(SH, C-U)

Gilbert A. Sprauve

In recent decades the Virgin Islands have come to occupy a place of a certain prominence in New World pre-Colombian history. We might explain this development in some measure as the result of archeological, anthropological and linguistic research. Here we refer to such research as it concerns the question of a possible ancient pre Colombian presence of Blacks on this side of the Atlantic. The undisputed leader in this field of research among caribbeanists is the Guyanese anthropologist and linguist Ivan Van Sertima. Professor Van Sertima was educated at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University and Rutgers Graduate School and is currently an associate professor of African Studies at Rutgers. We quote below from some of his recent writings related specifically to an early Black presence in what today we call the Virgin Islands:

I would like to draw your attention now to a dot-and-crescent script that I found in the Reef Bay Valley at St. John's in the U.S. Virgin Islands (Van Sertima, p.22.)

We have evidence from the Smithsonian itself [of] the discovery of African skeletons in the U.S. Virgin Islands. I think it was in 1974 or 1975. And I'm going to say what they said. They said these skeletons were morphologically African. They said that they were the bones of two Black males in their thirties and they were found in a pre-Colombian grave at Hull Bay in the Virgin Islands. They said they were probably pre-Colombian because the layer or strata in which they were found was dated about 1250 A.D.

They also found something that was typologically pre-Colombian: A pre-Colombian native American ornament around the forearm of one of these skeletons. But when they went into the lab to carbon date them, they couldn't. Now, I do not want to embarrass anyone. I have been told privately why there could be no proper carbon dating. It has nothing to do with this thesis and we share (the Smithsonian and I) a common concern that nobody should know about it. But it is necessary for me to say that it was in bad grace for them to suggest, as one of them did in a newspaper, that Van Sertima is a man who sees a horse and calls it a cow and that the reason why they could not carbon date the skeletons is because of the interference of sea water. That explanation is not valid.

Even more extraordinary was one report that the skeletons had to be post-Colombian because they found a nail associated with the skeletons. What is the conclusion? Africans can not make nails. You see what happens when your main focus is on primitives (pp.32- 33.)

We shift now to something that came about as a result of the Smithsonian find of African skeletons in a pre-Colombian grave in the Virgin Islands. The skeletons could not be dated and so the matter remains inconclusive, at least where the bones are concerned. But not far from Hull Bay, where these skeletons were found, at the bottom of Reef Bay Valley, on St. John's something unusual has emerged.

This script (Plate 64) is found at the bottom of a waterfall in the Reef Bay Valley and it is reflected in the water. The unusual regularity of the dot and crescent formation is what attracted me to it and away from the relatively meaningless carvings of animals further up the rock-face. It has been deciphered by Barry Fell, professor emeritus of Harvard. Fell has got into a lot of trouble over some of his dicerpherments but this has been carefully checked out. Scholars in the Libyan Department of Antiquities arrived at the same decipherment as he did. It has been identified as the Tifinagh Branch of the Libyan script. This was used not only by Southern Libyans but by people in some parts of medieval Mali and by the Tamahaq Berbers which in the period of which we speak, were not the heavily mixed Euro-African people they are today. The inscription reads: "Plunge in to cleanse yourself. This is water for purification before prayer."

Elsewhere in the volume African Presence in Early America (Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, 1992) Professor Van Sertima presents the reader with documentation of early sea-going craft built and sailed by Africans, including West Africans, cites many statements made to early European explorers by Amerindians concerning the presence of Blacks among them as neighbors or captives and cites mention of a [Black] people in St. Vincent.

The above is the context within which we approach Virgin Islands pre-colonial--in the sense particularly of pre-Danish--cultural developments.

Editor’s postscript: Relative to the possibility of an African origin of the Reef Bay petroglyphys, see also "Danmark," an excerpt of which constitutes Islands of Beauty and Bounty, (translator Nina York), in which the author, A.S. Orsted, made the following observation (in 1856): Around the lower one of these [cascades at Reef Bay] figures are carved in the rocks on both banks--very crude sketches of human faces, cruciform signs, etc. Thrse are the only traces discovered on our islands from the days of the Caribs (p.37).

. . . The Caribs were a people very different from the other aborigines of America (perhaps they had their origins in Africa.). They were at the same level of civilization as the pre-historic Europeans.