From: ThePresident
"We have come to reclaim the house of history." - Dr. Ivan Van Sertima. The following video is a lecture given by Dr. Ivan Van Sertima discussing African history. Van Sertima delivered perhaps one of the most brilliant lecture of his career. He essentially obliterated the Columbus myth and explain how the earliest people in the Americas were people of the Negritic African race, who entered the Americas perhaps as early as 100,000 years ago Recent discoveries in the field of linguistics and other methods have shown without a doubt, that the ancient Olmecs of Mexico, the forefathers of the Mayans, known as the Xi People, came originally from West Africa and were of the Mende African ethnic stock. According to Clyde A. Winters and other writers, the Mende script was discovered on some of the ancient Olmec monuments of Mexico and were found to be identical to the very same script used by the Mende people of West Africa. The video was recorded in 1986 at Camden Town Hall, London by the Caribbean Cultural International & Karnak House, and transferred from VHS. Dr. Ivan Van Sertima was born in Kitty Village, Guyana, South America on January 26, 1935. He was educated at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University where he graduated with honors. From 1957 to 1959, he served as a Press and Broadcasting Officer in the Guyana Information Services. During the decade of the 1960s, he broadcasted weekly from Britain to both Africa and the Caribbean. He came to the United States in 1970, where he completed his post graduate studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Dr. Van Sertima began his teaching career as an instructor at Rutgers in 1972, and he is now Professor of African studies in the Department of Africana Studies.Van Sertima is a literary critic, a linguist, and an anthropologist, and has made a name for himself in all three fields. As a linguist, he is the compiler of the Swahili Dictionary of Legal Terms, based on his field word in Tanzania, East Africa in 1967. As a literary critic, he is the author of Caribbean Writers, a collection of critical essays on the Caribbean novel. He is also the author of several major literary reviews published in Denmark, India, Britain, and the United States. He was recognized for his work in this field by being requested by the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy to nominate candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature from 1976 to 1980.The cornerstone of Dr. Van Sertima's legacy will probably be his authorship of They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America. According to Van Sertima: "The African presence in America before Columbus is of importance not only to African and American history, but to the history of world civilizations. The African presence is proven by stone heads, terra cottas, skeletons, artifacts, techniques and inscriptions, by oral traditions and documented history, by botanical, linguistic and cultural data."They Came Before Columbus is a groundbreaking historical work and a literary hallmark. The ideas and themes presented in They Came Before Columbus were not novel. Indeed, many people had written on the African presence in pre-Columbian America before Van Sertima, notably Leo Wiener, Kofi Wangara, R.A. Jairazbhoy, Legrand H. Clegg II, and Floyd W. Hayes III, but Van Sertima's book was the first such work of its type written by an African to comprehensively address the subject. In his own words, Van Sertima notes that:"What I have sought to do in this book, therefore, is to present the whole picture emerging from these disciplines, all the facts that are now known about the links between Africa and America in pre-Columbian times.