Latest update March 28th, 2024 12:59 AM
May 31, 2009 Editorial
The local reports on the passing of Dr. Ivan Van Sertima,hardly did justice to this great son of Guyana. Dr. Van Sertima was first of all, an amazing polymath in this age of specializations and sub-specializations – a literary critic, a linguist, a historian and an anthropologist – who made a name for himself in all these fields.
As a linguist, he was 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 was the author of Caribbean Writers, a collection of critical essays on the Caribbean novel. He was also the author of several major literary reviews published in Denmark, India, Britain, and the United States. He was recognised 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.
But it was as a historian that the great man made his greatest impact with his 1977 groundbreaking work, “They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America”. 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. However, Van Sertima’s book was the first such work of its type, written by an African to synthesise materials from a mind-numbing range of fields to comprehensively address the subject. That took someone with genius.
The book has been reprinted over twenty times and can still be found in any credible bookstore in the world. What has been the secret of the book’s success? At the heart is the willingness of Dr. Van Sertima to challenge the dominant paradigm of Eurocentrism that not only takes as given that all knowledge and achievements came out of Europe – but that as its antithesis, nothing came out of Africa.
Whatever may have been the criticism of Dr. Van Sertima’s thesis – and they have been legion from the Eurocentric academic establishment – they have not been able to shake the reassessment of the orthodoxy that was precipitated by “They came before Columbus”.
Rejecting the ghettoising of his approach as “Afrocentric”, Dr Van Sertima in turn undermined the dominant approach portraying the history of mankind from a European point of view. This “Eurocentric” approach assumed a sense of superiority on one hand and ignored the role of non-European civilizations in the development of human culture—even refuting this role—on the other hand. Another scholar, Bernal, would later also shake up the dominant paradigm that nothing came out of Africa with Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985 but unlike Van Sertima, he accepted the centrality of Europe in world civilisation.
In this respect Van Sertima’s book resembles Edward Said’s Orientalism, which also aroused great response and generated many offshoots. Like Said, van Sertima was concerned with the link between the image of the “Africa” in Western culture and imperialism. Said addressed the influence this image has on attitudes toward living cultures and on Middle Eastern politics of the last two centuries. Dr. Van Sertima, focused on the deeper damage done to the African psyche by the Eurocentric enterprise of denying agency to Africa and Africans and deploys his scholarship in a project of reclamation. In his words: “”We have come to reclaim the house of history. We are dedicated to the revision of the role of the African in the world’s great civilizations, the contribution of Africa to the achievement of man in the arts and sciences. We shall emphasize what Africa has given to the world, not what it has lost.”
Like another great Guyanese, Dr Walter Rodney, whose work “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” has defined a reappraisal of all that went before it, Dr Van Sertima deserves wider acknowledgement in their native land. Not for their upliftment –but for ours. May his soul rest in peace.
THIS IDIOT TELLING GUYANA WE HAVE NO SAY IN THE 50% PROFIT SHARING AGREEMENT WE HAVE WITH EXXON.
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