Chapter III: Christopher Who?
The Pre-Columbian Discovery
and Exploration of America
“Never have we praised somebody so highly for being so wrong” - Patrick Huyghe,
Columbus Was Last: From 200,000 BC to 1492 - A Heretical History of Who Was First
“The very definition of culture hinges on accumulation, transmission, and cross-fertilization of knowledge.” - Professor Paul Shao, Iowa State University.
Note: While this journal is concerned only with the history of North America, the entire continent, including Canada and South America, need to be looked at in terms of who arrived there first, and when, so for this chapter only I will be expanding my reach to include South America, Mexico and, if necessary, Canada. Because the entire thing forms one giant landmass, the idea of people arriving in one part and either sailing to or just migrating into another has to be considered, so we can’t ignore if say Chinese sailors landed in Mexico or Indian ones in Peru or whatever. Only by looking at the full picture can we build up a proper narrative of what may, or may not have happened before Senor Colon.
Trust can be a very powerful thing. You trust your parents, when you're little, believing they know everything and that what they tell you is true. You trust your teachers, when you go to school - they are older and founts of knowledge, so what they tell you, what they teach you must be the truth. And you trust the history you learn. Well, why not? Who would lie about events that took place hundreds or even thousands of years ago?
And then you grow up, and you start to question these things, and you think to yourself that something may not sound right, and that possibly you have not been told the real truth about it. And there are many reasons why this will be so. Existing power structures wish to remain in place, control of the narrative is an effective tool for the control of the people, and sometimes the real truth is just something those in authority, those in whom you have, from an early age, placed your unquestioning trust, don’t want you to know.
For many years - hell, right up to yesterday, in fact - I, like so many others, believed the myth that America was discovered by an Italian navigator and explorer working for the king and queen of Spain. He may even have believed it himself, at the time. But the truth - the real truth - is that when Christopher Columbus first sighted land and placed his feet on the beach at what he called San Salvador in the Bahamas, he was in fact following the journeys and walking in the footsteps of men who had passed that way over ten times the length of his life. Columbus was not in any way the first man to walk on the shores of what became known as America, not even the first white man, just the first European.
But as in all things, history is not only written by the winners but almost invariably by the powerful, the rich and almost exclusively by the white race, and so the story was spread throughout the Christian world of the time that the brave Italian Cristobal Colon, or Christopher Columbus, had “discovered” America, also known (erroneously) as the West Indies and more popularly (and, at the time, accurately) as the New World. His was the fame, his was the glory, yet time was not kind to him and the country he “first discovered”, as the history books will tell you, and as we all know, did not end up carrying his name, but that of another Italian explorer. More of that in the next chapter, however.
It would probably be a little glib, though no loss true, to say that the various other people who walked on American land before the Italian Admiral of the Ocean have been forgotten, or willfully pushed to one side, by history, because they don’t matter, but in many cases this has to be seen as the case. Most, not all but most, were black, and we know what European expansionist white supermacist history thinks of blacks. If they have a role at all, black people take the part of the slaves brought back from Africa to create the enduring and annoyingly indelible stain of human trafficking practiced, not only by America it must be said, but practised by that country for the longest period. When other nations had given up - or been forced to outlaw - the heinous crime of slavery, Americans stubbornly clung to their outmoded and by now unfashionable and seen as reprehensible practice of holding human beings in bondage for their own enrichment.
And this, generally, is what history will tell us about the black man and black woman. The word SLAVE is written large in deeply-incised letters of blood and fire across the entire history of the black community, the people now often referred to as African-Americans, and even today that horrid legacy persists, while under certain recent administrations its inhuman and misshapen shadow has begun to crawl out of the dark caverns of history and stagger across the landscape of politics, crime and human rights.
But how much different would it be did people know how important black people were to the discovery of America? How humble might so-called “real Americans”, “patriots” and “pure Americans” feel if they knew that they were little more than what we call here blow-ins; Johnny Come Latelys arriving in the fifteenth and sixteenth century to a land which had known the tread of the red man for over ten thousand years, and that of the black for over five hundred? Not much difference, probably, knowing people today. All of what we are about to record here might very well be dismissed as “fake news” or “BLM propaganda”, or any of the other myriad and pathetic excuses certain people have to explain away that which they cannot contemplate, agree with, understand or expect. In desperation, such facts might just be ignored, as they have been so far for over a millennium. But history can’t be ignored. The truth will, eventually, out.
This is the truth.
It may surprise you.
That does not make it any less true.
Note: All of the following information is taken from
They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America by Ivan Van Sertima. For those who may wish to examine his credentials, Van Sertima is a Professor teaching at Rutgers University. He is an anthropologist and linguist, and has written on this same subject for the
New York Times. His book was written over forty years ago, in 1976, yet this is the first time I have ever heard of it. Not that I should necessarily know of such things, but if, as I assume it is, proof for his conclusions are given in this book, should that information not by now have been used to update or even let’s say correct the history of the discovery and exploration of America? Of course, such updates would not go down well in the Land of the Free now, I understand that; but if this is a deliberate attempt to keep the world in the dark about the critical and pivotal role black people had in the exploration of the United States of America, then I think it’s doing everyone a huge disservice.
There is, of course, and has been, a very fragile and delicately-balanced state of mutual distrust between whites and blacks in America for, well, as long as the latter were forcibly introduced to the country by the former. You might even characterise it as an uneasy truce, and in very recent times this truce has wavered, snapped and now looks to be about to bend and reverse what little progress has been made in race relations in America. Despite a black man having aspired to the highest office in the land, the racial divisions in America have never been wider, and truth to tell, they were never that narrow anyway, despite the fine work of people like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson and of course Barack Obama, so a suggestion now that America was discovered by black people would be likely to strike a fuse to the tinder box that is just waiting to go off, and thrust the country into a full-on racial war.
So maybe it can be understood that this information had not been made public. But as the slogan goes, and it’s very true of course, black lives matter too; so does black history. If their ancestors were here before the whites, today’s blacks should be told this, and be able to point with pride and even a little arrogance towards their brave forebears, claiming once and for all their unalienable right to be here.
But such things are for Americans to decide, and there’s nothing I can do to speed or engage in that process. All I can do is tell you what I’ve learned, which is, to me anyway, nothing short of earth-shattering.
Professor Van Sertima’s own work is based, in part, he says in the foreword, on that of another acamadecian, Professor Leo Wiener, whose own research resulted in a three volume discussion entitled
Africa and the Discovery of America, itself published six years before he began writing his, so at least the tail-end of the 1960s, possibly a little further back, as I don’t know how long it took Van Sertima to write and publish his own book. But either way, we’re looking at a minimum now then of sixty years of the truth being ignored, or most likely suppressed.