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<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="font-size: 14pt"><span style="color: #990000">DR IVAN VAN SERTIMA - A grand farewell to an intellectual tour de force</span></span>
</span>
Published: Thursday | June 11, 2009
"We have come to reclaim the house of history."
With those few words, Dr Ivan Sertima, a linguist, literary critic and anthropologist, fired a major salvo at the myths that surround the role of people of African descent in human civilisation.
Often portrayed as mere spectators, but certainly not major contributors to global development and human history, <span style="font-weight: bold">Africans, the scholar often argued, gave the world a lot more than people care to acknowledge</span>. The Guyanese was right and to prove it he set out - through scholarship, intellectual inquiry and numerous books, articles, lectures and other published works - to correct the falsehoods.
<span style="font-weight: bold">"We are dedicated to the revision of the role of the African in the world's great civilisations, the contribution of Africa to the achievement of man in the arts and sciences," he once said. "We shall emphasise what Africa has given to the world, not what it has lost."</span>
And he did that, for instance, in his landmark 1976 book, <span style="font-weight: bold">They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America, a bestseller in which he outlined prehistoric African influences in the Americas, especially in South and Central America. The scholar, who spent more than 30 years teaching, writing and editing at New Jersey's Rutgers University also took his case for the acknowledgement of the African contribution to an international audience in such works as Blacks in Science: Ancient and Modern, Great African Thinkers, Cheikh Anta Diop," "Egypt Revisited, Black Women in Antiquity, and The Golden Age of the Moor.
</span>
Higher education
Little wonder, then, that a biographer, Runoko Rashidi, in a tribute concluded: "with absolute certainly it can be stated that, due to his consistent and unrelenting scholarship over the past 25 years in the rewriting of African history and the reconstruction of the African place in world history, particularly in the field of the African presence in ancient America, Ivan Van Sertima has cemented his position as one of our greatest living scholars."
Born in Kitty, a village in Guyana, on January 26, 1935, a time when British Guiana was a British colony in the far-flung empire "over which the sun never set", he was the son of a trade union leader, Frank Obermuller. He was raised in the Caribbean country where he received his primary and secondary education and also spent his early years as an adult, before heading to London in 1959 in pursuit of higher education.
In all, he spent more than a decade in England, much of it studying at the University of London, from which he received an honours degree in African languages and literature. But he also worked as a journalist, doing weekly broadcasts to the Caribbean and Africa. His interest in things African led him to learn Swahili, a language he mastered, so much so that he compiled a dictionary of its legal terms.
By 1970, he was ready to go further afield and he left England for the United States in 1970 where he did graduate work at Rutgers and ended up as an associate professor and an intellectual giant. His rich teaching and writing career brought him scores of accolades and significant national and international recognition as a distinguished scholar.
<span style="font-weight: bold">Few, for instance, have forgotten his appearance before a United States Congressional panel when, in 1987, he challenged the widespread notion that Christopher Columbus discovered the Americans.</span>
National reputation
Actually, there were several parts to Van Sertima's life. As a writer, he authored a host of major works and as a literary critic he wrote a collection of critical essays on the Caribbean novel. As a linguist who was proficient in Hungarian, he compiled a Swahili Dictionary of Legal Terms based on his work in Tanzania in the 1960s. As an anthropologist, his incisive analyses and publications on the African contribution gained him a national reputation in the United States and an international following in Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America.
As the founder and editor of the Journal of African Civilization, he ensured that it gained a reputation for excellence and uniqueness among anthropological publications.
An exclamation point was put to his literary career when the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy asked him to nominate candidates for the Nobel Prize between 1976-80.
Dr Van Sertima, who married Maria Nagy in 1964, died last week after suffering from Alzheimer's disease.
His passing has left a void in the academic and literary world that won't be filled any time soon.
Taken from 'CaribNews', the Voice of the Caribbean-American Community.
link ...
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="font-size: 14pt"><span style="color: #990000">DR IVAN VAN SERTIMA - A grand farewell to an intellectual tour de force</span></span>
</span>
Published: Thursday | June 11, 2009
"We have come to reclaim the house of history."
With those few words, Dr Ivan Sertima, a linguist, literary critic and anthropologist, fired a major salvo at the myths that surround the role of people of African descent in human civilisation.
Often portrayed as mere spectators, but certainly not major contributors to global development and human history, <span style="font-weight: bold">Africans, the scholar often argued, gave the world a lot more than people care to acknowledge</span>. The Guyanese was right and to prove it he set out - through scholarship, intellectual inquiry and numerous books, articles, lectures and other published works - to correct the falsehoods.
<span style="font-weight: bold">"We are dedicated to the revision of the role of the African in the world's great civilisations, the contribution of Africa to the achievement of man in the arts and sciences," he once said. "We shall emphasise what Africa has given to the world, not what it has lost."</span>
And he did that, for instance, in his landmark 1976 book, <span style="font-weight: bold">They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America, a bestseller in which he outlined prehistoric African influences in the Americas, especially in South and Central America. The scholar, who spent more than 30 years teaching, writing and editing at New Jersey's Rutgers University also took his case for the acknowledgement of the African contribution to an international audience in such works as Blacks in Science: Ancient and Modern, Great African Thinkers, Cheikh Anta Diop," "Egypt Revisited, Black Women in Antiquity, and The Golden Age of the Moor.
</span>
Higher education
Little wonder, then, that a biographer, Runoko Rashidi, in a tribute concluded: "with absolute certainly it can be stated that, due to his consistent and unrelenting scholarship over the past 25 years in the rewriting of African history and the reconstruction of the African place in world history, particularly in the field of the African presence in ancient America, Ivan Van Sertima has cemented his position as one of our greatest living scholars."
Born in Kitty, a village in Guyana, on January 26, 1935, a time when British Guiana was a British colony in the far-flung empire "over which the sun never set", he was the son of a trade union leader, Frank Obermuller. He was raised in the Caribbean country where he received his primary and secondary education and also spent his early years as an adult, before heading to London in 1959 in pursuit of higher education.
In all, he spent more than a decade in England, much of it studying at the University of London, from which he received an honours degree in African languages and literature. But he also worked as a journalist, doing weekly broadcasts to the Caribbean and Africa. His interest in things African led him to learn Swahili, a language he mastered, so much so that he compiled a dictionary of its legal terms.
By 1970, he was ready to go further afield and he left England for the United States in 1970 where he did graduate work at Rutgers and ended up as an associate professor and an intellectual giant. His rich teaching and writing career brought him scores of accolades and significant national and international recognition as a distinguished scholar.
<span style="font-weight: bold">Few, for instance, have forgotten his appearance before a United States Congressional panel when, in 1987, he challenged the widespread notion that Christopher Columbus discovered the Americans.</span>
National reputation
Actually, there were several parts to Van Sertima's life. As a writer, he authored a host of major works and as a literary critic he wrote a collection of critical essays on the Caribbean novel. As a linguist who was proficient in Hungarian, he compiled a Swahili Dictionary of Legal Terms based on his work in Tanzania in the 1960s. As an anthropologist, his incisive analyses and publications on the African contribution gained him a national reputation in the United States and an international following in Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America.
As the founder and editor of the Journal of African Civilization, he ensured that it gained a reputation for excellence and uniqueness among anthropological publications.
An exclamation point was put to his literary career when the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy asked him to nominate candidates for the Nobel Prize between 1976-80.
Dr Van Sertima, who married Maria Nagy in 1964, died last week after suffering from Alzheimer's disease.
His passing has left a void in the academic and literary world that won't be filled any time soon.
Taken from 'CaribNews', the Voice of the Caribbean-American Community.