Posted by NEWS SERVICE on November 16, 1998 at 21:48:52:
In Reply to: ACADEMIC TERRORISM: THE FIGHT AGAINST BLACK SCHOLARSHIP posted by NEWS SERVICE on November 16, 1998 at 21:35:33:
FORWARDED MESSAGE
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Date: Wed, 28 Oct 1998 09:18:37 -0500 (EST)
From: Rodney Jordan raj@melanet.com
Subject: On Van Sertima (From 9/97 MAAT News)
(portions of newsletter deleted)
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. "Net Notes"
5. Feature Story: Reply To My Critics, Ivan Van Sertima
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COMMENTS FROM THE PUBLISHER
"NET NOTES"
A blatant example of the latest attempt to suppress
information and to discredit Black scholars is the
current assault against Dr. Ivan Van Sertima of Rutgers
University. Van Sertima is a brilliant historian,
anthropologist, archeologist, linguist, poet and
author. He has written or edited twenty books over the
past twenty years. He is best known for his compelling
arguments that Black people reached the New World
thousands of years before Columbus.
In a democratic society, academic journals would be
expected to invite Van Sertima to publish his ideas on
their prestigious pages for the evaluation, analyses
and critiques of his colleagues; followed by a general
exchange of ideas between him and his critics. In
America, of course, no such democratic exchange is
available to Black (and most other) scholars who fail
to toe the conventional line. They are isolated,
marginalized and, if possible, destroyed.
Just such a movement is afoot at this very moment
before our eyes. In the Spring of this year, "Current
Anthropology" and "Ethnohistory" published vicious
attacks against the outstanding scholarly legacy of Van
Sertima without providing him with sufficient
opportunities to respond to his critics. Outraged by
this obvious conspiracy, Van Sertima is writing a book,
to be published in the Winter of 1998, entitled "A
Reply To My Critics." In the meantime, he has issued a
two page statement, which he asked us to reprint for
MAAT readers.
Recognizing this assault for what it is, Eso Won
Bookstore and Compton Community College hosted a large
reception for Van Sertima (about seven hundred people
attended) on October 10, 1997, during the eve of
Columbus Day. At the stellar event, the scholar
received tributes from U.S. Congressmen, State
Assemblymen as well as mayors and council people from
several cities in Los Angeles County. It was a
magnificent tribute to a giant scholar.
Please write and support Van Sertima and his
outstanding work at this address:
"Legacies"
Dr. Ivan Van Sertima
347 Felton Avenue
Highland Park, NJ 08904
We again remind our readers that our groundbreaking
videotape and booklet set, "When Black Men Ruled The
World: Egypt During The Golden Age," is still available
at (800)788-CLEGG.
Legrand H. Clegg II
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REPLY TO MY CRITICS
Ivan Van Sertima
An attack on my thesis that Africans made contact with
America before Columbus in two major pre-Christian
periods (circa 1200 b.c. and circa 800 b.c.) in
addition to the Mandingo contact period (1310/1311
A.D.) has been circulated in advance to hundreds of
subscribers to a journal, Current Anthropology. Copies
of this attack by Bernard de Montellano, Warren Barbour
and Gabriel Haslip-Viera were also sent out to
African-American scholars, some of whom were cited in
the attack, dishonestly titled "Van Sertima's
Afrocentricity and the Olmecs." The title's emphasis is
meant to suggest that all revisions of African history
by so-called "Blacks" belong to a common school,
radiate from a common brain, and are cast in the same
"racialist" hue and mode. This circular, which precedes
my new book, REPLY TO MY CRITICS (scheduled to appear
in Sept), seeks to highlight the brazen and malicious
lies, slanders and misrepresentations that characterize
this attack. Let it be noted that I was invited to
respond to this attack but was forced to withdraw. The
editor, after verbally agreeing that I could reprint my
commentary, after the issue of the Journal appeared,
did a dramatic about-turn when pressed to sign a
written agreement to back up his word. He wrote that I
could only reprint my "commentary" (15 pages) if I also
reprinted the attack on me (50 pages) since "they form
a unit." To feel the full absurdity of this, just
imagine the Jewish Defense League being forced to
republish an extended Nazi-type attack on their
positions in order to republish a brief response to
such a slanderous attack.
- LIE ONE: - "Van Sertima's expedition allegedly sailed
or drifted westward to the Gulf of Mexico where it came
in contact with inferior Olmecs. These individuals
created Olmec civilization." - De Montellano, Barbour
and Haslip-Viera.
- THE TRUTH: As far back as 1976, I made my position on
this matter very clear. I never said that Africans
created or founded American civilization. I said they
made contact and all significant contact between two
peoples lead to influences. "I think it is necessary to
make it clear - since partisan and ethnocentric
scholarship seems to be the order of the day - that the
emergence of the Negroid face, which the archeological
and cultural data overwhelmingly confirm, in no way
presupposes the lack of a native originality, the
absence of other influences or the automatic eclipse of
other faces"-p. 147 of "They Came Before Columbus." See
also Journal of African Civilizations, Vol 8, No. 2,
1986 "I cannot subscribe to the notion that
civilization suddenly dropped onto the American earth
from the Egyptian heaven."
- LIE TWO: None of the early Egyptians and Nubians
looked like Negroes. "They have long, narrow noses..."
"Short, flat noses are confined to the West African
ancestors of African-Americans." Again, "there is no
evidence that ancient Nubians ever braided their hair.
This style comes from colonial and modern Ethiopia."
- THE TRUTH: Narrow noses have been found among
millions of pure-blooded Africans. We can see this
among the Elongated and Nilotic types. My critics know
nothing about the variants of Africa, ancient or
modern. All the six main variants of the African have
been found in the Egyptian and Nubian graves. For
examples of ancient braided Nubian hair, see Frank
Snowden's "Before Color Prejudice," As for
Egypto-Nubians only having narrow noses, see Egyptian
pharaohs in Vol 10 and 12 of the JAC and major Nubian
pharaohs in Peggy Bertram's essay (JAC, Vol.
12)-Ushanaru, Plate 8, p 173; Taharka as the god Amun
from Kawa Temples, Plate 9, p. 173; Shabaka, Plate 12,
p. 176. Tanwetamani, Plate 16, p. 180. To say that
these are narrow noses is to exhibit a colossal
ignorance of African types in ancient Egypt and Nubia.
The agenda behind this is to bolster their case that
they could not have been models for any of the Olmec
stone heads.
- LIE THREE; Modern Egyptians look exactly as they did
thousands of years ago. The composition of the Egyptian
has not changed over the last 5000 years. Invasions by
the Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Arabs and Romans left
them looking the same today as in the dawn of history.
- THE TRUTH: This is a hasty misreading of the work of
scholars like A.C. Berry, R. J. Berry and Ucko who
point out that there is a remarkable degree of
homogeneity in this area for 5000 years. What a
superficial reading of this fails to note is that the
period ends with the close of the native dynasties
BEFORE the invasions of the Assyrian, Persian, Greek,
Roman and Arab foreigners
- LIE FOUR: Faced with the startingly Negroid features
of some of the Olmec stone heads, my critics try 4 ways
out: (a) They are "spitting images of the native;" (b)
they appear dark because some of them were carved out
of dark volcanic stone; (c) some were made of white
basalt which turned dark over time; (d) ancient
Egyptians and Nubians were remote in physiognomy from
sub-Saharan Negroes and none of them could have been
models for any of the "Negro-looking" heads. Having
said all that, they then claim that "races are not
linked to specific physiognomic traits."
- THE TRUTH: No need to shoot them down on this. They
turned the gun on themselves.
- LIE FIVE: Nothing African has been found in any
archeological excavation in the New World.
- THE TRUTH: In the drier centers of the Olmec world -
at Tlatilco, Cerro de las Mesas and Monte Alban - the
Polish craniologist, Andrez Wiercinski, found
indisputable evidence of an African presence. The many
traits analyzed in these Olmec sites indicated
individuals with Negroid traits predominating but with
an admixture of other racial traits. This is what I
have said. The work of A. Vargas Guadarrama is an
important reinforcement of Wiercinski's study. He found
that the skulls he examined at Tlatilco, which
Wiercinski had classified as Negroid, were "radically
different" from other skulls on the site, bearing
indisputable similarities to skulls in West Africa and
Egypt.
- LIE SIX: Van Sertima presents no evidence that a New
World cotton (gossypium hirsutum var. punctatum) was
transferred from Guinea to the Cape Verde in 1462 by
the Portuguese and there is no hard proof that West
Africans made a round trip to America before Columbus.
-THE TRUTH: I cited evidence in 12 categories to
establish Mandingo voyages to the New World circa
1310/1311 A.D. This included eyewitness reports from
nearly a dozen Europeans, even Columbus himself,
metallurgical, linguistic, botanical, navigational,
oceanographic, skeletal, epigraphic, cartographic,
oral, documented and iconographic evidence. With regard
to New World cotton in Africa before 1462, Stephens
spoke in two tongues to pacify isolationist colleagues.
- LIE SEVEN: My critics claim that I said the bottle
gourd came in with Old World voyagers.
- THE TRUTH: I was at pains to point out that this is
ONE PLANT THAT COULD DRIFT TO AMERICA WITHOUT THE LOSS
OF SEED VIABILITY. "Bottle gourds got caught in the
pull of currents from the African coast and drifted to
America across the Atlantic. Thomas Whitaker and G.F.
Carter showed that these gourds are capable of floating
in seawater for 7 months without loss of seed
viability" - "They Came Before Columbus," 204. They
indulge in an even more vicious dishonesty with regard
to cotton, claiming that I said "Old World cottons came
into America with a fleet of Nubians circa 700 B.C." I
never linked cotton transfer to Nubian contact.
- LIE EIGHT: My critics admit "we cannot unequivocally
date the heads" but they single out one which they say
Ann Cyphers confidently dated about 1011 B.C. Note the
date! This is 200 years AFTER the Egyptian contact
period c. 1200 B.C. Yet they claim that the dating of
this one head proves "Negro-looking heads" were being
carved, mutilated, and buried prior to 1200 B.C.
- THE TRUTH: The stone heads could not have been buried
before they were carved.
- LIE NINE: Egyptians stopped building pyramids
"thousands of years" before 1200 B.C. No relationship
whatever exists between Old World/New World pyramids.
- THE TRUTH: Enormous obelisks, calling for the same
complex engineering skills of the pyramid age were
built at Karnak as late as 1295 B.C. A pyramid was also
built as Dashur circa 1700 B.C. Bart Jordan, the
mathematical child prodigy, to whom Einstein granted
special audience, established startling coincidences
between Old World and New World pyramids. He agrees
with me that "The overwhelming incidence of coincidence
argues overwhelmingly against a mere coincidence."
- LIE TEN: My critics claim that I have trampled upon
the self-respect and self-esteem of native Americans
and they have come forward to champion their cause.
- THE TRUTH: My people (for I am part Macusi and part
African) would be horrified to have, as champions of
our cause, De Montellano, Barbour, and Haslip-Viera,
who disgrace us with the charge that "native Americans
would have sacrificed and eaten the Africans if they
came."
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* Legrand H. Clegg II is an attorney, historian and producer of the
award-winning videotape, "When Black Men Ruled The World:
Egypt During The Golden Age."
(To order the videotape, please call 1-800-788-CLEGG)
http://www.melanet.com/clegg_series
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