Objectively, it is an unfortunate reoccurrence in world history that across centuries, we have denied or minimized the contributions of those who are of African descent.
Crispus Attucks — On March 5, 1770, Crispus Attucks, a man of mixed African and Native American ancestry, was among five patriots killed by the British army in the Boston Massacre. Attucks was initially depicted as white or a bystander named Michael Brown.
Sally Hemings — Sally Hemings, enslaved by Thomas Jefferson, had six children between 1790 and 1808 fathered by Jefferson. For nearly two centuries, Thomas Jefferson’s family and most historians denied this, attributing such claims to political slander. It took a 1998 DNA test proving Jefferson’s genetic link before centuries of denial of his African-American descendants was finally destroyed.
Alice Coachman — First Black woman to win an Olympic gold medal, in the 1948 Olympics. She jumped a record-breaking 5 feet, 6⅛ inches in the high jump, despite often having to run barefoot in fields and on dirt roads in Georgia because she was frequently denied the opportunity to train for or compete in organized sports events.
But no denial of an African’s contribution to history has been as great as the ongoing denial of the African ancestry of the Niño brothers on the 1492 expedition. Initially, I stumbled upon this quite by accident — I began searching for information about Juan Niño, which was scarcer than for any other leader of the 1492 expedition.
Through my research, I have not found conclusive hard evidence that the Niño brothers were of African descent. But I did find that this is the most logical and probable determination we can make from an incomplete historical record.
Multiple historical sources identify the Niño family — Juan Niño and his brothers Pedro (Pero) Alonso and Francisco Niño — as experienced mariners from Moguer who participated in Columbus’s 1492 voyage. Little is documented about them prior to 1492.
In the years immediately following the 1492 expedition, Peter Martyr d’Anghiera (Pietro Martire), a humanist at the Spanish court, wrote letters in Latin describing the voyages. Copies of these letters circulated widely. The Venetian ambassador to Spain transmitted versions of them to Venice, where in 1504 a printed account appeared under the title Libretto de tutta la navigatione de Re de Spagna de le Isole et terreni novamente trovati, commonly associated with Angelo Trevisan. In this early printed source, Pero Alonso Niño is referred to as “El Negro.”
Some modern writers have suggested the nickname reflected involvement in the African slave trade. However, such an explanation is not supported by surviving documentation. Furthermore, it would have been odd for one of hundreds of sailors involved in the African slave trade to carry this nickname and not others.
Others have proposed that “El Negro” in the 1504 Trevisan printing represents a misprint or mistranslation of a variant spelling of the surname Niño, such as “Ningus” or “Ningo,” and that “El Negro” refers to their last name rather than a nickname. The misprint theory relies on a single speculative typographical explanation with no primary source evidence, no comparable documentary support, and no examples of period printing presses making a similar error in which a family name was transformed into a descriptor from an entirely different linguistic category.
Printing errors were common at this time — phonetic misspellings, dropped letters, transposed characters. But the misprint theory requires something categorically different and far more improbable. It requires a Venetian printer to have transformed a surname into a completely different word from a completely different linguistic category — not a misspelling of Niño but a substitution of an entirely unrelated descriptor.
One that is propagated today by contributors to Wikipedia who have uploaded a Caucasian portrait of Pero Alonso Niño. While this portrait is on display at Monasterio de La Rábida, that does not make it accurate. I believe this portrait is of their father, Alfonso Pérez Niño.
A more likely and period-appropriate interpretation is that the nickname reflected phenotype rather than profession. In late medieval Iberia, descriptive nicknames were often based on visible characteristics. El negro most likely is a phenotypic descriptor of Niño’s darker complexion, typical of sub-Saharan African ancestry.
Several additional historical facts, though not individually definitive, collectively support this interpretation. The Niño patriarch, Alfonso Pérez Niño, was documented in early Iberian-African Atlantic contact networks — connected to the Portuguese trade presence on the Gold Coast of West Africa. Alfonso Pérez Niño’s son Pero Alonso was born circa 1455 in Moguer, into a family that had already navigated those Atlantic-African routes.
Further validating this interpretation is that those of African descent were becoming increasingly common in Europe during this historical period. According to estimations of Cristóvão Rodrigues de Oliveira, an official of the Archbishop of Lisbon, by 1551 Africans represented 10% of the population of the city, counting for 9,950 of its 100,000 inhabitants. The established legal practice of self-purchase and manumission during this period is additional evidence confirming the presence of Africans in Europe in more than anecdotal numbers.
While no surviving document explicitly identifies the Niño brothers’ mother or confirms African ancestry, the triangulated evidence of the 1504 Trevisan reference, Alfonso Pérez Niño’s documented Atlantic-African connections, and the established demographic reality of enslaved African women in 15th-century Andalusia has led some historians to consider African maternal ancestry a plausible interpretation grounded in the available evidence and consistent with known demographic patterns. This interpretation does not rest on definitive genealogical proof but on circumstantial evidence aligned with established social realities.
As the author, I am far from the first person to identify the Niño brothers as of African ancestry. Twentieth-century commemorations, including one of the 33 dioramas presented at the 1940 American Negro Exposition in Chicago, highlighted the African ancestry of Pietro Alonzo (Pero Niño), pilot of La Santa María. This demonstrates that the African ancestry of the Niño brothers has been recognized within African-American communities for a significant period of time.
In 1959, Dr. Vincent H. Cassidy’s article “Columbus and ‘El Negro’” in Phylon Quarterly revisited the 1504 Libretto reference and examined its implications. Cassidy, a medieval history professor at Akron University, attempted to situate the epithet within broader Iberian racial and social contexts, though it stops short of definitive proof. Pedro (Pero) Niño is also listed in the African American Registry, the most comprehensive online database resource of African American heritage.
Of note, other theories about African presence in the Americas prior to 1492 — such as those proposed by Leo Wiener or Ivan Van Sertima — extend beyond the evidentiary base accepted by most contemporary historians. Ivan Van Sertima even testified in the U.S. House of Representatives claiming that the description of black people and gold spear tips indicated Africans reached the Americas, but that rises to the level of warranting inquiry and not confirmation. The specific theory is that Mandingo traders from the 1300s brought tools and plants such as the African bottle gourd. However, genetic and botanical studies, including Logan Kistler’s analysis of bottle gourds published in Ecology, which analyzed 86,000 nucleotide base pairs, concluded that bottle gourds drifted for 9 months reaching Brazil sometime between 9,000 and 8,000 BCE. This scientific analysis supports transoceanic drift rather than pre-Columbian African voyages by Mandingo traders. Additionally, no study has found epistemological similarities between spear tips from the new world and Africa that would indicate a shared origin. For these reasons, expansive claims of African contact prior to Columbus remain scientifically unsubstantiated.
The novel therefore treats African maternal ancestry as historically plausible, grounded in the 1504 reference to El Negro, the family’s documented Atlantic-African connections, and sociological patterns of the era.
Therefore, if any historian, researcher, or politician wants to claim otherwise, let them bring facts and evidence that rise above the level of those presented here. It cannot continually be the burden of erased leaders to reprove their own African ancestry.