First he said the Earth is flat. Now rapper B.o.B isn’t sure slavery happened, either

Rapper B.o.B likes to ask the big questions.

It’s just that, on two high-profile occasions now, he’s asked really big questions that have already been answered by science and history.

His latest came Wednesday, when he captioned a video on Instagram disagreeing with Pan-Africanism, the widely held belief that black people categorically come from Africa and have been scattered throughout the world throughout history, away from their ancestral homeland.

“They say slavery lasted 400 yrs... America is only 250 yrs old... You ever seen a slave ship? They can find a billion year old dinosaur bone but can’t find any slave ships,” he wrote.

Instead, B.o.B seems to believe that his ancestors were native to the Americas - not slaves brought over from Africa. He uses #SlaveryIsNotInMyDNA and #WeBeenHere to conclude his post.

However, the ballast of a Portuguese slave ship that wrecked in 1974 went on display at the African American History Museum in Washington D.C. in Dec. 2016. Museum Director Lonnie G. Bunch told Smithsonian Magazine that the Sao José-Paquete de Africa was the first known slave ship to have sunk with enslaved people aboard and found later by historians.

That runs counter to B.o.B’s claim that “they can’t find any slave ships.”

But his first premise in that post, the competing 250-year and 400-year timelines of U.S. History versus the history of slavery on the American continent, doesn’t swim either. British, Dutch and Spanish colonists brought their slaves to America before the United States fought its Revolution and became a country.

On Twitter Thursday, B.o.B denied his Instagram post was a denial of slavery in America. He titled that tweet, “Commonly Misquoted by Colonialist Media.” He said his question was more about where black people descend from than about slavery as an institution.

B.o.B made waves in Jan. 2016 when he questioned wherther the Earth was round, and in Sept. 2017 he started a GoFundMe campaign to prove that the planet he and 8 billion other humans inhabit is flat.

But it’s his latest claim that have some music fans wondering if the artist who has several Billboard Top 100 hits to his credit is more famous for his tunes, or his conspiracy theories.

This story was originally published November 3, 2017 at 2:16 PM with the headline "First he said the Earth is flat. Now rapper B.o.B isn’t sure slavery happened, either."