Ivan Van Sertima, born in Guyana, South America, was a distinguished scholar educated at the School of Oriental and African Studies (London University) and Rutgers Graduate School, earning degrees in African Studies and Anthropology. From 1957 to 1959, he served as a Press and Broadcasting Officer in the Guyana Information Services and, during the 1960s, broadcast weekly to Africa and the Caribbean from Britain. A multifaceted intellectual, Van Sertima excelled as a literary critic, linguist, and anthropologist.
As a literary critic, he authored Caribbean Writers, a collection of essays on Caribbean literature, and published significant reviews in Denmark, India, Britain, and the United States. His expertise earned him the honor of nominating candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature from 1976 to 1980, as selected by the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy. As a historian, he was invited to join UNESCO’s International Commission for Rewriting the Scientific and Cultural History of Mankind.
In linguistics, Van Sertima published essays on the dialect of the Sea Islands off the Georgia Coast and compiled the Swahili Dictionary of Legal Terms based on his 1967 fieldwork in Tanzania. His seminal work, They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America (Random House, 1977), now in its 29th printing, was translated into French in 1981 and received the Clarence L. Holte Prize for excellence in literature and humanities related to the African diaspora. His book Early America Revisited advanced studies in archaeology, anthropology, and historical pedagogy.
A Professor of African Studies at Rutgers University and Visiting Professor at Princeton, Van Sertima founded and edited the Journal of African Civilizations in 1979. His influential anthologies, including Blacks in Science: ancient and modern, Black Women in Antiquity, Egypt Revisited, Egypt: Child of Africa, Nile Valley Civilizations, African Presence in the Art of the Americas, African Presence in Early Asia (co-edited with Runoko Rashidi), African Presence in Early Europe, African Presence in Early America, Great African Thinkers, Great Black Leaders: ancient and modern, and Golden Age of the Moor, shaped multicultural curricula in the United States.
As a poet, his work appeared in River and the Wall (1953) and various English and German publications. His essays were featured in Talk That Talk (1989), Future Directions for African and African American Content in the School Curriculum (1986), Enigma of Values (1979), and Black Life and Culture in the United States (1971). Van Sertima lectured at over 100 universities across the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, South America, and Europe. In 1991, he defended his thesis on the African presence in pre-Columbian America before the Smithsonian, with his address published in 1994 as part of Race, Discourse and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View of 1492. In 1987, he challenged the Columbus myth in a landmark presentation before a Congressional Committee, advocating for people of color worldwide.