Ivan Van Sertima’s “They Came Before Columbus” focuses on the idea that ancient Africans sailed to the Americas before 1492. It is a fascinating introduction to the idea of African-American diffusionism. Van Sertima casts a very wide net, cataloging the possibility of voyages to the Americas by Phoenicians and Egyptians in ancient times, and West Africans in the centuries before Columbus.

The evidence (similarity of American and Egyptian pyramids, European encounters with dark-skinned people in the Americas before trans-Atlantic slavery, Native American and West African folktales and oral history, New World crops in the Old World and vice-versa prior to 1492, linguistic similarities between West Africans and Native Americans, ancient American statues with Negroid features, Columbus’s contact with African sailors, etc.) presented in this book is continually interesting, and is enough to convince someone who wants to believe it, but it is never quite conclusive enough to convince a skeptic.

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