While on my first late Monday morning subway ride, from 34th Street to 125th Street in Harlem, New York, it felt like I was traveling from Soweto to Park Station in Johannesburg, with a few notable exceptions.
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Just like back home, the coach was jam-packed, but there were no young men train surfing and the construction workers wore clean and bright work suits, without the odor that comes with long hours and back-breaking work. Some passengers jammed to music coming from their headphones; the dapper executives were fixated on their iPads held in one hand while the other grasped the overhead rails. Initially, feeling slightly paranoid, I was vigilant and clung to my valuables. After a while, I loosened up as I realized how chilled my fellow passengers were.
Amid the frantic activity of New York, I was flooded with memories of Johannesburg as three African women sat opposite me. The women, each of them hawkers, had two oversized plastic bags between their legs. They wore identical black headscarves and matching flat shoes. Taking no notice of the commuters squeezed around them, the women chatted and passed kente cloth, a traditional Ghanaian interwoven material, among themselves. Kente has become an integral part of African-American graduation attire.
While a handful of passengers were annoyed, the hustle of the hawkers, and the ‘gibberish’ coming from their tongues, left the rest amazed. I came to realize that the women left their village in Africa for the dream of a better life in the land of the free. Not a word of English was used in their conversation, but they know the basics of the language to make ends meet. I have met many other African foreigners like them who told me they learned English in the United States (US).
Soon after, I stumbled upon a 10-foot bronze statue of Harriet Tubman, the African American anti-slavery activist. Like the hawkers on the train, Tubman’s head was covered with a head wrap. Unlike the hawkers, Tubman was born into slavery in Maryland around 1820. In her late 20s, Tubman, along with her two brothers escaped the plantations; her brothers got cold feet and returned, leaving her to flee to the free state of Pennsylvania alone.
Later on, Tubman returned to Maryland to free slaves with the help of other freed African Americans. She carried out her mission armed with a shotgun. She never fired the gun because nobody tried to stop her. For her work, Tubman was called ‘Moses’ by her people.
Once slavery was abolished, Tubman joined the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. The former slaves took African Methodism across the Atlantic to Liberia and Sierra Leone, and later southern Africa.
Tubman’s statue, on Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem, overlooks an array of African restaurants in an area dubbed ‘Small Africa’. The owner of one of these eateries, Patisserie des Ambassades, is Gorgui N’doye. This Senegalese engineer opened the first restaurant in the south Harlem 16 years ago, with less than 10 employees. Today, Patisserie des Ambassades has 50 staff and opens for 20 hours every day.
N’doye started the restaurant in 2001 when Harlem was notorious for being a gangster’s paradise. The area underwent gentrification in 2005 and business started to boom.
N’doye has since returned to Senegal where has expanded his business to exporting peanuts to Asia and South Africa. In his absence, Patisserie des Ambassades is managed by another Senegalese, Ahmadou Ndiaye Jean.
Harlem’s facelift, however, hasn’t benefited everyone. Eric Fraska, a 31-year-old Liberian financier at MoneyGram in New York, laments the displacement of black folk due to the rising cost of living in the area.
Fraska came to the US as a 20-year-old to study. Over the years, he witnessed a lot of change. Like Ndoye, Fraska is saving money to start a business in Africa. He says he’s certainly going back.
“My education and skills are no longer needed here. There’s nothing more to do here. Africa is the future,” Fraska says over a frothing cappuccino.
I have no doubt the next time I catch up with Fraska will be in either Johannesburg or Monrovia.

‘There’s Nothing More To Do Here.  Africa Is The Future’

If you don’t know where you’re from, you can’t know where you’re going. This phrase has never rung truer for thousands of African Americans who have embarked on personal journeys to trace their lineage beyond the shores of the United States (US), back to Africa.
Not since Alex Haley, the American-born Pulitzer Prize winning author of Roots, traced his genealogy to The Gambia in the late 1970s has there been such a thirst for this knowledge. The release of the movie 12 Years a Slave two years ago renewed the interest. Today, science elevates the searches according to Gina Paige, the CEO of African Ancestry, the company pioneering the tracing of ancestry in the US using DNA.
“Other companies can only determine whether an ancestry is African. [Our company] is the first to use the science of DNA to trace maternal and/or paternal ancestry, not just to Africa but to a specific present day African country of origin and ethnic group,” says Paige.
Celebrating its tenth year, the African American-owned firm Paige co-founded with geneticist, Rick Kittles, utilizes its DNA database of more than 25,000 indigenous African samples from nearly 400 African ethnic groups representing 35 African countries. This allows for a high level of detail, accuracy and confidence in its assessments.
The tests use cheek swabs and results are delivered electronically in around six weeks.
“We successfully determine ancestry over 99 percent of the time,” says Paige.
“We find identical matches for approximately 85 percent of the people we test. For the remaining people, we find closely related lineages with greater than 95 percent confidence.”
The firm’s results have impacted the lives of more than 150,000 African American families, individuals, and global icons including Oprah Winfrey, US Ambassador Andrew Young, Condoleezza Rice, Martin Luther King, Jr., posthumously; Oscar-winning actors Louis Gossett, Jr., and Whoopi Goldberg; and Grey’s Anatomy actor Isaiah Washington, who became the first African American to receive dual citizenship as a result of DNA confirmation.
Not only do the DNA results change the lives of African Americans connecting with their past, they also boost the economies of the newfound African homelands through philanthropic and investment efforts from their long lost citizens.
Security specialist, Brian Williams, used African Ancestry to trace his lineage to the Ga tribe of Ghana. Six months later, he traveled to the West African nation in search of his people.
“During my first visit, I saw an elder who looked identical to my aunt who raised me. I saw her in a marketplace and couldn’t take my eyes off her. The guide brought me to her and she explained in her native language that I looked like her grandfather who was sent to the States and never came back,” he says.
“She introduced me to a group of elders and a linguist who started asking me questions. They accepted me into their group and put me through a traditional naming ceremony. Before long, I was enstooled as Chief Nii Arde Anum I, the Noa Mantse (development chief) of three Ghanaian villages.”
Still living in the US, Williams visits Ghana every three to four months to fulfill his chiefly duties of building up the visibility of the villages and collecting much-needed education supplies.
“On my second trip to Ghana, a man who sat one seat away from me on the plane told me he purchased a hotel in Cape Coast, located about two hours outside of the capital city of Accra. Three months later, I invested in the hotel and became head of security,” says Williams.
He is now CEO of the oceanfront Sanaa Lodge hotel. He has also created a business venture and school that trains security professionals throughout the country.
Randy Williams, who is unrelated to Brian, decided to not just go back but to give back after tracing his lineage to the Fula people of Guinea-Bissau. A truck driver by trade, Williams started the non-profit organization, From Your Heart to the World, using his own money and donations.
“Taking the ancestry test was initially all about finding my purpose. Then, after I visited, I said, ‘I gotta do more,’” he says.
He collects clothing, educational supplies, toys and medical supplies and ships it to the needy parts of the country.
“Our clients have built schools, created businesses and invested not just in their African brothers and sisters, but also Africa’s economy. It’s why we are serious about helping people better understand who they are,” says Paige.
African Ancestry is not restricted to tracing lineages from Africa. It also introduced myDNAmix, a product that determines ancestries from Native Americans, East Asia, Europe and India.
For 10 years and counting, African Ancestry is filling in the holes in people’s history and reconnecting them to the continent.

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Brother From Another Motherland

American civil rights activist, Reverend Jesse Jackson, is no stranger to South Africa. He came to Africa many times as he led radical African-Americans against apartheid in the 1970s and 80s.
<div id="attachment_322" style="width: 211px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-322" class="wp-image-322 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/DSC_0241-201x300.jpg" alt="" width="201" height="300" />Reverend Jesse Jackson</div>
The Baptist minister, who was also a US presidential candidate in the late 1980s, landed at OR Tambo Airport in Johannesburg in January as a guest of honor for the centenary celebrations of the African National Congress. It was a South Africa very different to the one he encountered three decades ago.
“The contrast between arriving in [what was then] Jan Smuts Airport and [what is now] OR Tambo airport, that in itself is hugely impactful, beyond this generation’s imagination. Back in 1979 there were no black pilots or flight attendants. The only blacks you saw were pushing brooms, they were under great intimidation and walking around with pass books in their hands.”
In 2012, the political issues of South Africa are far from over. This time around, Jackson, who marched alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Junior in the 60s in the civil rights movement,  landed in the heat of debate over one of the great issues of Africa: nationalization.
For many months in Africa’s biggest economy, there has been argument over whether South Africa should nationalize its crown jewels like the mining industry. Radicals like suspended ANC Youth League leader, Julius Malema, who is appealing his suspension from his post as president, has called for nationalization now in the cause of helping the poor with education and employment.
Jackson says it needs to be on the ruling party’s to-do list.
“The idea is to somehow create a fairer distribution of resources. [ANC] must determine the timetable for that, but too few people own too much wealth and too many have too little. Therefore, there must be some plan for re-investment so you have a fairer distribution of drinkable water, housing, healthcare and education,” says Jackson.
When Jackson reached the ANC celebrations, South African president, Jacob Zuma, used his speech as an indication that the party may want to put the issue to bed, saying government had acquired the state’s resources and would be using them appropriately to the people.
In August 2011 Mineral Resources Minister, Susan Shabangu, said: “Foreigners will not invest in South Africa; Nationalization is a bad idea… The correct question should not be whether or not we nationalize; the question, in my view, should be: How do we make use of our vast mineral wealth to eliminate [poverty, inequality and unemployment]? Is this perhaps not a more productive debate?”
Shabangu’s comments came to the dismay of many young black, unemployed South Africans as well as activists like Jackson.
“This is government induced wealth and neglected poverty so South Africa’s having to overcome centuries of mal-distribution of opportunity. Some of your best minds were driven out the country, others were not allowed in the country. So you cannot dismiss the devastating long term, continuous resonation of the economic apartheid system. This South Africa is different today; you are now free but unequal. Freedom required the will to sacrifice, to overcome barbarity and indecency. Now the challenge is equality, which requires a different set of skills,” says Jackson.
The nationalization question will be decided in December 2012, at the ruling party’s elective conference, which will also be held in Mangaung, Bloemfontein.
For now, Jackson says, the country’s democratic progress is headed in the right direction, but there is still a lot to learn about transparency, checks and balances.
“It’s still early in the morning for the new South Africa,” he says.

Tag: African - American

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