Ivan Gladstone Van Sertima

Ivan Gladstone Van Sertima was a Guyanese-born British academic who became an associate professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University. Born in 1935 in Guyana, he later moved to the United States where he pursued an academic career focused on African studies and pre-Columbian history. Van Sertima is best known for his 1976 book 'They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America,' which argued that Africans reached the Americas before Christopher Columbus through various forms of evidence including navigation records, cultural similarities, and interpretations of archaeological artifacts like the Olmec colossal heads. His work built upon earlier scholarship by Leo Wiener from the 1920s but expanded the thesis with what he called a 'pyramid of evidence.' Van Sertima founded the Journal of African Civilizations in 1979 and testified before a U.S. Congressional Committee about his theories regarding pre-Columbian African presence in the Americas. He also edited works on African contributions to science. Van Sertima died in 2009, leaving behind a legacy of scholarship that remains highly controversial in mainstream academic circles.