Ivan Van Sertima and Africa's Contribution to Global Civilization

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_van_Sertima

Beyond the news- Cote d' I voire

This is what  you have probably heard: 

Ivory Coast faces many hurdles to peace

The prolonged fall of Laurent Gbagbo continued Wednesday, casting a pall over Abidjan, a city that’s been ground to a halt by nearly a week of urban warfare.

Two efforts by forces loyal to the internationally recognized president Alassane Ouattara to storm a bunker under the presidential palace where Gbagbo is reported to be hiding with his wife and family failed to dislodge the defiant former leader who refuses to step aside.

The crisis that has gripped Ivory Coast since its election in November has seen the resurgence of heavily armed militias and ethnic violence in a country already long divided between north and south. The economy is near collapse and both sides of the conflict have been accused of horrific human rights violations. Reports suggest both sides have armed notoriously hard-to-control militias and recruited civilian fighters and mercenaries. from The Toronto Star

AND THIS IS THE TRUTH BEHIND THE NEWS: 

New African Magazine

January 2008 archived edition

Focus

CFA How France lives off Francophone Africa via the CFA franc Professor Mamadou Koulibaly, Speaker of the Ivorian National Assembly and Professor of Economics, sheds light on the economic devastation caused to the African member states of the CFA (Communauté  Financière d’Afrique – [French Community of Africa]) zone through their continued link to the French currency – the Franc – in the past and today to the euro. In this informative interview with New African’s Ruth Tete and Soh Taadhieu, Professor Koulibaly does not mince his words as he calls for a total split and the creation of an independent currency free of colonial baggage. Question: Could you explain to our readers, what are the principle mechanisms of the CFA Franc Zone? Answer: The CFA franc region represents a state-controlled zone of cooperation with, interestingly, the levers of control based in Paris, from where the priority is the interests of France. The satellite states that are members of this zone are dispersed in West and Central Africa. The operational logic driving the functioning of this zone brings to mind a similarity with the way the Eastern European states were linked during the Cold War to the former Soviet bloc through the Warsaw Pact. The principals of monetary cooperation between France and the member states of the CFA zone were formulated in the 1960s in a colonial pact which was reviewed in the monetary cooperation convention of 23 November 1972 between the member states of the Banque des Etats de l’Afrique Centrale (BEAC) (Bank of Central African States) and the French Republic on one hand, as well as in the cooperation agreement of 4 December 1973 between the member states of the Union Monétaire Ouest-Africaine (UMOA) (or the Monetary Union of West African States) and the French Republic on the other hand. Just before France conceded to African demands for independence in the 1960s, it carefully organised its former colonies in a system of compulsory solidarity which consisted of obliging the African states to put 65% of their foreign currency reserves into the French Treasury, b ased on the convertibility, at a rigid exchange rate of the CFA – a currency France had created for them.  Gbagbo opposes French Colonial Pact According to President Gbagbo’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Koffi Charlse (Ouattara has since sent his own UN ambassador to New York), “the core of the problem in Cote d’Ivoire is a conspiracy by the French government to use any means necessary to remove Gbagbo from power because they think he is dangerous and inimical to their interests in Francophone Africa. But Gbagbo will not allow the French to control and run Cote d’Ivoire on their own terms.” Now form an objective opinion.