Free Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen Page A

than 2,000 years. Does the teacher take
     time to research the question and find that the student is right, the textbook wrong? More
     likely, s/he puts down the student's knowledge: “Rap songs aren't appropriate in a history class!” Or s/he humors the child: “Yes, but that was long ago and didn't lead to anything.
     Vasco da Gama's discovery is the important one.” These responses allow the class to move
     “forward” to the next topic. They also contain some truth: the Afro-Phoenician
     circumnavigation didn't lead to any new trade routes or national alliances, because the
     Afro-Phoenicians were already trading with India through the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.
     Textbooks don't name Vasco da Gama because something came from his “discovery,” however.
     They name him because he was white. Two pages later, Life and Liberty tells us that Hernando De Soto “discovered [the] Mississippi River.” (Of course, it had
     been discovered and named Mississippi by ancestors of the Indians who were soon to chase
     De Soto down it.) Textbooks portray De Soto in armor, not showing that by the time he
     reached the river, his men and women had lost almost all their clothing in a fire set by
     Indians in Alabama and were wearing replacements woven from reeds. De Soto's “discovery”
     had no larger significance and led to no trade or white settlement. His was merely the first white face to gaze upon the Mississippi. That's why ten of the twelve American history
     textbooks include him. From Erik the Red to Peary at the North Pole to the first man on
     the moon, we celebrate most discoverers because they were first and because they were white, not because of events ihat flowed or did not flow from
     their accomplishments. My hypothetical teacher subtly changed the ground rules for Da
     Gama, but they changed right back for De Soto. In this way students learn that black feats
     are not considered important while white ones are.
    Continuing down the list of likely pre-Columbian explorations, we arrive at an interesting
     vantage point from which to consider this debate. Let us compare two other possible
     pre-Columbian expeditions, from the west coasts of Africa and Ireland.
    When Columbus reached Haiti, he found the Arawaks in possession of some spear points made
     of “guanine.” The Indians said they got them from black traders who had come from ihe
     south and east. Guanine proved to be an alloy of gold, silver, and copper, identical to
     the gold alloy preferred by West Africans, who also called it “guanine.” Islamic
     historians have recorded stories of voyages west from Mali in West Africa around 1311,
     during the reign of Mansa Bakari II. From time to time in ihe fourteenth and fifteenth
     centuries, shipwrecked African vessels-remnants, presumably, of transatlantic
     tradewashed up on Cape Verde. From contacts in West Africa, the Portuguese heard that
     African traders were visiting Brazil in the mid-1400s; this knowledge may have influenced
     Portugal to insist on moving the pope's “line of demarcation” further west in the Treaty
     of Tordesillas (1494). Traces of diseases common in Africa have been detected in pre-Columbian corpses in Brazil.
     Columbus's son Ferdinand, who accompanied the admiral on his third voyage, reports that
     people they met or heard about in eastern Honduras “are almost black in color, ugly in
     aspect,” probably Africans. The first Europeans to reach Panama-Balboa and
     company-reported seeing black slaves in an Indian town. The Indians said they had captured
     them from a nearby black community. Oral history from Afro-Mexicans contains tales of
     pre-Columbian crossings from West Africa. In all, then, data from diverse sources suggest
     that pre-Columbian voyages from West Africa to America were probable.
    In contrast, the evidence for an Irish trip to America comes from only one side of the
     Atlantic. Irish legends written in the