During the early 14th Century AD, Ibn Amir Hajib was returning to his distant kingdom of Mali after completing a sacred pilgrimage, known as a hajj, to Mecca. While resting in Egypt, he was interviewed by an Arab scholar from Damascus, then researching a history of West Africa. Chihab al-Umari asked the Sultan,
“How had you become ruler?” He replied:
“We belong to a family where the son succeeds the father in power. The ruler [mansa] who preceded me [Abu Bakr II] did not believe that it was impossible to reach the extremity of the ocean that encircles the earth (meaning Atlantic), and wanted to reach to that (end) and obstinately persisted in the design. So [in 1310 A.D.], he equipped two hundred boats full of men, as many others full of gold, water and victuals sufficient enough for several years. He ordered the chief (admiral) not to return until they had reached the extremity of the ocean, or if they had exhausted the provisions and the water. They set out.
“Their absence extended over a long period, and, at last, only one boat returned. On our questioning, the captain said: ‘Prince, we have navigated for a long time, until we saw in the midst of the ocean, as if a big river was flowing violently. My boat was the last one; others were ahead of me. As soon as any of them reached this place, it drowned in the whirlpool and never came out. I sailed backwards to escape this current.’
“But the Sultan would not believe him. He ordered two thousand boats to be equipped for him and for his men, and one thousand more for water and victuals. Then he conferred on me the regency during his absence, and departed with his men on the ocean trip, never to return, nor to give a sign of life.”1
Al-Umari’s interview with Ibn Amir Hajib took place about 175 years before Christopher Columbus sailed for the New World. Leading archaeological opinion, however, holds that Abu Bakr II’s transatlantic ventures never happened.
“There simply is no material evidence of any Pre-Hispanic contact between the Old World and Mesoamerica before the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th Century,” insists University of California-Riverside anthropology professor Karl Taube.2 He is seconded by official diffusionist deniers Warren Barbour, Gabriel Haslip-Viera, and Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, who are certain “no genuine African artifact has ever been found in a controlled archaeological excavation in the New World.”3
These gentlemen are apparently unaware of two male, negro skeletons excavated from a grave in the U.S. Virgin Islands by Smithsonian Institution archaeologists during February 1975. Subsequent published reports indicated that the human remains “showed a type of dental mutilation characteristic of African practices,” and “soil from the earth layers where the skeletons were recovered dated to circa 1250 A.D.,” roughly contemporaneous with Abu Bakr II’s oceanic expeditions.4 But the Virgin Islands’ finds were not anomalous.
Previous to his death in 2003, Andrzej Wiercinski, a professor of anthropology and archaeology at Warsaw University, identified negro skeletons in three, pre-Columbian sites at Mexico’s Tlatilco, Cerro de Las Mesas, and Monte Alban. As one of the foremost typologists of the 20th century, his racial classification of the remains was doubtless correct and has, in any case, never been challenged. Before any of these bones came to light, a French colleague told Barcelona’s International Congress of American Anthropologists in 1964 that “the only thing missing in connection with the negroid terra-cottas of ancient America as final proof of an African presence were negroid skeletons.”5
The “terra-cottas” to which he referred have been found by archaeologists in abundance across Middle America over the last 500 years, but few scholars have done more to document this expansive collection than Dr. Alexander von Wuthenau, Professor of art history at Berlin University. Typical of the numerous examples he published in his thoroughly researched Unexpected Faces in Ancient America is the baked clay representation of the self-evidently negro head of a young man unearthed during a Pre-Classic dig at Tabasco, Mexico, with a high date of 250 AD. A pair of much older (600 BC to 400 BC) terra-cotta heads of black men from Olmec Veracruz are displayed at the Museo de Antropologia de Jalapa. The smaller specimen is positively identified as West African by facial scarification patterns depicted across cheeks and nose.
According to Ancient American writer Paul Baron: Ritual scarification is still practiced in many parts of Africa. The Mexican terra-cotta demonstrates a style of tattooing common in southern Sudan, the former, ancient kingdom of Nubia. The same scarification patterns are in use today among the Nuer, Shilluk, and other, ethnic groups in the area.… Various cultural clues and traces unique to Africa can been seen in the faces of these statuettes and terra-cotta heads. For example, the African hairline is clearly visible in a fine stone head from Veracruz. It was carved during the classic period of Olmec Civilization, about 600 to 400 B.C.; it is seventeen centimeters from crown to chin. Another head of about twelve inches not only possesses Negroid features, but the hair design is authentically West African. This terra-cotta is on display at the National Museum of Mexico, together with ear-plugs or enlarged earrings, a common feature throughout West Africa.6
Portrayals of black Africans are not only found on pre-Columbian terra-cottas. Sir John Erik Sydney Thompson, “one of the foremost mid-20th Century anthropological scholars,” stylistically dated a Maya pottery vessel from Chamá, Guatemala, in southern Petén, to circa 800 AD during the Late Classic Period, and was “struck not only by the [black] skin color [of the vase painting], by also by the [negro] facial features and the beard” of one of the depicted men.7 “Thompson considered that the figures represented traveling traders,” Willard P. Leutze writes in Ancient American.8
Leutze continues:
He stated that the god of the merchants was Ek Chuah, and that in modern Yucatec Mayan, “Ek” is the word for “black.” Thompson said Ek Chuah was also the god of chocolate, and suggests that this is because cocoa beans were the universal currency of the Maya, and consequently associated with merchants. I would add that the Maya, both ancient and modern, are fond of word plays, and to have a dark-skinned man as the god of chocolate would amuse them.9
Ek Chuah is likewise depicted as a black man carrying a spear in the Dresden and Madrid Codices. In all three of these different depictions, the Maya artists deliberately rendered the god of chocolate’s profile unlike those of any of the other male figures around him. In addition to his black skin and beard—among a beardless population—his jaw is more pronounced; his nose is flat, not aquiline or “bobbed,” as are theirs; and the whole cast of his facial features is utterly unique. Particularly as he appears on the Chamá vase painting, Ek Chuah bears a remarkable physical resemblance to the African-American rock star of the 1960s, Jimi Hendrix!
Image 8-1: Guatemala’s Chamá pottery illustration. Photo courtesy of Ancient American.
During 1931, American archaeologist Ann A. Morris described painted murals inside Chichen Itza’s “Temple of the Warriors,” in Yucatan, as “all too typical of the negro and unlike the Maya to be readily taken for accident.”10 The Temple was abandoned no later than 1224 AD. Abundant archeological evidence for black Africans in pre-Columbian America is no less richly supported by related cultural finds. Early Portuguese colonists in Brazil were surprised to find examples of Potamochoerus porcus, or Red River hogs, also known as “Guinea hogs,” because they belong to a breed indigenous to Africa.
The first Spanish explorers of Venezuela and Colombia found the plantain, a banana-like fruit native to Africa, already growing on native Venezuelan and Colombian plantations. African jackbeans and Dioscorea alata have been recovered from Mesoamerican archaeological sites, and Conquistadors already found the same yams under field cultivation on the island of Trinidad. Agricultural trade was reciprocal, as indicated by 12th-century Nigerian pottery fragments imprinted with the illustrations of American maize. The Manihot esculenta is an American cassava important as a staple food to the tropical inhabitants of Ghana and Mali long before European colonists arrived in West Africa. (Cassavas are American tropical plants used for bread-making.)
Richard A. Fields writes in Ancient American: Thirty years before the first Columbian expedition to the New World, the Portuguese were supposed to have replanted cotton from their colonies at Guinea in the Cape Verde Islands. But late 20th Century botanists discovered that the genetic composition of the Cape Verde cotton was not indigenous to coastal West Africa. Instead, it was cultivated by Native Americans in the Caribbean. “How did it get to Africa before Columbus?,” they marveled.11
The manner in which this cotton was put to use by both Native Americans and West Africans further defined their relationship. The Aztecs, Fields continues, wore “vivid, colored mantles of cotton cloth, the colors of which so richly dyed they seemed to copy the iridescent plumage of birds” and designed with “radial wheels of the sun, feathers and stylized shells, the skins of tigers, in the forms of rabbits, snakes, fishes, and butterflies, mingled in a myriad of motifs with triangles, polygons, crosses, squares and crescents. These descriptions closely resemble the cloth and designs manufactured and printed by the Ashanti, Yoruba, Mandingo and other peoples of West Africa.”12 Indeed, Hernan Cortez and his Conquistadors observed how scarves worn by Aztec women were identical to almayzars imported to Spain by Moorish traders from Ghana.
Yet more lucrative was the transatlantic trade in gold. The Aztecs worked a copper-silver-gold alloy generally similar to, but markedly distinct from the copper-gold process known to their Musica contemporaries in Colombia as tumbaga. The Aztec version was known as guanín, but an identical alloy in West Africa was called guanines. According to the abstract of Columbus’s log made by Bartolomé de las Casas, the purpose of the Admiral’s third voyage was to test claims made by the native inhabitants of Hispaniola that “from the south and the southeast had come black people, whose spears were made of a metal called guanín…from which it was found that of thirty-two parts: eighteen were gold, six were silver, and eight copper”—“the same gold, silver and copper alloy, as found in spears forged in Africa’s Guinea,” Fields reports.13
Medieval metal-smiths of Ghana and Mali melted gold into characteristically X-shaped ingots, a form that appears to have been repeated throughout Olmec temple art, in which “X” was the symbol for wealth. Olmec connections with West Africans in pre-Columbian America may be the most revealing. Olmec derives from a contrived Nahuatl word, Ōlmēcatl, for “rubber line,” although just how the members of America’s earliest recognized civilization called themselves is unknown. They began abruptly building conical pyramids and great urban centers, while writing in a hieroglyphic language, working expertly with jade, and instituting ceremonial ballgames circa 1500 BC, mostly around the modern-day Mexican states of Veracruz and Tabasco. From the Olmec heartland on the Gulf Coast of Mexico their civilization spread westward to the Pacific coast and southward as far as Nicaragua. After 700 years of cultural splendor, their society slid into gradual decline, finally winking out of existence by 400 BC.
Their most prominent legacy is a collection of colossal stone heads, the first specimen of which was unearthed during 1858 by peasants in Tres Zapotes. All 17 represent helmeted males sculptured from Cerro Cintepec rock, a coarse-grained basalt named after a nearby volcano. Mudslides carried naturally formed boulders down the mountain slopes, where roughly spherical examples were chosen for their approximation to human head shape by artists. The selected specimens were then removed to ceremonial cities at Tres Zapotes, San Lorenzo, La Venta La Cobata, and Takalik Abaj. How these burdens, weighing many tons, were carried over some 100 miles without the benefit of wheeled transport or beasts of burden is an unsolved mystery. They required, in any case, a workforce of haulers, overseers, tool-makers, construction engineers, carpenters, rope-makers, and sculptors supported by food-providers, housing authorities, medical personnel, and security guards.
Image 8-2: Found in San Lorenzo, this 9-foot-tall Olmec colossal stone head is preserved at Mexico’s Xalapa’s Museum of Anthropology. Photograph courtesy of Wikipedia.
The results of these major public works projects were monumental masterpieces ranging in height from nearly 5 to 11 feet, and weighing between six and 50 tons, although the largest specimen remained unfinished not far from the source of its stone. All the faces are naturalistic and realistic, but differently depicted—the true-life portraits of individual men, and the greatest examples of Mesoamerican art. Most of them (10) were unearthed at San Lorenzo, where they were originally arranged in two, roughly parallel lines—five on either side—running north to south, perhaps forming a processional route. None of the 17 were deliberately buried, but had been covered by many centuries of natural deposition that perfectly preserved them until 2009, when members of an evangelical church vandalized four colossal heads and more than 20 other artifacts at Villahermosa’s Parque-Museo La Venta, resulting in four-month-long restoration work costing 300,000 pesos (almost U.S. $22,000).
Since the Olmec heads first came to light during the late 19th Century, they have consistently embarrassed conventional archaeologists still clinging to outdated notions of pre-Columbian America’s alleged isolation from the outside world, because the monumental faces are obvious portraits of black Africans. Skeptics once argued that noses of the ancient artworks were deliberately flattened by the Olmecs, thereby inadvertently giving the faces a pseudo-African appearance, to avoid damaging them during transportation from the distant Sierra de los Tuxtlas Mountains. But that explanation was contradicted by a few, long-nosed colossal heads. Moreover, their creators would not have risked breaking finished sculpture by dragging them 100 miles over rough terrain, but only began sculpting after the Cerro Cintepec boulders had already been brought to San Lorenzo and other places for final display.
The party line for Establishment scholars reads that the heads’ portrayed “physical characteristics correspond to a type that is still common among the inhabitants of Tabasco and Veracruz.”14 If that is true, then they may be mixed descendants of black Africans accurately depicted by the Olmec. DNA testing of these modern-day inhabitants may show how their ancient ancestors were real-life models from Mali or Ghana for the giant heads. Anti-African academic insistence is recent dogma. From the moment the first heads were discovered to the present day, unbiased professional researchers have gone beyond the obvious to confirm the sculptures’ all-too-apparent identity.
According to Fields:
“In 1938, a team of scientists from the Smithsonian Institution, University of California and National Geographic Society traveled to Tres Zapotes for the purpose of retrieving the Olmec stone head. Group leader, Dr. Clarence Welant, told Ivan van Sertima, professor emeritus at Rutgers University, New Jersey, and a specialist in African visitors to pre-Columbian America, “Every one of the members on the team was absolutely convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was an African presence in ancient America, after they excavated the head.”15
Dr. Welant and his colleagues found that the sculpted face’s pronounced superciliary brow ridge and broad nose with flaring nostrils were diagnostic characteristics of West Africans. The Tres Zapotes example they examined and others depict supporting, subtle details, such as their distinct peripheral lip ridge particular to inhabitants of Benin, Guinea, Senegal, and the Cape Verde islands. From all the wide variety of stone more readily available for their monumental portrayals, the Olmec sculptors went out of their way to select black basalt, a deliberate choice on behalf of their subjects’ skin color, as part of all the other, accurate features associated with these portrayals.
“On the back of the head,” Fields continues, “generally ignored by investigators, appear seven Ethiopian-style hairbraids virtually identical to the African cornrow mode still worn today by many people of African descent in America and in Africa itself.”16
Precisely whom the great heads portray is no less controversial. Early observers assumed that they were depictions of slaves, but no one would bother memorializing indentured servants, especially on such a grandiose scale. Modern archaeologists and some cultural diffusionists assume they are the representations of kings or regents, a conclusion implicit in the sculptures’ monumentality, and arising from a perceived similarity between headgear worn by the sculptures and tribal crowns from Ghana. After he discovered and excavated the first of the Olmec heads at Tres Zapotes, in 1862, José Melgar overheard local peasants use a term native to themselves: Yalahau, for “Negro chief.”17
Four hundred years earlier Spanish explorer Bartholomew Las Casas met a “Negro king” in Panama, where geographer Lopez de Gomara independently reported the existence of a black population.18 In narrating the discovery of the Pacific Ocean to Pedro Martir, historian to the Spanish court, Vasco Núñez de Balboa told how, in 1513, he crossed the Isthmus of Panama, “where nothing but Negroes are bred, who are ferocious and extraordinarily cruel. (The Spanish explorers) believe that in former times, negroes, who were out for robbery, navigated (from Africa), and, being shipwrecked, established themselves in these mountains. The (Indians)…have internal fights full of hatred with the negroes.…”19
During 1905, Alfonse Quatrefages, professor of anthropology at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, referred to Panama natives in Darien as “true negroes.”20 The Olmec heads may, therefore, represent royal African figures after all. Or they could be monuments of sportsmen, who were beheaded as a reward for winning sacred ballgames. Such recreation was not mundane entertainment, but deeply religious ritual, in which the Sun’s very existence was personified by a large rubber ball. Because a man could never hope to achieve anything greater in life than obtaining victory on the holy ball court, he was sacrificed at its supreme moment of glory, thereby ensuring his soul’s direct ascent to heaven’s highest level. The disembodied Olmec heads are memorials to these decapitated heroes, as further implied by the headgear they wear, more suggestive of leather helmets than ornate crowns. Both interpretations may not be mutually exclusive, however, because the religious sportsmen might have also been kings.
But if they originated in Ghana, Mali, Benin, Cameroon, et al, why does monumental stonework even remotely resembling the Olmec heads appear nowhere in all of West Africa? Nor, for that matter, were such highly crafted examples of sculpted art ever repeated anywhere else throughout the long, subsequent history of Mesoamerican Civilization by the Mayas, Zapotecs, Toltecs, Aztecs, or any of the otherwise high cultures that followed. The colossal heads are absolutely unique to the Olmecs, unlike anything seen in pre-Columbian America, before or since, suggesting that they were as foreign to the land as the men they depicted. “The most naturalistic Olmec art is the earliest, appearing suddenly without surviving antecedents.”21
Numerous broken ceramic vessels and figurines found in association with the colossal heads afforded radio-carbon dating around the beginning of their creation, circa 900 BC. In addition to Chihab al-Umari’s interview with Ibn Amir Hajib cited at the beginning of this chapter, other prominent Arab historians of the 14th Century AD, including Abu-sa’id Uthman ad-Dukkali and Ibn Battuta, wrote that West African oral traditions described transatlantic voyages from Ghana as early as the ninth century BC. This period additionally coincides with King Solomon’s three-year trading expeditions from Israel to the Lands of Ophir, described in Chapter 7.
These enterprises were invariably inter-racial affairs, continuously overseen by Jews, and captained and staffed by Phoenicians, but crewed by various nationalities, which became progressively black, as the commercial fleet put into African ports during its circumnavigation of the continent, and original ships’ company from the Near East were replaced by coastal manpower. When King Solomon’s armada reached Mexico—specifically, Veracruz, the Olmec birthplace—some of his Nigerian or Senegalese sailors may have jumped ship, or were more likely transferred ashore under a trade agreement arranged by their superior officers to serve in the natives’ lethal ballgame. In any case, this scenario is suggested by the existence of other Olmec sculpture, as identifiably Semitic, as the giant heads are West African.
Whenever the former appear in connection with the latter, the blacks are invariably depicted as servile, such as the image of a negro cringing before a standing Jew or Phoenician, as carved on a sandstone pillar at Alvarado, in Veracruz, dated to around 800 BC. These are hardly the representations of powerful monarchs, but more reminiscent of Nubian slaves portrayed in dynastic Egyptian art.
Worse, Monte Alban’s Danzante figures—some of which are clearly negro—are not “dancing,” but actually writhing in agony after having just been castrated as sacrificial victims. “The 19th Century notion that they depict dancers is now largely discredited.…”22 Although most of the colossal basalt heads have West African faces, others are unquestionably Amerindian. Moreover, they do not make up a preponderance of Olmec art, which is, as mentioned previously, additionally illustrated with dominant, Semitic personages. As Martin A. Grundy told Ancient American readers, “the majority of artifacts available to us suggest that the Olmecs themselves were almost certainly not black.”23
Production of their colossal heads peaked around 600 BC, a date corresponding to the Phoenicians’ circumnavigation of Africa commissioned by Egypt’s Pharaoh Nekau and described in Chapter 4. The last examples were made about 200 years later, another highly significant period, just when a famous Carthaginian expedition under the command of Hanno the Navigator rounded West Africa into Cameroon. These highly civilized Phoenician culture-bearers, not the Native American Olmec or their West African guests, were the artists who carved early Mesoamerica’s atypical stone heads. Monumental sculpture was found throughout Phoenicia, to a far less degree in pre-Columbian Middle America, and not at all in sub-Saharan Africa. Although West African influence in Mesoamerica may have begun with King Solomon’s Ophir expedition and subsequent Carthaginian enterprises, it did not end in Olmec civilization, but became more expansive during subsequent centuries of contacts the kingdoms of Mali and other sultanates renewed until the early 14th Century AD.
Transoceanic voyages generally presented no significant challenges to the overseas’ desires of these potentates. In his abstract of Christopher Columbus’s log, Bartolomé de las Casas quoted the Admiral concerning statements made by King John II of Portugal to the effect that “canoes had been found which set out from the coast of Guinea [West Africa] and sailed [across the Atlantic Ocean] to the west with merchandise.”24 These were actually barges rowed in shifts by 24 oarsmen sitting on benches, port and starboard, with a hut amidships. Early-16th-century Spanish explorers of Venezuela reported seeing exactly the same, so-called “power canoes” plying the Orinoco River, from whence Auaké Indians made regular, round-trip passage to Puerto Rico in open-water voyages of more than 400 miles.
“The shortest distance across the Atlantic is from West Africa to the eastern bulge of South America,” explains Leutze. “Any raft or canoe caught by ocean currents off of West Africa will be carried to the Americas.”25 In confirmation, Fields tells how “during 1952, Alain Bombard sailed in a life raft, L’Heretique, from Casablanca on the Moroccan coast, via the Canary Islands to Barbados, minus food or water, and equipped with only a small fishing kit. He arrived in perfect health after 65 days at sea, less time than it took Columbus to cover the same stretch of ocean.”26 Thirteenth-century Mombassa merchant vessels known as booms, dhows, and mtepes, carrying 30 ton cargoes as far as Arabia, would have been certainly capable of successfully completing transatlantic voyages to America.
That they in fact did so is affirmed by an abundance of reliable eyewitness reports. Fray Gregoria Garcia, a mid-16th Century priest, saw black-skinned inhabitants of an island off Colombia’s northern coast. He was seconded by the country’s first Spanish explorers, who entered settlements of black people near Cartagena. A copy still exists of the official authorization Miguel de Pasamonte received from the Spanish Crown in 1519 for the capture of native Venezuelan blacks as slaves. Professor Quatrefages specified the locations of “indigenous” American negroes, such as Saint Vincent’s Black Caribbees and the Charruas of Brazil, where a tribal people call themselves the Galibis, the identical name by which another tribe is known in Mali. The Brazilian Marabitinas are mirrored by the Marabitine people of the Sudan.
That so many pre-Columbian African correspondences should occur in Brazil, where the Carthaginian Paraíba inscription and other Phoenician trace elements have been found, perfectly complements such evidence for ancient Near Eastern seafarers in South America. Quatrefages also identified pre-Columbian West Africans in North America, including the Jamassi of Florida. Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano was the first modern European to visit the Atlantic shores of North America in 1524, when his ship was greeted by natives living on the Carolina coast. “The color of these people is black,” he was surprised to observe, “not very different from that of Ethiopians.” He assumed that they could not possibly be Africans, but had merely painted their bodies, until, near Roanoke Island, some of them “swam out into the surf to rescue a French sailor who had fallen from a dory,” Dr. Gunnar Thompson recounts. “Verrazano noted that the natives were still black after wading ashore.”27
Barton cites a spring 1996 Freedom Press Newsletter article about some present-day black Americans claiming descent from West Africans, who allegedly arrived on our continent in pre-Columbian times. He paraphrases the text:
The Ouachita Nation exists in an area of the southern United States, which includes parts of Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Mississippi. The name Ouachita means “Black Land”…similarities between Ouachita and names from Mali and Ghana, such as Ouagadugta city, in the region of Burkina Faso, south of Mali; the term Ouassei Farmall, which means “Minister of Property” in the Songhai language; and the word Wagadu, which was the actual name for ancient Ghana, all begin with Ouachita.28
These linguistic commonalities and eyewitness reports by the earliest, Columbian explorers from Europe are complemented by Dhyani Ywahoo, a member of the Eastern Tsalagi, or Cherokees’ traditional Etowah band. “Our elders told me that long before the White men made their appearance upon the shores of Turtle Island [North America],” she stated, “other visitors had come. In the great long time ago, the black people came from Africa.”29
Their experience in pre-Columbian America stands apart from all the other ancient Old World visitors. Once here, West Africans ran the gamut from being worshipped as gods, obeyed as kings, acclaimed as sports heroes and lavished with wealth as export-import merchant seamen to enslavement by Semitic overlords and ritual torture and death as sacrificial victims. Accordingly, the foregoing evidence documenting their extraordinary story must give us pause for reconsideration of Abu Bakr’s early 14th Century voyage, which opened this chapter. His disappearance does not necessarily mean he failed to sail the Atlantic Ocean to its other side, where he and his several thousand men may have left some of the enduring clues described in the preceding pages.