The African Presence in the Americas
many centuries before Columbus

A Black History Month Talk presented by Kwesi Bacchra aided by Marcia Campbell
at Wellingborough African Caribbean Association on 16 October 2001
© NTP Trust MMI

We are told that, when Columbus set sail on 5th August 1492 with three small ships (Santa Maria, Pinta and Nina) and 120 men to venture out over the broad Atlantic Ocean, he was sailing out into the unknown on a risky journey, where many Europeans, who believed the earth was flat, were convinced they would tip over the edge of the world into the eternal abyss. But clearly Columbus did not believe that or he would never have gone on his voyage of discovery.

Columbus is credited with being the first man from the Old World to cross the Atlantic and land in the Americas, but that is just not true. In 985 AD a Viking explorer called the Eric the Red landed in Greenland and set up a colony there which flourished until being wiped out some 300 years later by bubonic plague. About 1,000 AD his son, Leif Eriksson sailed south and landed in what he called Vinland which was probably Labrador or Nova Scotia in what is now Canada. Nearly five centuries later Columbus was collecting the information about the possible routes to India by sailing west across the Atlantic. He had learnt his seamanship on slave ships trading between the Crimea in the Black Sea and Genoa, his home town in Italy. The slaves of course were usually blonde, blue eyed, pagan Slavs captured on the Russian Steppes and they were sold all over western Europe especially to Spain, both the part controlled by the Catholic kings and the southern half which had been occupied and ruled by the Moors for over 600 years.

Columbus had learned  about the Viking colonies in Greenland and been told the stories about Irish fishermen who often got lost while catching fish in the foggy seas closer than they realised to Labrador. So in 1477 he sailed north to Iceland to check whether what he had heard was true. However Columbus knew that India and the islands to the south which produced the spices he wanted to import back to Europe had hot climates. Iceland and the seas beyond were bitterly cold and he thought they could never take him to India and the wealth he sought. So he took advantage of work assignments to visit the Cape Verde islands and the Portuguese trading post at  El Mina in West Africa and listened to the stories told by  the local people about African sailors who had for hundreds of years sailed out over the great ocean towards the setting sun.

As a sailor and mapmaker Columbus had learned the importance of secrecy, so what he found out he kept to himself and, when he returned to Europe, he took back with him two Africans, one of whom would become his companion for life. That African companion and perhaps the other one too went with Columbus on his first voyage of “discovery”. They were his guides across the great so-called unknown ‘Ocean Sea’.

The official route taken by Columbus’s small flotilla of little ships is usually shown as an almost straight line west, just north of the Tropic of Cancer from the Canaries to the Bahamas. Half way across the Atlantic this course would have taken him into the Sargasso Sea. This is a wide area of the Atlantic where there are no currents and often no wind, one of the areas on the oceans of the world called doldrums. Masses of floating seaweed collect in this area often making it difficult for small ships to plough their way through. Without winds sailing ships come to a complete halt and the stench of decaying fish and vegetation is absolutely nauseous. In his Ryme of the Ancient Mariner Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes of a ship marooned in the Sargasso Sea, describing the oppressive heat and smell suffered by seamen who wait in vain for a wind to stir their sails and, as their barrels ran dry, he cries “Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink”. But where does Columbus describe any similar situation in any of the several journals he kept of his voyage? Nowhere, because that is not the way he went.

What Columbus did record was that, ten days after leaving the Canaries on 6^th of September 1492, they sighted green seaweed floating near the ship, which indicated that land must be near. The official course could not have brought them even to the Sargasso Sea in that time, but six days sailing was the distance between the Canaries and the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Senegal in West Africa. These were under the control of the Portuguese, and Columbus knew that they would regard him as a traitor for having obtained the support of the Spanish crown, because he had previously been in the employ of the king of Portugal. Knowing this his crews would never have agreed to sail close to Portuguese territory, so he had zigzagged his way, taking almost twice as long as he should and passed just to the north but out of sight of the Cape Verde Islands.

Now why was it so important to take this route? Columbus had been told by his African friends that sailing west from the Cape Verde Islands would place him in the Sene-Gambia current which crosses the Atlantic almost straight to Barbados. Also he would pick up the North East Trade winds which would take him close to the Brazilian coast. However, he had probably been told that Brazil had little to offer except forest and that Africans had for centuries traded with the islands in what we now call the Caribbean. So still to deceive his crews Columbus tacked westward across the ocean, sometimes north-west, sometimes south-west, but ever westward. On the 10^th October they saw a flock of  petrels which are land birds and that told them they were very close to land, and two days later at two in the morning white cliffs were sighted shining in the moonlight. They were about to land in the Bahamas on an island called Guanahani by the Amerindian natives and San Salvador by Columbus, perhaps what we now call Watling Island.

But, because Columbus had needed to keep his crews in the dark by zigzagging across the Atlantic, the voyage had taken them 70 days. His second voyage sailing more directly would take him only 20 days to cover the same distance, but now he knew that what the Africans had told him was true, The only thing that Columbus could never accept was that he had never reached the East Indian islands he sought and that where he had landed was a whole ‘New World’. Because of this his mistake has come down to our time as these islands are still called the West Indies and the native peoples of the Americas are called Indians, which of course they are not.

Europeans in Europe and the Americas have ever since Columbus credited him as being the first person to ‘discover’ the Americas. He was not of course. As we have shown, he was not even the first European. All he had done was to have the courage to place his faith in what he had learned from Africans and persuade Queen Ysabella of Castile to finance him, as well as cajole 120 men, many of whom would otherwise have been executed for criminal offences, to take the risk to sail with him in the search for gold.

But what is the general belief about Africans that has been promoted for the last 500 years? Africans were not sailors and could never have sailed out across the Atlantic in their dug-out canoes, they say. Columbus did not believe this and history does not support that contention.  Indeed Columbus himself writes in his journals about those African voyages. In his Journal of the Third Voyage he tells us that Africans periodically left the Guinea coast and sailed west across the ocean loaded with merchandise. In his book Masalik, written before Columbus was born, the Arab historian Al-‘Umari tells how a Mandinga emperor launched two expeditions to explore the western limits of the Atlantic Ocean. These took place either in 1307 or 1312, that is at least 80 years before Columbus’s first voyage and involved 2,400 ships. Before himself setting out, the emperor waited for a report from the first voyage. One ship returned which obviously made him confident enough to set sail with the second fleet, but the armada was lost and never heard of again, perhaps sunk in a storm. The loss of so many ships must have had a terrible impact on the Mandinga sailors for, when Columbus visited El Mina, the Portuguese settlement in West Africa, some 70 years later, there appears no evidence that a trans-Atlantic trade was still being carried on.

When I have discussed this subject with white historians, even so-called liberals, they have frequently raised the question of how the Africans got back home to Africa. They seem convinced that at least some of them would have been seen or even shipwrecked on the Irish or other west European coasts. After all that is where the Gulf Stream would have brought them. But this raises two questions. Firstly they are wrong to assume that Africans were just drifters and could only go where the ocean currents would carry them; Africans were sailors and were just as capable of sailing against the current as European seamen. Secondly, the best way back to West Africa from the Caribbean using currents and wind systems is to sail south along the coast of Brazil and cross the Atlantic to southern Africa before allowing the north-bound currents to carry them home.

Columbus noted a lot more evidence of long term African contact with his misnamed Indies. Firstly, let us look at the banana which he found growing there. The banana is not native to the Americas for its origins lie in Asia, from where it was introduced to Africa it is said by Arab traders. Although Arabs or Moors may have introduced the banana to Spain, personally I do not accept the argument that it was only Arabs who traded across the Indian Ocean. When visiting the south Indian state of Karnataka some years ago, I noted that some of the statues carved into the rock-face temples from the 8^th to the12^th century were of people who were clearly African. No doubt Arabs did trade with India and as far south as Zanzibar in Africa, but I believe more evidence will emerge in time of East Africans trading across the Indian Ocean for many centuries just as the ancient Egyptians did.

Certainly bananas were being grown in South America long before Columbus, for they have been found in graves in Peru dating back way before his voyage. Moreover, the distinct African connection can be found in South American indigenous languages. In Spanish banana is the Moorish word platano, but the West African word for banana is bakoko. In the South American language Galibi we find it is baccuccu, in Oyapock it is baco, in Oyampi become, in Tupi pacoba, and in Apiacas pacowa. All linguists would have to agree that the South American words must have derived from the African bakoko. And there are many other examples of plants and fruits having names which derive from an African language.

Now let us consider the reed boats which were once commonly found on both the Pacific and Caribbean coasts of Central America and which can still be seen on Lake Titicaca high in the Andes mountains on the border between Peru and Bolivia. The Norwegian anthropologist, Thor Heyerdahl, was convinced that the papyrus reed boats of Africa could have sailed across the Atlantic long before the birth of Christ. Paintings of them can be found in the pyramids of ancient Egypt and they are still in common use on Lake Chad in Central Africa. His theories were ridiculed by other scientists so he set out to prove the scoffers wrong. Employing Africans from Lake Chad, he told them to build him a papyrus-reed boat in the style of those painted in the pyramids, but they did not follow his instructions precisely and left off the rope from the top of the mast to the stern because on their inland lake it was unnecessary.

So in 1969 Heyerdahl set sail from Morocco and almost reached Barbados. His failure was because, without a rope from the mast to the stern, it gradually sank into the sea, became waterlogged and broke up. Back he went to the boat builders but insisted this time that they include the stern rope. This time it took him only 57 days to complete his journey safely and intact, much faster than Columbus’s first voyage.

There is other evidence of ancient African contact with the Americas. Even the Greek myths about Atlantis may be based on what they learned from the Egyptians – and most of the knowledge of the ancient Greeks seems to originate in Egypt, the people there being described as Black, by the greatest Greek historian, Herodotus. Heyerdahl points out that the name of the Sun God in many American cultures even as far as Hawaii is Ra, the same as in ancient Egypt. This cannot be coincidence. Further there is the Olmec practice of building pyramids. While there are some significant differences, particularly internally, measurements of pyramids and their siting in relation to the most important stellar constellations reveal amazing similarities.

Then 150 years ago to the east of the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico, the home of Olmec civilisation, a discovery was made which was to shake the racist philosophies of white historians in Europe and North America. At the time they were in the process of writing Black Africans out of ancient history because their presence did not fit in with the race theories of white supremacy of the time. In the United States it was before the Civil War and slavery was still practiced throughout the southern states and, soon after emancipation, the courts were to declare that Africans were only three fifths human. Ancient Egyptians therefore could not be Black because that would mean that Europeans were not superior and that they were latecomers in terms of civilisation. Africans had to be painted as ignorant savages, and not even ‘noble savages’ as Rousseau liked to suggest. They were described as brutish and, because they were argued not to have resisted slavery, they deserved to be enslaved. Modern racism was created by the European intelligentsia from the 18^th century onwards in order to justify chattel slavery, which they knew within their hearts was a crime against humanity.

In the age of the Enlightenment, the still revered David Hume was acknowledged to be the father of empiricism. This is the philosophy of basing conclusions on experience and what can be proved experimentally rather than depending on theoretical propositions. In spite of being widely travelled and having contact with many Black intellectuals like Ignatius Sancho, Frank Barber, the protégé of Dr Samuel Johnson, and Chevalier de Saint Georges, and with Benin masks before him he wrote that Black people had “no arts, no sciences and no ingenious manufactures”. Of course he knew he was lying, but he was happy to do so to maintain the mythology he and his racist friends were successfully creating.

So what was this discovery? The Mayan peasants at a place called Tres Zapotes had found an enormous stone head which had pronounced African features. A very broad nose, prognathism (projecting jaw), and very full lips. The historians and scientists of the time could just not accept that this and other stone heads being found were sculptures of Africans, and they put forward some of the lamest explanations: they were baby faces, human jaguar faces with snarling lips, that the tools of the sculptors were blunt, even that, having fallen face-down, the noses had become flattened. Some heads were reburied and photographs were destroyed or hidden away in filing cabinets at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. A hundred years were to elapse before historians like Guyanese Ivan Van Sertima exposed the truth and fetched up a rotten heap of white historians who wanted to prove literally that Black is White.

And they are still doing it. The November 1983 edition of the National Geographic magazine carried an article entitled New Light on the Olmec, but there was little new in it, just the same old racist denial. The carved helmets on the heads so reminiscent of similar heads in Egypt with some also displaying African hair braids were said to be ball game helmets, but no mention of the now well known proposition that these sculptures were of Olmec chieftains whose ancestry was clearly in Africa. I wrote to the National Geographic pointing out the possible African connection, but my letter was never published. The heads have been dated as being from 1200 to 900 BCE and, in my personal opinion, were sculptures of local chieftains who had descended from Africans who had migrated out of Nubia and Kush at the southern end of Egypt. There had been a long period of Nubian expansion around 3,000 years ago which carried development and knowledge all over Africa. For example the Dogon people who live in Mali in the hills to the south of Timbuktu have carefully preserved knowledge of the stars for thousands of years, particularly of the Sirius system. Sirius is the brightest star in the heavens and the ancient Egyptians associated it with the annual flooding of the Nile. It was not until 1862 that Alvan Clark, a maker of telescopic lenses, discovered the companion star, Sirius B. Yet the Dogon people had not only known of the smaller star’s existence since time immemorial but of its peculiar wobble in its elliptical circuit around the bright Sirius A.

By 750 BCE the Nubians and Kushites had taken control of the whole of Egypt under their Pharaoh Kashta after driving out the nomadic Libyan invaders who had gained control at the end of the 300 year period of instability which followed the four Pharoahs named Rameses, Akhenaten and Tutankhamun, the young pharoah who died in 1327BCE; and thus started the 25^th Dynasty, the Nubian Dynasty. From 1400 to 600 BCE was the period that was the most likely time that ancient Africans might have sailed to the Americas, and the massive Olmec stone heads in Mexico date from precisely that period.

There are so many other similarities between ancient Egypt or Kemet and the Olmecs: the use of the false beard by the rulers; the double crown with the head of a serpent on the lower crown and a bird on the upper; the royal crook and flail; the sacred boat to carry the soul of the departed and with almost the same name: sitak in Egyptian and cipak still in Mexican Indian languages. There are other similar words from the distant past: like kupi in Egypt meaning incense, which is kopul in Mexico.

Let us now consider a practice which may have been brought back to Egypt from MesoAmerica. We have all heard of the vicious ceremonies when the still beating hearts of sacrificial victims were cut out and fed to the Sun God --- white historians would never hide that one because for them it justified the awful slaughter of many thousands by the Spanish conquistadors and the destruction of 90% of the books of the Aztecs --- This bloody ritual was so wide–spread amongst the various cultures in the Americas that it must have been indigenous, but yet we find representations of it in Egypt with the enemies of the Sun God Ra having their living hearts plucked out.

There were other proofs of African influence and trade which Columbus noted. There were two distinct types of Carib Indian, one was the light brown skinned type more usually portrayed, but there was also a black Africoid type. In his Journal of the Second Voyage Columbus explained that, when he was in what is now Haiti, native Americans told him that black-skinned people had come from the south and south east trading in gold-tipped spears. He was told that those spear points were made of a metal alloy they called guanin. This word guanin is the plural of the African word ghana meaning gold. Arabists suggest that it is Arabico-Berber but they too often seem to be more keen on promoting ideas of Arab ascendancy while making excuses for the vicious slavery of Africans still carried on today by Arabs.

Slavery of any man, woman or child whether by Arabs across northern Africa or by Europeans in the interests of global capitalism, slavery of campasinos (peasants) on south American plantations by north American fruit companies, slavery of little children forced to work on carpets or Nike trainers or as domestics in upper and middle class families in so many south Asian countries, slavery of children and young adults forced to fight in tribal armies, and let us be honest that is most often in African countries as is the trade in child slaves between certain West African states. I denounce all those forms of slavery, and my list is not complete by any means. I denounce slavery because no man or woman has the right to hold any other human being in subjection. Slavery is a crime against humanity which the world’s politicians refuse to eradicate because so many of them have their own fingers in the slave fed gravy.

But back to those spear tips. If an archaeologist finds a small piece of pottery on a dig in Northamptonshire, he will jump to a whole sack full of conclusions about its age, the people who owned it and their lifestyle, the people who made it and their brilliance as manufacturers and, if they find  a skull, they reconstruct the face to show what they looked like. But, I don’t know whether you have noticed on TV programmes, how biased they are about these remains found in Britain, the remodelled heads are always painted as white people even when the breadth of nasal cavity, cheekbones, forehead and jawbones suggest a non-European origin. Why is it then that in this the new millennium such strong evidence of the presence of Africans in the Americas long before Columbus is rejected? Even Columbus himself was not that biased or racist, he had experienced the freedom of life in Africa which was so different to the oppressive governments in Europe where priests, bishops and popes forced the people to follow their version of Christianity or face death at the stake.

As we look around the world today we can see the kind of oppressive society under which Europeans were forced to live in his time. As far as I am concerned, when religious fanatics impose theocratic rule whether they are called Jesuits as in the 16^th century, Christian fundamentalists in the Bible Belt of the United States, Zionists in Israel or the Talaban in Afghanistan, ordinary people lose their freedoms and we see every day how great a threat they represent to peace in the world. What Columbus found in Africa was a political situation which has often been dismissed by European academics as “stateless societies”. What they were in fact were essentially village democracies where ordinary people could state their point of view and where the elders would dispense justice on the basis of respecting certain taboos. In towns and cities, as for example in the City of Benin, regulation tended to be more rigid. But, even where the expanding influence of Islam could be seen, it was not oppressive. The one great fear that ordinary people had was of capture following war between African kings, which might mean slavery according to well kept rules, but could mean the more dreaded removal to another world by Arab traders, a practice which still goes on.  

Columbus was so struck by the spear tips that he sent them back to Spain to be assayed. There it was found that the alloy contained precisely the same proportions of gold and silver as similar spears in general use in West Africa. This was an arms technology equivalent today to the tipping of bullets and shells with uranium in order to make them more able to penetrate steel. If no other of the masses of evidence of pre-Columbian African presence existed, this alone would be enough for me to accept as conclusive, and I have never heard any scientist even try to put forward a valid argument against it. Metal spearheads could not float across the Atlantic from Africa to the Caribbean on their own, and native Americans themselves told Columbus that they were brought there by Black men. Here I could rest my case, but I have just a few more points to make.

If the Americas were unknown until 1492, how is it there are so many old maps which show the American coastlines so accurately? The portolanos which navigators used to find their way around the Mediterranean and other seas showed only the ports and gave a distorted view of the shape of land masses. What are interesting are the maps drawn so soon after Columbus’s first voyage. The old world was still distorted by cartographers by copying from the portalanos but the new worlds of North and South America as well as even Antarctica were amazingly accurate. They even showed lands still not explored by Europeans and were recognised as having been copied from ancient maps which no longer exist. What happened to these old maps? Why did they disappear? Perhaps many were destroyed deliberately together with all the other literature which was burnt by European colonists, who did the same to Africa as they did to the Aztecs, but only more successfully. In Mexico we have accounts of how the Aztec books were destroyed on huge bonfires because according to the Catholic priests they were the works of the Devil. In Africa the destruction was so complete that we do not even have accounts of that cultural holocaust. However, many artefacts were taken back to Europe and, who knows, some may one day turn up in the vaults of Estoril or the Vatican City.

Columbus and the conquistadors saw the physical evidence of African people in Central America where there were many Black tribes. Some sided with Cortes in his conquest of the Aztecs because they were oppressed by the Aztec regime, and indeed Cortes could never have won without their help. Many skeletons from the Olmec period reveal strong Africoid characteristics and a large number of terracotta statuettes as well as wood carvings from that period over 2000 years ago are clearly Negroid. Moreover, continuing contact with Africa over the centuries is indicated by the remains of African people still being found. For example there was the discovery of two skeletons at Hull Bay in the Virgin Islands. While it is acknowledged that they were African, the Smithsonian Institute has tried to explain away the radiocarbon dating of 1250 AD by saying that contact with seawater may have altered the amount of carbon C-14 present. Also the presence of an iron nail in the grave, the Smithsonian white-supremacists argued, indicated a post-Columbian date because they refuse to accept the considerable evidence of the use of iron in Africa before the Europeans arrived.

African place names abound in Central America just as European place names are found in north America and Hispanic names in south America. The name Mandinga appears as a town, a river and a bay in Panama and Mali was the name of a region of Panama, while Cana is the name of that country’s oldest gold mine; Cana of course derives from the African word for gold. Even elements of Islamic culture was carried into the Americas by Africans. When Spaniards arrived in St Vincent they described the “woolly-haired” people they found there as “Mohamedans” and thought their language sounded rather like Arabic. Now this is interesting because, the Moors having so recently occupied a large portion of Spain, they knew what Arabic sounded like. They noted also that the Caribs would not eat pork, lizards or crabs, all of which are taboo in Islamic societies. The most important symbol of Islam, which appears today above the domes of mosques and on the flags of several Moslem states, is the crescent. This was highly esteemed amongst the Caribs and Arawaks and crafted in gold, silver and copper alloys which was called caracoles, another African name. Also Africans introduced the art of weaving cotton into the Americas where it was used as a currency as it was in Africa, and this was specifically noted by Columbus.

What I have presented to you  is only the beginning of the story. It is rather like Counsel’s opening statement at a trial, the full evidence has to be presented later. Time does not allow me to put the full case here tonight, so it is up to you to go out and discover it. A lot of that evidence is available in Ivan Van Sertima’s book African Presence in Early America as well as in other books, but it is also up to you who listen to me this evening or those who will read a copy of this talk on my website to carry the case forward. I am no longer a young man and not in the best of health and this may be my last Black History Month talk, so I urge you to take the time to study the subject yourselves. Make sure your bookshelves include some of the many books available and pass on what you learn to your children. Encourage them to take an interest in establishing the truth about history, the good and the bad. Then perhaps some of them will decide to make a career out of history or archaeology, to discover more of the evidence I am sure is still out there and to write books, make films and perhaps give their own Black History Month talks just as my own son, Nicholas Roussel-Milner, will be doing here in two weeks time.

Thank you for listening to me.