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Black explorers we should celebrate instead of Columbus
by
Ronda Rocha Penrice
There was a time when Christopher Columbus was heavily pushed and accepted as the greatest explorer of this side of the globe.
Never mind the little detail of how one could “discover” a place where people already live.
But because Europeans long ago staked claim as the dominant voice, especially of the so-called “New World,” their version of events has endured.
As with every other position in the world, African peoples were explorers as well. Here are a few we should all know:
Abubakari II (also Abu Bakari, Abu Bakr II and Mansa Musa II)
Western scholars have, by and large, dismissed the assertion that Africans had contact with the Americas long before Columbus. But scholars such as Ivan Van Sertima and Cheikh Anta Diop rejected this in the books
They Came Before Columbus (1976) and
The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality (1974). But they were not alone. Decades before, respected
Harvard lecturer Leo Wiener, a Russian-born scholar of Polish-Jewish heritage who was a polyglot skilled in more than 20 languages, noted the African presence in his 1920 book
Africa and the Discovery of America.
Around 2000, Malian historian Gaoussou Diawara, author of
Abubakari II, available in French, along with other African researchers, began to explore the history of Abubakari, who once ruled the Mali Empire in West Africa, and to proclaim him the main force behind the African arrival to the Americas prior to Columbus.
Abubakari is said to be the son of Kolonkan, sister of Sundiata Keita (also Sundjata Keita and Soundjata Keita), the founding emperor of the great Mali Empire in West Africa. In 1311, Abubakari abdicated his throne to Mansa Musa to pursue his belief that the Atlantic Ocean, similar to the River Niger, had another bank. Already during his rule, Abubakari had funded a 200-boat expedition to find the bank.
When only one ship returned, with the captain reporting that a current swept the rest of the fleet away, prompting him to turn back, Abubakari put together a 2000-boat expedition he himself helmed. It is believed that Abubakari, who never returned home, landed at what is now Recife in Brazil and that some of the previous boats landed throughout the Americas, including what is now Mexico and even in Colorado. This is why Wiener and others before and after him note early remnants of African culture in the Americas, some of which Columbus found upon his arrival.
The Niño Brothers — Pedro Alonso (also Peralonso Niño), Francisco and Juan
Described as “El Negro,” navigator and explorer Pedro Alonso Niño, son of a white Spaniard and enslaved African woman, has long been acknowledged for accompanying Columbus on his first expedition to the Americas in 1492 as the pilot of the Santa Maria. Although Pedro is one of the most well-known of Columbus’s crew, he was not alone — his brothers Francisco (youngest) and Juan (oldest) were also part of Columbus’s voyages.
In their home of Moguer, Spain, they were prominent sailors with experience on Atlantic voyages. Reportedly, Pedro even sailed the West African coast. During the first Columbus voyage, Juan helmed La Niña, which he also owned. Francisco was most likely a sailor on La Niña.
The brothers also took part in Columbus’s second voyage in which it is well-documented that Pedro was with Columbus when he “discovered” Trinidad. In fact, sons of Pedro and Juan are believed to have participated in Columbus’s voyages as well. Enterprising Pedro set out on his own expedition, in search of riches in the Americas Columbus had not ventured through. Although he successfully returned to Spain, he was accused of cheating the King of 20 percent of the treasure and arrested. He died in prison before he could go to trial. Francisco died in Honduras. It is not widely known where Juan died.
Juan Garrido
Born in Africa, Juan Garrido was enslaved in Portugal but began his career in exploration in Seville, Spain, probably as a slave. Around 1502 or 1503, he landed in Santo Domingo. Later, Garrido was elevated to the status of conquistador and was with Ponce de Leon during his search for the Fountain of Youth in Florida in 1513. Garrido was also part of the Hernán (also Hernando) Cortés-led invasion of Mexico in 1519, which resulted in the conquest of the Aztecs.
Later, he participated in expeditions to Michoacán in Mexico in the 1520s and traveled to islands around San Juan and Cuba as well. Garrido, who married and fathered three children, settled in Mexico City. To secure land that, based on his service, should have automatically been his, he provided testimony of his exploits of his 30 years as a conquistador, without pay, in 1538. Today, he is also credited with harvesting the first commercial wheat crop in the Americas.
Estevanico/Esteban
By most accounts, Esteban was sold into slavery around 1513 in the Portuguese-controlled Azemmour on Morocco’s Atlantic coast at around age 10 to 13 and brought to Spain, where he became the servant of Andrés Dorantes de Carranza. With Dorantes, Esteban, who is labeled a Moor by most historians, traveled to Cuba to join the Pánfilo de Narváez expedition to conquer Florida for Spain. Although raised a Muslim, Esteban converted to Catholicism, which was also a requirement to participate in Spanish expeditions to the Americas. From Cuba, the expedition of roughly 600 Spanish, Portuguese and African troops arrived in Tampa Bay in 1528.
Most of the soldiers perished, however. Eventually, a hurricane displaced Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, Dorantes and Esteban around Galveston, Texas. Reportedly captured by native peoples for five years before becoming free, the four-man crew walked for four years through New Mexico, Arizona and Northern Mexico all the way to Mexico City. Later, in 1536, Esteban explored northern Mexico with Cabeza de Vaca. Around 1539, he was part of an expedition led by Friar Marcos de Niza that scouted terrain for Francisco Coronado’s search for “Seven Cities of Gold.” Reportedly, Esteban was killed by the Zuni tribe near the border of Arizona and New Mexico, but his body was never recovered.
http://thegrio.com/2015/10/12/explorers/
TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE
Celebrating our African historical personalities,discoveries, achievements and eras as proud people with rich culture, traditions and enlightenment spanning many years.
Monday, August 25, 2014
JUAN GARRIDO: THE FAMOUS BLACK AFRICAN-SPANISH CONQUISTADOR WHO WAS THE FIRST PERSON TO GROW WHEAT IN AMERICA
Juan Garrido (c. 1480-c. 1550) was a black African-Spanish conquistador. African by birth, he went to Portugal as a young man. In converting to Christianity, he chose the Spanish name, Juan Garrido ("Handsome John"). Unlike his fellow conquistadors, Juan Garrido appears to be the first free black person in the Americas, and he was the first person to grow wheat in the New World.
In the early 1500’s, Garrido led a life that was uncharacteristic of a black man in that time.
Juan Garrido (c. 1480-c. 1550), the Black Spanish Conquistador
In 1503, Garrido went on his first expedition to Hispaniola and was present for the 1508 expedition with Ponce de Leon against Puerto Rico and Cuba. He was paid well for his deeds with money and land. Garrido would travel with De Leon again in 1513 and 1521. Like the other conquistadors, he was in search of fortune, or at the very least, a comfortable life for his family. He did win some spoils and farmland from conquered natives. He even owned African and Indian slaves. Nevertheless, like most of the treasure-hunting conquistadors, he died poor. There are 16th century paintings depicting Juan Garrido, in which he was mistaken as a slave, like one in which he is holding a pike, standing next to a horse belonging to Hernan Cortes.
Juan Garrido
Garrido and other blacks were also part of expeditions to Michoacán in the 1520s. Nuño de Guzmán swept through that region in 1529-30 with the aid of black auxiliaries.
In 1538, Garrido provided testimony on his 30 years of service as a conquistador:
"I, Juan Garrido, black in color, resident of this city [Mexico], appear before Your Mercy and state that I am in need of providing evidence to the perpetuity of the king [a perpetuad rey], a report on how I served Your Majesty in the conquest and pacification of this New Spain, from the time when the Marqués del Valle [Cortés] entered it; and in his company I was present at all the invasions and conquests and pacifications which were carried out, always with the said Marqués, all of which I did at my own expense without being given either salary or allotment of natives [repartimiento de indios] or anything else. As I am married and a resident of this city, where I have always lived; and also as I went with the Marqués del Valle to discover the islands which are in that part of the southern sea [the Pacific] where there was much hunger and privation; and also as I went to discover and pacify the islands of San Juan de Buriquén de Puerto Rico; and also as I went on the pacification and conquest of the island of Cuba with the adelantado Diego Velázquez; in all these ways for thirty years have I served and continue to serve Your Majesty--for these reasons stated above do I petition Your Mercy. And also because I was the first to have the inspiration to sow maize here in New Spain and to see if it took; I did this and experimented at my own expense."
Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla.
Juan Garrido is recorded to been have born in 1487 on the West Coast of Africa and moved to Lisbon, Portugal as a young man. His freedom among slavers is still a mystery. Historian Ricardo Alegria suspects Garrido's father was a king who traded with the Portuguese. This theoretical African king may have set young Juan up as a commercial liaison, sending him for a Christian and Portuguese education.
Other historians such as Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., presume Garrido was either “sold to Portugese slave traders or somehow traveled on his own to Lisbon.” This theory comes from the coincidence of his name matching a Spaniard's on his first voyage to the New World. The fifteen-year-old African boy traveled from Lisbon to Seville, Spain, and in 1503 he joined the convoy to Hispaniola with the island's newly appointed governor. A Spaniard on the ship with him was named Pedro Garrido. Pedro might have been Juan's master and Christian namesake. Either way, Juan's name surely was not Juan in Africa.
Castas Painting "De Negro y d India, China-Cambuja" 1763
However, these foreign researchers missed a major point as their research could have been narrowed down to Gold Coast (Ghana) and the Bight of Benin (Nigeria) in West Africa to get the possible place Garrido was coming from. It is well known that the Portuguese first reached what became known as the Gold Coast in 1471 and that in 1472, the Portuguese captain Ruy de Siqueira brought a sailing ship as far as the Bight of Benin under the reign of Oba (king) Ewuare. If the first assumption that Garrido could be son of a King then he might be a son of the Edo (Bini) Oba but Edo people has no record of that. That leaves Elmina as possible origin of Garrido and there are historical accounts to support the expert fishmen people of Elmina. According to Dr Kwamena Esilfie Adjaye "Elmina people recounts that the Portuguese explorers who first visited their land took some Elmina sailors to the town of Moguer (in Huelva, Andalusia, Spain), Seville and Lisbon in Portugal." Local Elmina history claim the three sailors include a man later named Nino who sired four famous sailor children. The children were Pedro Alonso, Francisco, Juan and one other Niño. The most famous was the navigator, Pedro Alonso Nino also known as El Negro (the Black). The four Niño brothers became sailors with prestige and experience in Atlantic journeys before playing a distinguished part in Columbus's first voyage to the New World. Their friendship with the Pinzón Brothers, and especially with the oldest of them, Martín Alonso Pinzón, influenced their participation in Columbus's project. The participation of the Pinzón Brothers in the Columbian enterprise was the key to overcoming the doubts among the region's sailors; the help of the Niño Brothers made it possible to defeat the opposition among the men of Moguer to taking on an enterprise of uncertain outcome.
It is of my humble educated opinion that judging from the involvement of people taken from Elmina as sailors and Columbus in his second voyage stopped in Elmina and ask for some black crews support the view that Garrido might be a Fante man from Elmina.
It is said that upon arrival in Seville, he joined an expedition to the New World, possibly traveling as Pedro Garrido's servant. Garrido with as a member of the Spanish expedition arrived in Santo Domingo (Hispaniola) about 1502. Garrido spent six years at Hispaniola watching explorers pillage the New World. The Spanish government allowed the conquistadors to take land, people, and treasure; it was the Crown's attempt to convert the world to Catholicism. Garrido signed on for the Conquest. In 1508, he joined Juan Ponce de Leon with about fifty conquistadors to look for gold in Puerto Rico and Cuba. They found it, and Garrido's life became a thirty-year adventure of exploring, fighting, and looting.
Ponce de Leon settled Puerto Rico and became its governor. Garrido settled there too, and fought against the natives when they revolted in 1511. When Ponce lost his position to Diego Columbus in 1513, he took Garrido and other soldiers to look for another treasure island. Instead, they found the huge peninsula of Florida. They were not equipped to take on the Florida natives. They claimed it, named it, and planned to return later to conquer it.
Duty called back in the Caribbean. The Carib Indians were launching ferocious revolts against the Spanish. Garrido scouted the islands with Ponce, "pacifying" (fighting) and enslaving Native Americans. Then it was back to Puerto Rico. Ponce's wife died and he spent time raising his daughters. Meanwhile, Garrido assisted other small expeditions and mined for gold.
By 1519 he had joined Cortes' forces and invaded present-day Mexico, participating in the siege of Tenochtitlan. He married and settled in Mexico City. He continued to serve with Spanish forces for more than 30 years, including expeditions to western Mexico and to the Pacific. He is credited with the first cultivation of wheat in the New World. Juan Garrido explored a final expedition in 1533 with Cortes to Baja California before he passed away in 1536.
Ponce and company finally returned to Florida in 1521 with settlers, livestock, supplies, and weapons to control the natives. Florida's Indians ran the settlers off before they even got settled. Ponce took an arrow shot and rushed to Cuba for medical attention, but Spanish doctors couldn't save him. He died a month later. Garrido had worked for Ponce for thirteen years.
source:
http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/colonial/black-conquistadors.pdf
http://augustine.com/history/black_history/juan_garrido/
http://kwekudee-tripdownmemorylane.blogspot.com/search?q=Elmina
http://kwekudee-tripdownmemorylane.blogspot.com/2014/08/juan-garrido-famous-black-african.html
