Ivan Gladstone Van Sertima (26 January 1935 – 25 May 2009) was an associate professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University in the United States.
He is best known for his Olmec alternative origin speculations, a brand of pre-Columbian contact theory, which he proposed in his book They Came Before Columbus (1976). While his Olmec theory has "spread widely in the African American community, both lay and scholarly", it was mostly ignored in Mesoamericanist scholarship, or else dismissed as Afrocentric pseudohistory to the effect of "robbing native American cultures".
Van Sertima was born in Karina Village, Guyana, when Guyana was still a British colony; he retained his British citizenship throughout his life. He completed primary and secondary school in Guyana, and started writing poetry.He attended the School of Oriental and African Studies(SOAS) at the University of London from 1959. In addition to his creative writing, Van Sertima completed his undergraduate studies in African languages and literature at SOAS in 1969, where he graduated with honors. During his studies, he learned Swahili and Hungarian. From 1957 to 1959, worked a Press and Broadcasting Officer in the Guyana Information Services During the 1960s, he worked for several years in Great Britain as a journalist, doing weekly broadcasts to the Caribbean and Africa. Van Sertima married Maria Nagy in 1964; they adopted two sons.
In doing field work in Africa, he compiled a dictionary of Swahili legal terms in 1967.
In 1970 Van Sertima immigrated to the United States, where he entered Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, for graduate work.
He published his They Came Before Columbus 1976, as a Rutgers graduate student. The book deals mostly with his claims of African origin of Mesoamerican culture in the Western Hemisphere, but among other things also writing that the kings of the 25th Dynasty of Egypt were Nubians. The book, published by Random House rather than an academic press, was a bestseller and achieved widespread attention within the African American community for his claims of prehistoric African contact and diffusion of culture in Central and South America. It was generally "ignored or dismissed" by academic experts at the time and strongly criticized in detail in an academic journal in 1997.
Sertima completed his master's degree at Rutgers in 1977. He became Associate Professor of African Studies at Rutgers in the Department of Africana Studies. In 1979, Van Sertima founded the Journal of African Civilizations, which he exclusively edited and published for decades.
He published several annual compilations, volumes of the journal dealing with various topics of African history. His article, "The Lost Sciences of Africa: An Overview" (1983), makes claims for early African advances in metallurgy, astronomy, mathematics, architecture, engineering, agriculture, navigation, medicine and writing. He claimed that higher learning, in Africa as elsewhere, was the preserve of elites in the centres of civilizations, rendering them vulnerable in the event (as happened in Africa) of the destruction of those centers and the disappearance of the knowledge. Van Sertima discussed such "African scientific contributions" in an essay for the volume African Renaissance, published in 1999 (he had first published the essay in 1983). This was a record of the conference held in Johannesburg, South Africa, in September 1998 on the theme of the so-called African Renaissance.
After divorcing his first wife, Sertima remarried in 1984, to Jacqueline L. Patten, who had two daughters.
On July 7, 1987, Van Sertima testified before a United States Congressional committee to oppose recognition of the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's "discovery" of the Americas. He said, "You cannot really conceive of how insulting it is to Native Americans . . . to be told they were discovered".
Van Sertima retired in 2006. He died on 25 May 2009 aged 74.He was survived by his wife and four adult children. His widow, Jacqueline Van Sertima, said she would continue to publish theJournal of African Civilizations. She also planned to publish a book of his poetry.
