Did Africans Arrive in America Before Christopher Columbus?​

The controversial hypothesis that Africans arrived in America before Christopher Columbus further complicates the historical relations between Africans and the Ameri-indigenous. The goal of either people, however, is a point of convergence—to decentre Columbus as an emblem of imperial history. 

In 2021, President Joe Biden became the first US president to officially commemorate ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Day’, initially and perhaps more colloquially known as ‘Columbus Day’, a federal holiday in the US. The earliest known Columbus Day celebration, writes scholar of Ameri-indigenous education, Susan C. Faircloth, took place on 12 October 1792, on the 300th anniversary of his landing. Yet, challenges to the often-heroic narrative of Christopher Columbus’ so-called ‘exploration’ have not just come through the Ameri-indigenous or even Hispanic community. Several African scholars particularly in the Atlantic have coalesced around the hypothesis that Africans were the first to discover the Americas, beginning with ancient Nubia. However, an even more circulated theory is that Africans arrived in the Americas in the mediaeval period, at the height of the Mali empire.

In African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, historian, Michael A. Gomez, relays the account of the fourteenth-century Malian king, Mansa Musa, where he came to power after his predecessor, Mansa Muḥammad b. Qū, failed to return from an oceanic voyage off the west coast of Africa. Muḥammad b. Qū’s voyage took place after an initial dispatch was more or less unsuccessful, with only one ship returning to report that the rest of the fleet had disappeared after encountering ‘a river with a powerful current.’ 

The account was recorded by mediaeval Arab historian and geographer, Shihāb ad-Dīn Aḥmad ibn Faḍl Allāh al-ʿUmarī, although Mansa Musa would describe the voyage to the governor of Old Cairo, Abū ‘l-Ḥasan ‘Alī b. Amīr Ḥājib, while on his famous hajj. The implications of such an account, Gomez argues, at the very least points to the expansive mindset of Mansa Musa, who perhaps desired, ‘to transfigure his relationship to the wider world.’ Gomez argues that the ‘very ‘‘imagining’’ of the voyage is far more critical to the question of the Mansa’s state of mind than its verifiability,’ indicating Gomez’s ambivalence about the probability of the journey...