Whether it was to assuage their own conscience, or to argue with more humanitarian elements in their white societies, or whether it was to convince African people themselves that they actually deserved their cruel fate, or whether it was a combination of all three and even more reasons, the white rulers felt they had to rewrite the history of the human race. They rewrote history for five hundred years.

When Ivan Van Sertima published THEY CAME BEFORE COLUMBUS in 1976, the original Belizean cultural movement had already collapsed, destroyed by party politics. The young Belizeans, including myself, who led UBAD, had a sense of the magnificence of African civilizations in Egypt, Ethiopia, Mali, Benin, Zimbabwe, and so on, but none of us were experts in the anthropology or the history.

Professor Van Sertima, who has been ailing the last few years, is a Guyanese native who speaks seven languages at the highest levels. As chairman of the University of Belize, I had one real achievement ? we brought Van Sertima to Belize. While the Rutgers University professor was here, there was not a peep or a cluck out of the undercover white supremacists in the Belize education system.

Van Sertima?s arguments were stunning, incredible, and yet those arguments could not be defeated. Africans had traveled to this part of the world ? the Western Hemisphere, before Christopher Columbus. The pre-Columbus Africans left all kinds of evidence of their presence here, and some of the most outstanding pieces of evidence are the giant African stone heads in the Veracruz and Tabasco regions of Mexico. Modern scientific tests establish that those stone heads were built between 700 and 800 years before the birth of Christ, a period when Egypt was ruled by black pharaohs from Nubia.

In a mere newspaper column, I cannot reproduce all of Van Sertima?s arguments. But I promised in last weekend?s column to explain to you how Egyptians/Nubians reached Mexico.

There are four African stone heads at La Venta, plus the engraving of a Phoenician-type figure on a stele beside the African heads. Van Sertima explains that the Phoenicians were the premier seamen in the Mediterranean at this period in history, and they were often in the hire of the Egyptians/Nubians, who required vast supplies of copper and tin to manufacture bronze weaponry for their armies. The Phoenicians, as poor in metals as Egypt, ?made fortunes out of the maritime metal trade.?

So the people who appeared in Mexico on the Gulf Coast hundreds of years before Christ and more than two millennia before Columbus, were sailing in boats on the ocean, both Egyptian boats and Phoenician boats.

The Norwegian writer and explorer, Thor Heyerdahl, proved around the time of UBAD, that the most primitive Egyptian boats ? the papyrus reed boats that were built before Egypt?s wooden ships, could have made it across the Atlantic from Africa to America.

Van Sertima explains in THEY CAME BEFORE COLUMBUS: ?Even in the early predynastic times the Egyptians were building plank boats as well as papyrus boats. By the dynastic period, they could boast of boats as long as three-car trains. It is recorded that the black African Pharaoh Sneferu, at the close of the Third Dynasty, in one year made sixty ships that were 100 feet long and in the following year built three with a bow-to-stern measurement of 170 feet.?

?Metal supplies had been severely curtailed by the Assyrian control and blockade of Asian sea routes, and they were sorely needed for the weaponry of the Nubian-Egyptian armies. Ships on this metal run, moving in the vicinity of the North African coast, could very easily have been caught in a storm and swept off-course by the North Atlantic currents. Such an accident (which has happened in many documented instances) could account for the startling appearance in the Olmec heartland of Negroes with elements of Egyptian culture. One branch of the North Equatorial current would have taken them from the North African or West African coast right into the Gulf of Mexico.?

Professor Van Sertima points out that a man can survive for 50 days and longer without food, if he has adequate supplies of water, and he argues that, contrary to popular opinion, sea water can be used as a supplementary water source as can fish juices. Rainstorms and the ocean would provide adequate fresh water and food.

The role that Christian education has played in the European rewriting of history is a subject I will not discuss at this time, because it is useless to debate with religious fanatics. They wish to go to heaven, and they have decided that their special set of religious beliefs will get them there. In Belize, the vast majority of the people are Christians, and they do not wish to hear anything which suggests that their religions are anything other than supernatural.

It is for sure, however, that it was the slave trade and slave labor which enriched Europe. Until the discovery/invasion of Africa and America by the Europeans five centuries ago, the people we have known as the European rulers of planet earth (G-8 and all this) were barbarian tribes warring with each other. Since Europe enslaved Africa, the Europeans have become wealthy and they have become able to finance the research and technological development which they now display as evidence of their intellectual superiority. In the face of manifest European hegemony, many of our African and indigenous American children develop inferiority complexes and try to become European. This is an effort which is doomed to eventual failure.

Knowledge of our true history will not immediately and materially improve our economic and social situation. If we are armed with the truth, however, as Belizeans we should be able to make better decisions. Unfortunately, our education system is designed to prevent our children from reaching the truth, because the truth would raise serious questions about those who are ruling us ?in the name of God.? That is why the road Kremandala travels is a long and hard road, a road where the successes are small, and few and far between. Still, a man must be what a man has to be.

Power to the people.