Did African Ships Beat Columbus To America?

DAKAR, Senegal - A Senegalese scholar believes Africans reached the Americas centuries before Columbus and is organizing an expedition to prove it.

Pathe Diagne, a linguist and historian, contends that Africans discovered the navigational route from Senegal across the Atlantic in 800 B.C. He claims they laid the basis for the Olmec civilization in what is now the state of Veracruz, Mexico.

"Look at the giant head relics," Diagne said in an interview. "Look at their negroid features, very different from American Indian features.

"There are also many similarities in the architecture structures - like the pyramids, which were developed in the Sahara and then traveled . . . to America as the Teotihuacan pyramids - as well as similarities in the writing alphabet and in the languages."

Shawky el-Gamal, an expert in African history at the African Studies Institute in Cairo, Egypt, said there were indications that Africans reached the Americas before Columbus, but "no solid proof or documentation."

"The Greek historian Herodotus wrote of the Pharaohs' navigational skills and their voyages," he said. "There are also those pyramids in South America. And other things, but they are indications with no solid proof."

In 1970, the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl sailed from Africa to the Caribbean in a reed boat in an effort to prove the ancient Egyptians could have reached the land that became known as America.

Diagne acknowledges his theory lacks documentation. But he said he has evidence that, in 1312, more than 170 years before Columbus, an Islamic emperor in West Africa named Mansa Bakari II sailed to America with an expedition of 2,000 boats and settled there.

His expedition will set out for America in May or June in four small sailboats similar to the ones he says were used by Bakari II. He said they will follow the same route and he expects the voyage to take 25 to 30 days.

While teaching at Cornell University in the United States, Diagne said, he discovered references to maps that depicted the voyage of Bakari II.

He mentioned two Spanish maps, made in 1375 and 1413, and said he also found references to the voyage in a book written by Ibn Fadallah al-Omari, an Arab scholar, in 1324.

"All the information was there, but no one noticed it before," Diagne said, adding that the writings of Columbus yielded more proof.

"Columbus used the same navigational route as Bakari II did," he said. "He traveled south from Portugal and then used the current and wind that Bakari II used to take him to South America."

Columbus must have followed the West Africans' maps, Diagne said, because they employed methods of cartography unknown at the time in Portugal.

Also, he said, "Columbus in his notes wrote that he found African groups in America, different from the Indians. The Africans already had many colonies there. He even had interpreters from Ghana to help communicate with them."

Bakari II was emperor of Mali, which also included what are now Senegal, Gambia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Niger and parts of Algeria. He encountered great opposition at home when he announced plans for the voyage, Diagne said.

The scholar said he had traced 28 songs from the Mandingo tribe telling of support for Bakari, the anger of people who thought he was abandoning them and happiness when he sent word that he had arrived in the New World.

"One of the songs says that Bakari's cartographer was an Arab called Ibrahim Ismail," he said. "It says that Bakari put the two words together and named part of the New World Brazil,"

Celebrations in 1992 of the 500th anniversary of Columbus' first voyage to the New World prompted Diagne to write a book about Bakari II.

The boats his expedition will use, called locos, are long and narrow with pointed ends, similar to competition rowboats. The custom-made locos are about 65 feet long, 6 feet wide and 4 1/2 feet deep, with single sails 10 feet high. Including sophisticated communications equipment, they cost about $30,000 each.

Sponsors of the expedition include the Senegalese and Nigerian governments, and Arab and international cultural groups.

"Our aim is not to show who got there first, but to teach the world about West Africa's historical knowledge of navigation," Diagne said.