“I did not want to approach my study of ancient history directed by WHITE scholarship”: Drusilla Dunjee Houston (1876-1941) to Ivan van Sertima (1933-2006)

This paper explores specific instances in Ivan van Sertima’s They Came Before Columbus (1976) where the influence of Drusilla Dunjee Houston’s Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire (1926) can be detected and it explores an inherent contradiction in their vindicationist approach to writing ancient history. Drusilla Dunjee Houston argued for a great antediluvian Black empire that dominated the nations from the Ganges to the Pillars of Hercules, and the Americas, while Ivan van Sertima argued for ancient Black civilizations that extended their empire to the Americas at least as early as the Hellenistic age. Both have as their project the contradiction of the prevailing narratives––scholarly and popular––about ancient history and the place of Black peoples in it, which they recognize to be White supremacist. These narratives either erased Black people from the historical record or turned them into savages for whom slavery had a benefical and civilizing effect. To counter these narratives, both Drusilla Dunjee Houston and Ivan van Sertima mustered a wide array of evidence from an eclectic range of sources to make their very similar arguments that Black people were the first great civilization. Although both have ended up on the margins of academic discourse, they enjoy a central place in popular Black reception of ancient history. What is particularly fascinating about their arguments, and what this paper explores, is the relentless way both authors address Black audiences and strenuously reject White scholarship on the ancient world as inherently White supremacist. Yet, at the same time they accept uncritically the pernicious criteria of the very White narratives they are contesting for what counts as a great civilization: the signifiers of colonialist and imperialist dominion, i.e. monumentalism, territorial expansion, military prowess, etc.