Blacks Also Owned Miles of  US Pre-Columbian Lands

By Paul Barton, editorial, TOMRIC Agency (Dar es Salaam), 25
May 2001 Washington D.C. 

One of the saddest aspects of enslavement in the Americas, particular North America, is the fact that all forms of education was denied us and still is today. Blacks were forced to remain ignorant and told
they have no history or culture. 

Well, here is the problem, most African-Americans are still void of historical knowledge particularly of their
ownership to lands right here in the U.S. 

Blacks owned about one million square miles of land in the Louisiana Territories and the South Eastern/Florida
region, as well as California. In all these areas of the U.S., there were Black African-American nations before
Columbus, who were targeted for enslavement due to the Papal Edict that gave the Christian nations of Europe
the go-ahead to make slaves of all descendants of Ham found in the newly discovered lands This fact cannot be
denied. The essay on Black Civilizations of Ancient America, published as the great book; Susu Economics the
History of Pan-African Trade, Commerce, Money and Wealth, tells a reality of this. 

While many of Africans? ancestors were kidnapped in Africa, many were Africans who came from West
Africa, had a number of kingdoms and empires in the Southern parts of the U.S., and who were captured, had
their lands taken and their persons sold into slavery. These Africans were direct black ancestors and their had a
continuing connection with West Africa which included trade and commerce on the very eve of the invasion of
the Europeans to the Americas. 

In 1991, the U.S. returned about 68,000 square acres of land to the Washitaw Nation of Louisiana, one of the
prehistoric Black nations of the United States (See www.hotep.org). This group of Blacks is the evidence of
the Black ownership of land and the Black presence before English and Spanish/French colonization of North
America. 

Many Blacks living today are descended from the pre-Columbian Black nations and it is time that issue is
included in the reparation discussion. They should locate who are the descendants of these
pre-Columbian African nations in the U.S. (perhaps the entire mixed African-American population, since most of these Black
tribes were enslaved and shipped to plantations and mixed with Blacks from Africa). 

When discussing reparations, they must realize that more than the actual performance of slave labor was
involved. The taking of Blacks aboriginal lands in North America was also involved in this great trade, which
was part of a grand conspiracy by the European powers, in which they used biblical mythology to promote
their policies. 

Black researchers should do the work necessary to find the documentation proving that as recently as the
1800?s, the U.S. fought with a Black nation in California called the ?Black Californians, and that that Black
nation ended up on slave plantations in the U.S., while others were sent to salt mines in Mexico. 

The French and Spanish have documentation on the Black Washitaw Nation who once owned much of the
annexed Louisiana Territories. In fact, the Washitaw Nation regard the states of Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas,
Oklahoma and Mississippi as Washitaw Proper, and as of this very moment, the Washitaw Nation is recognized by nations around the world as one of the most ancient nations in the Americas (See
www.hotep.org). 

According to the present leadership of the Washitaw Empire, the Wasitaw are the descendants of prehistoric
African sea farers who settled in the Mississippi Valley Region and the Southern U.S., thousands of years
Before Christ. They were boat builders, builders of pyramid mounds, Seafarers and practiced agriculture. 

According to an article, www.wanoline.com (see also We Are The Washitaw, the Washitaw originally came
from Africa and were Africans. The Washitaw are still African Negritic peoples and they, like many of the
ancient Blacks who live in the Americas became victims of the Papal Edict which opened the way for the
colonialization of the New World and the taking of people into slavery and occupation of their lands. 

The Washitaw build hundreds of earthen pyramid mounds all over the southern and midwestern parts of the
U.S. Some, such as the mound at Poverty Point in Louisiana is one of the most sacred sites of the
Washitaw. Skeletons found in Washitaw gravesites from the pre-Columbian period show a tall people with characteristics
similar to Africans. 

It is time to get to do a thorough job on the reparation issue. What need to be done is not discussing how to
parcel out the money we may receive, but how to gain lands taken from our ancestors and how to create a
nation of independent minded people who will use their skills to rebuild the Black nation in America and return
to the glorious renaissance Blacks had right here in the U.S., Mexico and Africa before European colonialism. 

Copyright ? 2001 TOMRIC Agency. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).

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African Presence In America Before Columbus

http://members.aol.com/carltred/AfricanPresence.htm

http://www.humanities.ualberta.ca/history111/African_discovery_america.htm

The Following is an e-mail essay sent to an African List serve:

—– Original Message —–

From: Minister Faust minister@oanet.com

To: zemariam@istar.ca

Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2001 6:55 AM

Subject: African Explorers in Pre-Columbian America

Who came first, Columbus?

The Long Trail of Evidence of African Explorers in Pre-Columbian America

By Hisham Aidi

According to Malian historian and playwright Gaoussou Diawara, Africans may have
"discovered" America nearly two centuries before Christopher
Columbus’s famous landing. In his forthcoming book, The Saga of Abubakari II… He left with 2000
Boats, Diawara describes an African monarch who abdicated his
throne in 1311 and set off to discover whether the Atlantic Ocean, likethe vast River Niger,
"had another bank." Diawara contends that in 1312
Abubakari II, who ruled over a vast West African empire including modern-day Mali, landed in Recife,
on the coast of Brazil. The scholar, who heads a research
project dedicated to exploringthe history and heritage of Abubakari II, marshals considerable
archaeological and linguistic evidence demonstrating the African presence in pre-Columbian America.

He’s not the first to do so. The thesis of an early African presence in the Americas was
prominently advanced by Guyana-born anthropologist Ivan Van
Sertima in his 1977 book, They Came Before Columbus. Van Sertima argues that Africans reached the
Americas in two stages. The first wave, ancient Egyptians and
Nubians, reached the Gulf of Mexico around 1200 BCE and 800 BCE, respectively, bringing with them
writing and pyramid-building. Centuries later, around 1310 CE,
the Mande people of West Africa went to Mexico, Panama, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru and various
Caribbean islands, according to Van Sertima. The Olmec stone heads of Mexico, which have
astonishingly African features, are among the archaeological and
linguistic evidence Van Sertima presents. Van Sertima describes how, according to Columbus’s own
writings, the people living on the island of Hispaniola (later
Haiti and the Dominican Republic) told him that "black-skinned people had come from the south
and southeast trading in gold-tipped metal spears. Columbus sent
samples of these spears back to Spain to be tested, and they were found to be identical
in their proportions of gold, silver and copper alloys to spears then being forged in African
Guinea. Columbus’ son, Ferdinand, said his father told him that
he had seen black people north of what is now Honduras." The evidence, Van Sertima concludes,
"argues overwhelmingly against a mere coincidence."
Indeed, the idea that Columbus was not the first person from across the ocean to
"discover" the Americas is commonplace, and shared by
the Society of American Archaeology, which declared in 1968 that "there cannot be now any
question, but that there were visitors to the New World from the
Old in historic or even prehistoric time before 1492."

But did they come from Africa? Unlike theories that Viking explorers from Northern Europe arrived
on the North American continent hundreds of years before
Columbus-theories that are debated but generally treated with cautious respect-Van Sertima’s
assertions drew angry fire from those who disagreed. A New York
Times reviewer dismissed Van Sertima as a "deluded scholar" writing "ignorant
rubbish" with "abysmal" historical and research
methods. Students of Meso-America have also strongly disputed Van Sertima’s characterization of the
Olmec people as African. David Grove, an expert on Olmec
civilization, notes that Van Sertima’s claims about the Olmecs’ blackness are suspect because
"the Olmecs did not have a selection of skin tones to
choose from in making their monuments. The only stone available to them was black stone.

The source of the stone is the Tuxlas Mountains, of volcanic origin." A particularly caustic
critique, titled "Van Sertima’s Afrocentricity and the Olmecs,"
even scoffed that "native Americans would have sacrificed and eaten the Africans if they
came."

Such attacks don’t surprise [White writer] Richard Poe, the author of Black Spark, White Fire:
Did African Explorers Civilize Ancient Europe?, which addresses
the possibility of Africans taking transatlantic trips before Columbus. "Ivan Van Sertima is a
courageous and brilliant scholar, who has done ground-breaking
work," says Poe. "His findings have never received the fair hearing that they deserve.
Rather than refuting his arguments, Van Sertima’s critics
habitually resort to mean-spirited, personal attacks. The anger and indignation his theories provoke
seems to go beyond mere scholarly disagreement." Such
fierceness, Poe says, has a lot to do with race-black scholars generally embraced Van Sertima’s
work. "Consciously or unconsciously, some of Van Sertima’s critics
may still be clinging to the 19th-century notion that seafaring is a European monopoly,"
he says. "Seafaring is the quintessential European achievement, the single endeavor of which we
are most proud. It was seafaring that enabled Europe to conquer
the world. White people have a deep sense of themselves as explorers.

The idea that black Africans might have beaten us to the New World threatens our sense of
ownership over the seas. Maybe it’s a bit like the way some
black people dislike hearing white musicians do rap. A hundred years ago, it was common for scholars
to claim that peoples of so-called ‘Aryan’ or Nordic race
possessed a peculiar combination of courage and wanderlust that made them natural sailors.
Non-Aryans were viewed as poor sailors, even when the evidence
proved otherwise-as in the case of the Egyptians, who are known to have made long sea voyages
to Somalia, Crete, Greece and probably beyond." The evidence, Diawara argues, can still be
found in Africa. Both Van Sertima and Diawara say that Mali’s
griots (oral historians) tell of the African king who sent an expedition to the "Western
Ocean." His voyage is mentioned not only in the griots’
narratives, but also in Arabic texts, including a 14th century Egyptian book by the historian al-Omari.
In an interview with the BBC, Tiemoko Konate, one of the
researchers working with Diawara, offered other evidence of Abubakari’s landing in Recife, Brazil:
"Its [Recife’s] other name is Purnanbuco, which we believe
is an aberration of the Mande name for the rich gold fields that accounted for much of the
wealth of the Mali Empire, Boure Bambouk." Konate also cites tests, similar to those Van
Sertima described, showing that the gold tips of spears found by
Columbus in the Americas may be made of originally West African gold. In an interview with Emerge
magazine, Van Sertima argued that the Atlantic’s currents serve
as natural marine conveyer belts: "Once you enter them, you are transported (even against your
will, even with no navigational skill) from one bank of the
ocean to the other," he said. "Thor Heyerdahl crossed the Atlantic in 1969 in a papyrus
boat like those built by Africans before the time of Christ. Hannes
Lindemann crossed the Atlantic in an African dugout in 12 days less than it took
Amerigo Vespucci or Columbus to cross. Three currents can carry Africans to the Americas: off the
Cape Verde islands, off the Senegambia coast, and off the
southern coast of Africa. It is at the end of these currents that we have found Africans in America
before Columbus."

Interestingly, Diawara thinks that the story of Abubakari II, who apparently never returned to
Africa, has important lessons to offer Africans today-particularly
African leaders in the states that used to constitute the ancient Malian empire. "Look at
what’s going on in all the remnants of that empire, in Ivory
Coast, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea," Diawara said in a BBC interview. "Politicians are
bathing their countries in blood, setting them on fire just so
that they can cling to power. They should take an example from Abubakari II. He was a far more
powerful man than any of them. And he was willing to give it all
up in the name of science and discovery. That should be a lesson for everyone in Africa today."