Selected Commentaries on Dr. Van Sertima's Work
in Africana Studies

“One of the most important contributions to African scholarship...”

— Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate

One of the oldest and most important archaeologists in America, Dr. Clarence Weiant, who was on the site in Mexico when the first stone heads (some with African features) were discovered, defends Van Sertima against attempts by the British archaeological establishment to discredit his earlier book, “They Came Before Columbus”.

“Van Sertima's work,” Dr. Weiant writes, “is a summary of six or seven years of meticulous research based upon archaeology, egyptology, African history, oceanography, astronomy, botany, rare Arabic and Chinese manuscripts, the letters and journals of early American explorers, and the observations of physical anthropologists...As one who has been immersed in Mexican archaeology for some forty years, and who participated in the excavation of the first giant heads, I must confess, I am thoroughly convinced of the soundness of Van Sertima’s conclusions.”

—Dr. Clarence Weiant
Letter to the New York Times, May 1, 1977

“One of the most important events in the development of research and publication from the perspective of Pan-African scholarship.”  The Journal is now in the forefront of the struggle being waged to alter school curricula and to modify “Western” and “World” civilization courses in the United States.”

— St. Claire Drake,
 Author of Black Folk Here and There

I received the issue of your journal which you were so kind to send ... In my works entitled “Afrique Noire Pre-Coloniale” (Pre-Colonial Black Africa) and “Antiquite Africaine par l’image” (African Antiquity through Images), I dealt with the possibilities of pre-Columbian contacts between Africa and America, but it was only a working hypothesis.  Thus, you can imagine how much pleasure your discoveries gave me because of the conclusive evidence they constitute for historical science. All my congratulations!

— Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop, 1979

The Journal represents an outstanding contribution to this greatly neglected area.  Your selection of topics and authors are superb.  The inter-disciplinary emphasis, the rigor of scholarship and the freedom of perspective are all too rare and is urgently needed ... Those with whom I share the Journal share in my excitement for the knowledge and potential that it offers ...

— Dr. Asa G. Hilliard,
Fuller E. Calloway Prof. of Urban Education at Georgia State University

“Ivan Van Sertima presents an incisive analysis of the influence of African languages on the language of African descendants, and he refutes one of the common myths about the so-called bankruptcy of black language.”

— The American Journal of Sociology, 1972

 

“Lorenzo Turner and Melville Herskovits demonstrated the sense of it decades ago, and black linguists in the vein of Turner, like Ivan Van Sertima (Rutgers), have kept the argument alive in current times.”

— The New York Times Book Review, September 7, 1972