Yosef A.A. Ben-Jochannan

Also known as Dr. Ben, Yosef Alfredo Antonio Ben-Jochannan claimed to have been born on December 21, 1918 to a Beta Israel lawyer named Kriston Ben-Jochannan and a Puerto Rican Jewish midwife mother of Yemenite ancestry named Julia Matta-Cruz in Gondor, Ethiopia.

His formal education is elusive, and he was likely an autodidact, but he claimed it to have begun in Puerto Rico and continued in the Virgin Islands and in Brazil. Ben-Jochannan claimed to have earned a BS degree in Civil Engineering at the University of Puerto Rico, but the registrar has no record of his attendance. He claimed to have received doctoral degrees in Cultural Anthropology and Moorish History from the University of Havana and the University of Barcelona in Spain, but Barcelona says that he never received a degree from them. He claimed to have earned advanced degrees from Cambridge University in England, but Cambridge says that he never received a degree from them and furthermore, Cambridge University said it had no record of Ben-Jochannan ever attending any classes there. His claim to have received an MS degree in Architectural Engineering from the University of Havana in Cuba is uncontested, and he held honorary doctoral degrees from Sojourner-Douglass College, Marymount College, and Medgar Evers College.

Dr. Ben-Jochannon taught at City College in New York City and from 1973 to 1987, he was an adjunct professor at Cornell University. He wrote and published 49 books and papers, mainly about how in his mind the Ancient Egyptians and Israelites were black Africans. Two of his better-known works: “Black Man of the Nile” and “Africa Mother of Major Western Religions."

He was eulogized by controversial black supremacist religious leader Louis Farrakhan, "as the last of a great list of scholars of ancient black civilizations and black history.