Ivan Van Sertima and 'They Came Before Columbus'

Ivan Gladstone Van Sertima was born on January 26, 1935, in Kitty Village, British Guiana, in what is now Guyana. He moved to London as a young man, where he studied African languages and literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and worked for a period at the Guyanese High Commission and as a broadcaster for the BBC’s African Service. He later earned a doctorate at Rutgers University and joined its faculty, becoming an associate professor of Africana Studies, a position he held for the rest of his academic career. In 1979 he founded the Journal of African Civilizations, a scholarly publication he edited for decades that became a platform for research into African history and its global influence.

Van Sertima’s reputation, both his fame and the controversy that followed him, rests overwhelmingly on a single book. They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America, published by Random House in 1976, argued that West Africans crossed the Atlantic and made contact with civilizations in the Americas, most notably the Olmec of Mesoamerica, centuries before Columbus’s 1492 voyage. Drawing on comparative accounts of Mesoamerican art, oral histories, botanical evidence, and the writings of early European explorers, Van Sertima contended that African visitors introduced or influenced practices including pyramid construction, mummification, and astronomical knowledge among pre-Columbian peoples. The book became a bestseller, particularly within African American communities, and Van Sertima went on to testify before the US Congress in 1987 opposing plans to celebrate the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage, arguing that such commemorations obscured a much older and more complex history of contact between Africa and the Americas.

The book’s reception in professional archaeology and history was sharply different from its popular reception. Published without academic peer review, its central claims, including the assertion that certain Olmec colossal stone heads depict African facial features, drew sustained criticism from specialists in Mesoamerican archaeology and physical anthropology. A widely cited 1997 examination in the journal Current Anthropology, co-authored by a number of scholars responding directly to Van Sertima’s claims, concluded that no confirmed African artifact had ever been recovered from a controlled archaeological excavation anywhere in the pre-Columbian Americas, and that the comparative evidence Van Sertima relied on did not hold up under closer scrutiny. Critics also argued that the theory, whatever its intentions, risked crediting Indigenous American achievements to outside influence rather than to the societies that actually built them. Mainstream historians and archaeologists have generally classified the book’s central thesis as pseudoarchaeology, a categorization Van Sertima and his supporters disputed throughout his life.

Beyond his signature book, Van Sertima compiled and edited several anthologies examining the history of scientific and cultural achievement across the African diaspora, including Blacks in Science: Ancient and Modern (1983) and The Golden Age of the Moor (1992), both drawn from issues of his Journal of African Civilizations. He remained a fixture of Afrocentric scholarship and popular Black history education through the late twentieth century, admired by many readers for insisting that African contributions to world history deserved far more attention than conventional textbooks gave them, even as the specific evidentiary claims underpinning his best-known argument failed to persuade the archaeological mainstream.

Van Sertima died on May 25, 2009, in Highland Park, New Jersey, at age 74. Decades after its publication, They Came Before Columbus remains in print and continues to be read widely outside academic archaeology, a rare case of a single book’s popular and scholarly legacies pulling in almost entirely opposite directions.