…Black gods and gods with Negroid features (for black is sometimes just a ceremonial color) may be found among American Indians. Another black god is the god of jewelers, Naualpilli. The Negroid features of the god were sculpted in green stone by the Mexicans, while his kinky hair was case in pure gold. There is also the god of traveling merchants, of whom we shall later speak, Ek-chu-ah, who enters Mayan mythology in the wake of the Mandingo.

It is hard for many to imagine the Negro-African figure being venerated as a god among the American Indians. He has always been represented as the lowliest of the low, at least since the era of conquest and slavery. His humiliation as a world figure begins, in fact, with the coming of Columbus. It is the very decade of his “discoveries” that the black and white Moors were laid low. The image of the Negro-African as a backward, slow and uninventive being is still with us. Not only his manhood and his freedom but even the memory of his cultural and technological achievements before the day of his humiliation seem to have been erased from the consciousness of history. Even in the thinking of Leo Wiener, M.D.W. Jeffreys and James Bailey, white scholars who have all sought to prove the Negro-African presence in pre-Columbian America, the black man still figures as an inferior.

Bailey, in his book The God-Kings and Titans, disclaims any indigenous base for African cultures before the Arabs and Romans. “That African culture, prior to the Arab and Roman gold-trade, was an independent African invention…is nonsense.” He sees them in ancient America simply as mercenary soldiers of the Phoenicians. Leo Wiener, the Harvard philologist, assumes that the great Mali empire of medieval West Africa owed all its refinements, even its animist ritual and magic, to the Arab-Islamic civilization. The Mandingo came to America before Columbus, he declares, but carrying another man’s cultural baggage. He sees the Negro-African as simply a conductor of Islamic cultural electricity. The South African anthropologist M.D.W. Jeffreys refers to the Negro in one of his articles as “a West African item,” and while he presents forceful arguments for his pre-Columbian presence, suggests that he came here as a porter and paddler for the Arabs. For all these men, therefore, the image of the Negro-African has not changed. They remain victims of the myth created and sustained for half a millennium, while appearing to strive manfully to dispel it. For them, before and after Columbus, the Negro is still a beggar in the wilderness of history, a porter, a paddler, a menial, a mercenary — the eternal and immutable slave.

If this had indeed been the case, why should the Olmecs erect huge monuments to him which dwarf all other human figures in the Americas? Why should some of the Negroid representations  be venerated among the Maya and Aztecs as deities? Why should the finest of American potters sculpt such vivid and powerful portraits of this contemptible man? Can we image modern black artists in Mozambique building colossal monuments to the Portuguese soldiers who clashed with the freedom fighters of Cabral? Or the South African whites, for that matter, erecting altars and temples to the garbage collectors or street cleaners of Pretoria? These contradictions do not appear as the glaring absurdities they really are unless a shift in consciousness occurs. Such a shift is required if we are to reconstruct the history of America and Africa during those periods in which these worlds and cultures are seen to collide and converge. We cannot see very far if we enter an ancient time with contemporary blinkers, even if our pathways into the past are illuminated by a hundred torches lit by the most recent archaeological discoveries. What is needed far more than new facts is a fundamentally new vision of history.

Source: Ivan Van Sertima. They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America. 1976. p.  29-31.