Official Website of
Ian Isidore Smart
what is ukraine to me?
At the very least 10,000 years ago, people for the heart of Africa—whom the ancient Greeks called Aithiops (Ethiopians)—“discovered, while others were yet barbarians, the elements of the arts and sciences … [and] founded on the study of the laws of nature, those civil and religious systems which still govern the universe.” In this the final stage of the UN declared International Decade for People of African Descent, 2015 to 2024, as humanity lives through the COVID pandemic and stares down the catastrophe of climate change, we now have to confront the Ukraine conflict. The question, “What Is Ukraine to Me?” puts the situation in a perspective that brings us back to the fundamental indisputable fact of the African origin of civilization.
My Story
IAN ISIDORE SMART is an African who happened to have been born in Belmont, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. Smart earned the B.A. (hons) in Spanish and French from University College Dublin, Ireland (that was in 1968); the M.A. in Spanish Language and Hispanic American Literature from the National Autonomous University of Mexico City (that was in 1970); and in 1975, the Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from UCLA. As a scholar, writer, and publisher, Smart has actively participated in the Black Books Revolution. In 1981, Smart joined with the late great Stanley A. Cyrus to found the Afro-Hispanic Institute, which served as the home institution for the Afro-Hispanic Review. Smart was the managing editor of the Review for its first five years of existence, 1982 to 1987. In 1987, Smart passed the Review on to become a publication of the University of Missouri-Columbia. And it is currently—in its thirty-eighth year of uninterrupted existence—published by Vanderbilt University.
Smart focuses his research on the “Amazing Connections,” the profound African roots not only of Latin American civilization but of Western civilization itself. He is currently engaged in mastering the classical language of all humanity, Middle Egyptian, the language of the hieroglyphs. Complementing his study of this the most ancient African language, Smart is working to master what, it may be reasonably argued, has to be the latest African language, Haitian Kreyol.
Smart is author of twenty books and dozens of scholarly articles published in the United States as well as in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Europe.
