I'm African - Now What?
the dna experience can mean more questions than answers
2008-02-07
By Eric Easter
On a whim last Fall, I sent away for a kit from the company African Ancestry to submit my DNA and discover my roots.
The initial impetus, to be honest, was that it presented a cheaper and more efficient alternative to buying individual gifts for my five siblings and the nine children they have between them. A well-spun "gift of knowledge" would save me dozens of hours in malls and bookstores.
The test was simple: Swabs to each cheek with three long Q-tips, tagging a bag with a bar code that was provided and sending it back in a self-addressed envelope.
Men, because of our X and Y chromosomes have the choice of exploring the lineage of either the mother or the father. Women may only choose the mother’s side and have to recruit a male relative to get to the father’s line. This presented a dilemma of sorts. I was only willing to do one lineage, and became worried that my siblings would be offended by a decision to explore one side and not the other.
But a cousin at a recent family reunion on my mother’s side revealed a substantially researched tree that pinned the family’s origins to the early 1700s and a free woman of color named Mary France of Westminster, Maryland - the original matriarch of what is now the Franze family of Baltimore and its several offshoots. With so many generations accounted for, tracing the journey from Africa seemed incidental and less of a priority.
My father was the greater mystery. By the time I was born my father, Theodore Roosevelt Easter, was well into his fifties and in his fourth marriage. My parents divorced when I was two, and after several sporadic visits, he and I had very little contact until his death in the early 90s. My siblings had a more sustained relationship but still knew little more about his history than his hometown (Emporia, Virginia) and what he chose to be his birthdate (April 1908). Frankly, no one thought to ask until it was too late, something more common in families than most people would like to admit.
Beyond that, his history is a dead end. Virginia kept no birth records prior to 1920. On genealogy sites, African American Easters from Emporia abound, but none I’ve found have an obvious link to my father. The choice was clear.
Despite a "what the hell" attitude when I started, the idea that I might get closer to real information became more important during the six weeks it took to get back results.
When the package arrived, it was both exciting and anti-climactic. A white envelope does little justice to whatever gilded treasure box you might imagine the revelation of your history to be wrapped in.
What comes in the envelope is even less impressive –a photocopied map of Africa with a star in your country of origin, a nicely designed brochure that provides basic but scant information on the most common tribes, a page of gibberish that represents that matching of your chromosome polymorphisms and, almost buried in that information, a certificate of ancestry.
Nevertheless I gathered my family around the fireplace, explained what I had done and dramatically read the results showing my DNA sequence to be a 100% match to sequences from the Ewondo people of Cameroon.
The significance was lost on my young children. Their fascination with Africa at this point begins and ends with zebras and wildebeests. That will change soon enough.
More disappointing and surprising was my wife’s lack of interest, in both my origins and her own. She has a fairly close knit extended family with many living elders and a substantial visual and written record. She is apparently as connected as her spirit needs. Then again, given her features and those of her family, her roots almost certainly sprouted somewhere closer to the Caucusus mountains than Mount Kilimajaro. Perhaps that’s the reason she doesn’t want to go much deeper.
For many, the test will raise more questions than it answers. That certainly was the case with me. African Ancestry's brochure stipulates that the results are accurate for a range of 500 – 10,000 years. That’s a tremendous gap. Five hundred years is a sizeable chasm in information, but a goal that can be aspired to. In theory at least, there could be enough documentable evidence in that period to make a connection that could lead to an Alex Haley moment.
If the 10,000 year mark is more accurate, the connection is lost. The possible permutations of relationships, migrations and distance in that large a timeframe are simply too great to wrap a history around. That's 8000 B.C., are we talking Flintstones, Land of the Lost, stone tools, written language?
Still, the psychological impact of having a starting point is powerful. I’ve discovered things about Cameroon and the Ewondo that have made me proud – the origins of the music styles makossa and bikutsi, the central roles in entrepreneurship and government that my presumed relatives have assumed. And things I did not want to know – the Ewondo, according to some historians, were brokers in the slave trade, bartering the lives of surrounding peoples.
Now, as with the phenomenon of buying a new car and suddenly seeing that car at every turn, I see Cameroon and connections to my life in places where they may or may not exist.
Over the years I’ve pieced together a small but significant African art collection, based on nothing more than what spoke to me. Oddly enough, I’ve since found that most of those pieces are from Cameroon. Is the aesthetic in my blood?
I’ve toured Western and Southern Africa extensively, and while I’ve never been to Cameroon, I felt more at home and at peace in its close neighbors Gabon and Angola. Was that an inbred spiritual connection?
I am unusually attracted to the unique beauty of Helen and Celeste Faussart, the Franco-Cameroonian sisters who make up the neo-soul group Les Nubians. A natural love or a redbone predilection gone global?
In the end, a DNA result, like religion, serves the spirit only to the degree of your need for spirituality. It you desire connection, it makes that connection, however tenuous. It is a starting point, no more, no less. What route you take after that start is up to you.
Eric Easter is Chief of Digital Strategy for Johnson Publishing Company. He writes about politics, culture and technology for ebonyjet.com.
