He is the author of They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America, which was published by Random House in 1977 and is presently in its twenty-ninth printing. He also compiled the Swahili Dictionary of Legal Terms, based on his field work in Tanzania, East Africa, in 1967. He was honored as an historian of world repute by being asked to join UNESCO's International Commission for Rewriting the Scientific and Cultural History of Mankind.Īs a linguist, published essays on the dialect of the Sea Islands off the Georgia Coast. He was honored for his work in this field by being asked by the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy to nominate candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature from 1976-1980. He is also the author of several major literary reviews published in Denmark, India, Britain and the United States. He was a literary critic, a linguist, and an anthropologist who made a name in all three fields.Īs a literary critic, he is the author of Caribbean Writers, a collection of critical essays on the Caribbean novel. During the decade of the 1960s he broadcast weekly from Britain to Africa and the Caribbean. From 1957-1959 he served as a Press and Broadcasting Officer in the Guyana Information Services. He was educated at the School of Oriental and African Studies (London University) and the Rutgers Graduate School and held degrees in African Studies and Anthropology. Ivan Van Sertima was born in Guyana, South America. In They Came Before Columbus, we see clearly the unmistakable face and handprint of black Africans in pre-Columbian America, and their overwhelming impact on the civilizations they encountered.ĭr. Combining impressive scholarship with a novelist’s gift for storytelling, Van Sertima re-creates some of the most powerful scenes of human history: the launching of the great ships of Mali in 1310 (two hundred master boats and two hundred supply boats), the sea expedition of the Mandingo king in 1311, and many others.

Examining navigation and shipbuilding cultural analogies between Native Americans and Africans the transportation of plants, animals, and textiles between the continents and the diaries, journals, and oral accounts of the explorers themselves, Ivan Van Sertima builds a pyramid of evidence to support his claim of an African presence in the New World centuries before Columbus. They Came Before Columbus reveals a compelling, dramatic, and superbly detailed documentation of the presence and legacy of Africans in ancient America.

Ivan sertima they came before columbus