Ivan van Sertima

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Ivan Gladstone Van Sertima (26 January 1935 – May 25, 2009) was a Guyanese-born associate professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University in the United States, who was best known for his Olmec alternative origin theories, a form of pre-Columbian contact theory that he developed in his book They Came Before Columbus (1976).

Though Olmec's "spreads widely in African society, both lay and academic," it was largely dismissed in Mesoamerican scholarship, or else dismissed as Afrocentric pseudoarchaeology or pseudohistory to the effect of "robbing native American cultures."

Early life

Van Sertima was born in Kitty Village, near Georgetown, during British Guiana's colony (present-day Guyana); he retained his British citizenship throughout his life. He attended primary and secondary school in Guyana and began writing poetry. He attended the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London from 1959. Van Sertima completed his undergraduate studies in African languages and literature at SOAS in 1969, where he graduated with distinctions in addition to his creative writing.

Van Sertima served as a Press and Broadcasting Officer in the Guyana Information Services from 1957 to 1959. He spent several years in the United Kingdom as a journalist, broadcasting weekly throughout Africa and Africa. In 1964, Van Sertima married Maria Nagy; they had two sons, Larry and Michael, who were adopted.

In doing field work in Africa, he created a dictionary of Swahili legal terms in 1967. Van Sertima immigrated to the United States in 1970, where he enrolled Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, for graduate study.

Sertima remarried in 1984 to Jacqueline L. Patten, who had two children, after divorcing his first wife.

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