Van Sertima completed his master's degree at Rutgers in 1977. It was generally "ignored or dismissed" by academic experts at the time and strongly criticised in detail in an academic journal, Current Anthropology, in 1997.
Published by Random House rather than an academic press, They Came Before Columbus was a best-seller 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. The book deals mostly with his arguments for an African origin of Mesoamerican culture in the Western Hemisphere. He published his They Came Before Columbus in 1976, as a Rutgers graduate student. In 1970 Van Sertima immigrated to the United States, where he entered Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, for graduate work.Īfter divorcing his first wife, Sertima remarried in 1984, to Jacqueline L. In doing field work in Africa, he compiled a dictionary of Swahili legal terms in 1967. Van Sertima married Maria Nagy in 1964 they adopted two sons, Larry and Michael. During the 1960s, he worked for several years in Great Britain as a journalist, doing weekly broadcasts to the Caribbean and Africa. įrom 1957 to 1959, Van Sertima worked as a Press and Broadcasting Officer in the Guyana Information Services. 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 honours. He attended the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London from 1959. He completed primary and secondary school in Guyana, and started writing poetry. Van Sertima was born in Kitty Village, near Georgetown, in what was then the colony of British Guiana (present-day Guyana) he retained his British citizenship throughout his life. While his Olmec theory has "spread widely in African American community, both lay and scholarly", it was mostly ignored in Mesoamericanist scholarship, and has been dismissed as Afrocentric pseudoarchaeology and pseudohistory to the effect of "robbing native American cultures". He was 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). Ivan Gladstone Van Sertima (26 January 1935 – ) was a Guyanese-born British associate professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University in the United States.
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