Caribbean History
Who was here first, and why haven’t we been taught that?
“To Africans, the Americas weren’t new, we were already there.”
On July 31st, 2025, the Buffalo History Museum will host a public history seminar designed to shake up everything you thought you knew about the so-called “discovery” of America.
Titled SANKOFA: Africans in America, Before Columbus, the event is the third installation in the 2025 African Enlightenment Seminar Series by the Ancient African Antiquities Research Institute of America (AAARIA). AAARIA is the brainchild of African historian, TEDx speaker, and bestselling author Emmanuel Kulu Jr., a rising voice in the reclamation of Black world history. The three-hour event runs from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. EST and features Kulu as keynote, supported by host Shantelle Patton of That Brown Bag and AAARIA researcher Chey Winston.
The program’s purpose is simple: to retell American history through an African lens, grounded in evidence, legacy, and ancestral memory. The implications are seismic. It asks audiences to wrestle with a bold idea: What if Africans were in the Americas long before 1492?
“Cristóbal Colón (Christopher Columbus) didn’t discover America. He was the last, not the first, to step foot here,” says Kulu. “The New World was only new to Europeans. We were already there.”
This unapologetic assertion, rooted in the work of scholars like Ivan Van Sertima and Cheikh Anta Diop, isn’t new in Pan-African academic circles, but it remains taboo in mainstream education. That’s what Kulu and AAARIA are working to change.
Founded in 2022, AAARIA is a research and curriculum institute that centers Ancient Africa’s untold contributions to world civilization, long before the transatlantic slave trade. Through seminars, resources, and grassroots partnerships, Kulu’s organization aims to reframe global Black history beyond the trauma of enslavement and into the brilliance of civilization-building.
Kulu’s upcoming seminar in Buffalo will spotlight archaeological and anthropological evidence that challenges the Eurocentric idea that civilization, science, and exploration were born in Europe. Chey Winston will add to the conversation by exploring African agricultural practices and trade networks in the Americas before Columbus’ arrival, facts often buried or dismissed in mainstream textbooks.
The seminar is aptly named SANKOFA, a Ghanaian Akan word meaning “go back and fetch it.” For Kulu, that act of returning to ancestral truth is spiritual and political. “We cannot build a liberated future without reclaiming a truthful past,” he says.
Attendees can expect a compelling blend of historical research, cultural analysis, and unapologetic storytelling. It’s a call to unlearn the lies and teach the truth.
Kulu is not your typical historian. The Buffalo-based educator is also a novelist, speaker, and founder of a K–12 African Studies curriculum initiative. His TEDx talk, Untold: The Golden Age of Africa, has been praised for its depth and passion, and his novel I, Black Pharaoh: Rise to Power restores authentic Black imagery to Ancient Egypt, or Kemet.
His mission? To challenge the racial bias baked into Western education systems. “Black history is world history,” Kulu insists. “If humanity started in Africa, then every culture on this planet should be learning about it, not just Black students.”
Mainstream media is beginning to take notice. Kulu has been featured in Forbes twice: once for his work on DEI in historical education, and again in a 2024 article titled 4 Key Black History Facts That Everyone Should Know, which includes his TEDx talk and vision of African kings and queens as central to global legacy.
In a time when school boards across the U.S. are politicizing curriculum and banning books that center race and truth, AAARIA’s work is both radical and necessary. The SANKOFA seminar challenges mythologies. It reminds us that erasure is never neutral, and it calls Black people across the diaspora, especially in Western New York and Southern Ontario, to reclaim what was always ours: memory, knowledge, and pride.
“If we don’t tell our stories, they’ll keep telling them for us, and wrong,” says Kulu.
Registration for SANKOFA: Africans in America, Before Columbus is open now via Eventbrite. Space is limited. For more information, visit www.aaariaedu.com.