of fully-formed humans or jungle cats, demonic masks or fierce jungle-warriors, to this monumental concentration, this fascination, this obsession with bodiless heads. Second, the heavy transport techniques used by the Egyptians and Nubians to move colossi across the waters on barges and rats are unique in the ancient world. The Japanese found in the 1970’s that they could not replicate this technology. Yet Robert Heizer, who was no diffusionist, tells us that there were startling identities between the unique heavy transport techniques of the ancient Americans and Egyptians. We search in vain for antecedents for this development in the American archaeological record……

There are many terracotta figurines which represent Africoid types…..Alexander Von Wuthenau, who has excavated and classified more of these terracotta than any other investigator, presents at least a hundred of these in “The Art of Terracotta Pottery in Pre-Columbian America” and “Unexpected Faces in Ancient America”. ….You can visit the finest collection of these Africoid heads at his chateau and studio at San Angel.

A nose decoration first appears on the La Venta ceremonial platform next to the first sequence of stone heads……Note now the dramatic alteration. THE LARGE BULBOUS NOSE HAS BEEN RECUT. IT HAS ACTUALLY BEEN MADE TO LOOK AQUILINE. Once again, in the face of an apparent deception we are called upon to be gracious. The nose, we must assume, appeared too big, too broad, to bulbous to be real. How could the discoverers not but conclude that vandals or the blows of time had damaged it? So what were they expected to do to restore this ancient personage to its original dignity? Why, history had already suggested the perfect solution. The huge African nose on ancient royal sculpture had led Napoleon’s army to shoot off its cannon. Later invaders were to fracture and flatten this nose, shatter and splinter it. But these good gentlemen went one step further. They filed it down to fit in with their fancy or fantasy of what it should be…..They “refined” it.

But evidence of a physical presence is only one half of the story. What influence did the outsider have, if any, on the native? Before I answer that question I want to make it clear once again that any contact between two peoples and cultures can lead to a cross-fertilisation. And that to find a dozen or even a score amidst a hundred and one elements in a civilisation that strongly suggests borrowing, does not negate a native originality nor an indigenous base for the civilisation. Nor does it necessarily constitute a claim that the outsider is superior to the native. In fact, there are instances in history where the invader is more affected by the civilisation of the invaded than vice versa (A classic example of this, though still unacknowledged, is the impact on the culture of the conquering Greeks by the conquered Egyptian).

There are ritual parallels between the Olmec and the Egyptian that are so startling that they bear serious examination, especially in the light of a highly probable physical presence. All sorts of claims have been made by diffusionists but the few I shall present here meet a very rigorous criteria. (1) Traits that appear in an interrelated cluster rather than single-trait correspondences. (2) Traits that are unique to the two culture areas, in that they appear nowhere else in the world save where they can be shown to have diffused from what we claim to be outsider or donor culture. (3) Traits that are so complex or arbitrary that it is remotely unlikely that they should occur in the same form and with the same function in cultures far apart. (4) Traits for which there is abundant evidence of antecedence in the donor culture and no such known evidence at the moment in the supposed recipient.

Let us look, first of all, at monarchic traits – traits associated with the priest-caste or ruling elite of both civilisations….Use of purple as an index of royal or noble rank, for eg. The religious value of purple and its use to distinguish priests and people of high rank is well known among the dynastic Egyptians. What is little known, however, is that it grew out of very unique circumstances and is found nowhere else in the Old World save where it can be shown to have diffused from its original centre. Sanctity was attached to shell purple b/c the murex shell, from which it was extracted, revealed by the sequence of colours through which it moved, before acquiring its final fixed purple, a parallel to colour changes of the Nile in flood. The Egyptians therefore considered purple a noble and sacred colour, and, through the Phoenicians, who adopted the purple industry, the association of purple with royalty, the priesthood and the high born, spread throughout the Mediterranean.

We find purple having the same value in the Olmec world. Both Matthew Stirling and Prof. Zenil Medellin noted that a patch of purple appears on one of the monumental stone heads at San Lorenzo. Medellin in fact claims that some of the stone heads were originally painted but that the paint faded over time. In the Nuttall Codez, Zelia Nuttall, the discoverer of the codex, notes, “pictures of no fewer than 13 Mexican women of rank wearing purple skirts and 5 with jackets and capes of the same colour. In addition, 45 chieftains are figured with short, fringed, round purple waistcoats, and there are also three examples of the use of a close fitting purple cap.”……

Observe this Olmec dignitary at Cierro de la Piedra. This is clearly a Native American. He is probably a king and has one of his subjects bound and seated at his feet. Look at the royal head. Upon this head stands something so unique that only the priest-kings in two culture-areas in the world have been known to wear it. This is the double-crown. The double-crown in the Egypto-Nubian world grew out of very specials historical circumstances. It signified the joining of the two lands, the north and south, Egypt and Nubia. But there is more to it than that. Far more unique is the bird and serpent motif on royal diadems and crowns. Yet here, in this extraordinary glimpse of an Olmec king, we see the duplication of not one, but two, indisputable traits. Not just the double-crown, but the lower crown with the head of a serpent and the upper crown with the head of a bird (the plumed serpent motif)

….(I)t will be impossible to find a mirrored duplication of such a complex and arbitrarily fused twin-trait, in any other cultural context, in any other part of the world, without some demonstrable evidence of contact between the mother of the original trait and her daughter…

….There is the royal crook and royal flail, part of the ceremonial regalia of priest-kings in both areas. Jairazbhoy cites an Olmec painting at Oxtotitlan where the Olmec king seated on the throne has the same type of flail as the Egyptian and it is the same position behind his head. But there is also, in this interconnected cluster of monarchic traits, the sacred boat or ceremonial bark of the priest-kings. WHAT IS SO REMARKABLE ABOUT THIS IS THAT NOT ONLY HAS IT THE SAME FUNCTION BUT THE SAME NAME (“sibak” in Egyptian, “cipac” in Mexican. The ‘b’ and ‘p’ of course, are interchangeable plosives).

I had noted the parasol or ceremonial umbrella in my earlier work, as something reserved for royalty in both civilisations. IT IS ACTUALLY RECORDED IN MEXICAN TRADITION AS HAVING COME ACROSS THE WATER FROM THE EAST BY WAY OF FOREIGNERS. Here again Jairazbhoy cites this little known oral tradition recorded in the ‘Titulo Coyoi’, one of the surviving texts of the Quiche Maya, influenced by the ancient Olmec. The tradition harks back to early visitors. “These things came from the east” it says, “from across the other side of the water and the sea: they came here, they had their throne, their little benches and stools, THEY HAD THEIR PARASOLS AND THEIR BONE FLUTES”.

Jairazbhoy also draws our attention to another unusual monarchic trait duplicated in the Olmec world – feathered fans used by Egyptian royalty that are almost identical in shape, style and colour as the royal fans found in ancient Mexican paintings in the pyramids of Las Higueras. These fans were painted in an area once dominated by the Olmec and in a culture clearly influenced by them….The fans are made of feathers arranged in concentric circles of blue, red and green. In Mexico they are blue, red and light blue but the Mexican light-blue is the closest thing on the colour spectrum to the Egyptian green.

Let us look closely now at (other examples that) strongly suggest a cultural influence.

(Here is an illustration of) ceremonial balls of incense served up in hand-shaped spoons. The Egyptian king is throwing up pellets of incense into a hand-shaped spoon. The Mexican priest below (as portrayed in the Codex Selden) is dropping balls of incense in a hand-shaped incense spoon. The incense also is roughly identified by the same sounding name, “kuphi” (pronounced ko-pi or ku-pi) n Egypt, while we have copal (pronounced ko-pul) in Mexico.

Observe another. In Egypt the Pharaoh is purified by the gods Thoth and Horus, pouring crossed steams of libation over him. In the Mexican Codex we see the same ceremony. Here two underworld gods pouring crossed streams of libation over a third god……..

Another ceremony is the phallic cult. Here is the god Min in Egypt holding his phallus in the same manner as the Mexican as seen in the Codex Borbonicus…….

Among the most startling of identities between the two cultures b/c they are found nowhere else in that phase of time is the human-headed bird, the Ba and the ka. These human-headed birds are found on sarcophagi in both Egypt and Mexico and holes are cut in both places so that the soul of the deceased, which it represents, can come and go. There is also the human-headed dog Anubis……

Mummification among the Olmec is another claim that has been made but the evidence is scanty. This may be due to the fact that the corrosive humidity of the soil destroyed much of the skeletal material. But, as we have shown, there are significant centres where crania were found in good enough condition to be analysed. There are mummified remains in Mexico, to be sure but no hard evidence, it seems that the manner of mummification or the formula for mummification is close enough to suggest an influence. In….Olmec Mexico Rafique Jairazbhoy presents a very unusual sculpture from Oaxaca with rib cages outlined as those of a dead man and arms folded in exactly the same way as in some Egyptian mummies – arms crossed over chest, fingers open.

But here is another so-called coincidence that is much harder to explain…..Here in spite of earlier centuries of occupation of Olmec sites like San Lorenzo (as early as 1500 BC) we are witnessing the very first pyramid construction at La Venta (948-680 BC). Not just the conical pyramid but the step-pyramid. And further, the first use in America of a north-south axial orientation for ceremonial structures…This axial orientation for orientation for pyramids is not only unique to Egypt and Nubia. It has an indisputable antecedence.

Now what have the isolationist said about this? They have ducked this one rather awkwardly. The large constructions at one end of the platform is not a pyramid at all, they say, but a “fluted cone”. This is meant to represent, they claim, “a volcano”. This explanation ignores two very important things.

First, that it was built of clay, not stone, as in the Old World prototype. Also, it was built on a swampy area. The sides would inevitably collapse inwards with time, as do all earthen hills, and the construction would naturally lose the sharpness of its original slopes.

Second, how can we ignore the miniature step-pyramid at the other end of the platform, which is clearly and undeniably related? Is this then a baby volcano? Come on. If our critics are going to be absurd, let them be absurd logically…..

Here now is a map which is the most extraordinary piece of evidence that Africans crossed the Atlantic in early times. This map is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, pre-Columbian. It was redrawn in 1513 from pre-Christian maps found in the sacked library of Alexandria. It is called the Piri Reis map from the Turkish admiral who found it. It has its meridian in Egypt, in the area later called Alexandria by the Greeks, later called Cairo by the Arabs. It definitely precedes them. Their maps do not show these things. The mid-Atlantic islands are shown with remarkable accuracy. The Cape Verde, Madeira Islands and the Azores are shown in perfect longitude. The Canary islands are only off by 1 degree longitude. The Andes are shown on this map. THIS WAS ONLY SEEN BY THE EUROPEANS IN 1527 WHEN PIZARRO CLAIMED TO HAVE “DISCOVERED” IT. The Atra River in Colombia is shown for a distance of 300 miles from the sea. The Amazon river is shown, the actual course of the river, while 16th century European maps bear no resemblance to its real course. Even more remarkable is the near accuracy of the longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates between the African and the American coasts. NO EUROPEAN MAP CAME EVEN CLOSE TO THIS UNTIL THE 18TH CENTURY. 150 YEARS AFTER THE DEATH OF COLUMBUS, EUROPEAN EXCYLOPEDIAS DECLARED THAT LONGITUDE HAD NOT BEEN DISCOVERED AND WAS PROBALY UNDISCOVERABLE…….

We shift now to something that came about as a result of the Smithsonian find of African skeletons in a pre-Columbian grave in the Virgin Islands. The skeletons could not be dated and so the matter remains inconclusive at least where the bones are concerned. But not far from Hull Bay, where these skeletons were found, at the bottom of the Reef Bay Valley on St John’s, something unusual has emerged.

This script is found at the bottom of a waterfall in the Reef Bay Valley and it is reflected in the water. The unusual regularity of the dot and crescent formation is what attracted me to it and away from the relatively meaningless carvings of animals further up the rock-face. It has been deciphered by Prof Barry Fell, professor emeritus of Harvard. Fell has gotten into a lot of trouble over some of his decipherments but this has been carefully checked out. Scholars in the Libyan Dept of Antiquities arrived at the same decipherment as he did. It has been identified as the Tifinagh Branch of the Libyan script. This was used not only by Southern Libyans but by people in some parts of medieval Mali and by the Tamahaq Berbers which, in the period of which we speak, were not the heavily mixed Euro-African people they are today. The inscription reads: “Plunge in to cleanse yourself. This is water for purification before prayer”…..

Let me close by saying, this is not all diffusionist fantasy and all I ask is that there should be a little more tolerance and openness to discussion and examination of the subject. It will take a lot of time and study by many experts, n many fields……but we cannot approach the study of shattered worlds like Africa and America the way we approach the study of Europe. We are forced to venture into several disciplines today b/c of destruction of documents, in order to grasp the true complexity of these vanished worlds. But America was not the tidy, closed world we would like to think it was. The Africoid type, depicted in the terracotta and in the bones and stones, was not the result of local micro-evolution but hybridisation through migration. The Atlantic was never a sea of darkness. Its currents were living, moving roads, marine conveyor belts….

No great civilisation, be it African, Asian, or European, developed in total isolation. Why should America then? Why should we assume that a world, so vast and various that the peoples in Mexico alone spoke 14 languages, rotated away from the rest of humanity for tens of thousands of years, until a little gold-hungry adventurer, Christopher Columbus, suddenly discovered that the people here were really livingin India, that Cuba was the continent, South America an island, the Caribbean Sea the Gulf of the Ganges?

Thank you.

Taken from “African presence in Early America” edited by Prof Ivan Van Sertima.

Keep it comin man!!!!!!!!!!!