Did Africans Arrive in America Before Christopher Columbus?

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 argue s, 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. He writes: ‘The absence of supporting evidence certainly gives pause, but on its own fails to generate scepticism sufficient to completely dismiss the possibility, as corroboration for one element of the story derives from oceanographic studies.’ Gomez suggests that the powerful current encountered might have been the Canary Current:

A year-round movement of water flowing south along the West African coast from what is now southern Morocco to Guinea; then westward in the form of the Equatorial Currents to the Gulf of Mexico, where they become the Gulf Stream; then back across the Atlantic toward Europe and North and West Africa, its southern branch developing into the Canary Current, renewing the cycle.

However, the fact that the fleet(s) might have encountered the current does not necessarily mean that they were successful in actually reaching the land masses of the Americas. Gomez relays at least ‘two obstacles’ in which the Canary Current ‘facilitated navigation from the north but inhibited it from the south,’ and the fact that, ‘West Africans possessed naval capacities ill-suited for oceanic transport, their watercraft consisting of pirogues or boats made of hollowed-out trees.’ Nevertheless, whether real, or imagined, or an entanglement between the two, the account has made an indelible mark on both Black consciousness and Black scholarship.