African Ancestry Helps A-List Line Up of African American Celebs Join Obama in Knowing their Roots in Africa

The rise of consumer genetic testing coupled with First Black President of African descent spawn trend in African Americans to trace roots to Africa during post-election Holiday season.

 

One things President-Elect Barack Obama won't have to grapple with in the Oval Office is his ancestry.
He's one of the few African Americans who actually know exactly where in Africa their African bloodlines began -- an experience that remains elusive to many people of African descent in the U.S.  African Ancestry, Inc., the company that pioneered DNA-based ancestry tracing for people of African descent, is making it easier and more accurate for African Americans to be like Obama and know their roots this Holiday Season with a specially-priced Holiday DNA-Test Kit at  African Ancestry
	In addition to the thousands of families impacted through African Ancestry's DNA tracing during the past five years, African-American celebrities have also responded to the trend. African Ancestry's celebrity round-up includes movie stars and musical artists to business moguls and political leaders.
With common ancestries in West and Central Africa -- regions more affected by the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade -- a majority of African Ancestry's celebrity reveals are from present-day Sierra Leone. Cameroon and Nigeria also run a good race as genetic homelands for many of America's top African American icons among the nearly 40 countries that African Ancestry's proprietary DNA testing system is designed to trace.  See sample listing below:
Maya Angelou -- Sierra Leone India.Arie -- Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Liberia Jim Brown - Nigeria Don Cheadle - Cameroon Kimberly Elise - Mali Roberta Flack - Cameroon Morgan Freeman - Niger Whoopi Goldberg -- Sierra Leone, Liberia Louis Gossett Jr. -- Sierra Leone, Liberia Judge Hatchett - Nigeria Tom Joyner -- Sierra Leone Spike Lee, Niger - Cameroon Taraji P. Henson - Cameroon Russ Parr - Niger Chris Rock - Nigeria Forrest Whitaker - Ghana Oprah Winfrey - Liberia Susan Taylor -- Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Liberia Hon. Andrew Young -- Sierra Leone Mayor Shirley Franklin -- Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone Dr. Dorothy Height -- Sierra Leone Congr. Barbara Lee -- Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone Dr. Louis Sullivan -- Sierra Leone Congr. Diane Watson, Central African Republic Chauncey Davis -- Sierra Leone, Liberia Trevor Pryce -- Sierra Leone, Liberia Etan Thomas -- Sierra Leone Dr. John Hope Franklin - Cameroon Dr. Wade Nobles -- Sierra Leone Dr. Mae Jemison -- Cameroon, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Senegal

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By Kirk Semple

GRAND ISLAND, Neb. — Like many workers at the meatpacking plant here, Raul A. Garcia, a Mexican-American, has watched with some discomfort as hundreds of Somali immigrants have moved to town in the past couple of years, many of them to fill jobs once held by Latino workers taken away in immigration raids.

Mr. Garcia has been particularly troubled by the Somalis’ demand that they be allowed special breaks for prayers that are obligatory for devout Muslims. The breaks, he said, would inconvenience everyone else.

“The Latino is very humble,” said Mr. Garcia, 73, who has worked at the plant, owned by JBS U.S.A. Inc., since 1994. “But they are arrogant,” he said of the Somali workers. “They act like the United States owes them.”

Mr. Garcia was among more than 1,000 Latino and other workers who protested a decision last month by the plant’s management to cut their work day — and their pay — by 15 minutes to give scores of Somali workers time for evening prayers.

After several days of strikes and disruptions, the plant’s management abandoned the plan.

But the dispute peeled back a layer of civility in this southern Nebraska city of 47,000, revealing slow-burning racial and ethnic tensions that have been an unexpected aftermath of the enforcement raids at workplaces by federal immigration authorities.

Grand Island is among a half dozen or so cities where discord has arisen with the arrival of Somali workers, many of whom were recruited by employers from elsewhere in the United States after immigration raids sharply reduced their Latino work forces.

The Somalis are by and large in this country legally as political refugees and therefore are not singled out by immigration authorities.

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By Kofi Nkrumah

"Don't care where you come from. As long as you're a black man, you're an African. Don't mind your nationality, you have got the identity, of an African." — Peter Tosh.

"Before 1945, most Czecho-slovak citizens had never even met a black person. But ever since the first black soldier entered the country with General Patton's Third Army in April 1945, people ... have gradually got used to Africans and Afro-Americans."

 

So said Jarka Halková in a report on Radio Prague Jan. 31, 2005. As has been proven by history, that acquaintance was short-lived, and 1945 has since been consigned to the faint memories of the aged or to some dusty pages of history. The communist putsch of 1948 and the Cold War politics that ensued literally prohibited further free movement of (black) people to this part of the world. African or black presence throughout the communist era was indeed very limited to a few diplomats and students on scholarships. And it was obligatory for such students to return to their countries of origin upon completion of their studies. It was only those who graduated at the dawn of or after the collapse of the Berlin Wall who had the opportunity of seeking their pastures right there, back home or elsewhere.

Obonete Ubam - Chairman of the League of Ethnic Minorities

Some, if not many, chose to stay and today they are at the core of the African community in Prague and in the Czech Republic in general. Added to this category of Africans is a new wave of immigrants from both the continent and the Diaspora, who have been trickling in since the Iron Curtain finally collapsed. No doubt, therefore, that black presence in the streets of Prague and other major cities in the Czech Republic is gradually becoming commonplace. There are Africans or blacks who have settled down to family lives with Czech spouses. Children sired from these relationships are equally becoming fairly visible and it might not be too long before some ingenious ethnologist, journalist or activist starts talking about black-Czechs, Afro-Czechs or African-Czechs.

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From Aaron, a former slave without a last name, through Paul BurgessZuber, a 20th century lawyer and professor, the recently publishedAfrican American National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2008) is the most extensive and inclusive collection of biographical informationabout African American lives ever published.

The African American National Biography (AANB), co-edited by HenryLouis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Higginbotham, is an eight-volume series thatincludes biographies of more than 4,000 African Americans throughout500 years, dating back to the arrival of Esteban, the first recordedAfrican explorer to set foot in North America.

Gates, the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor in the Faculty ofArts and Sciences and the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, andHigginbotham, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and African andAfrican American Studies and chair of the Department of African andAfrican American Studies, have included the famous and the infamous, aswell as hitherto obscure individuals.

The series includes national heroes and historical figures such asMartin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass. But the biographies alsoinclude Sissieretta Joyner Jones, a 19th century opera singer; RichardPotter, a magician, sword swallower, and ventriloquist who owned 175acres in New Hampshire and died in 1835; and the pistol-packing,fist-fighting Mary Fields, also known as Stagecoach Mary, of the late19th century.

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Suggests male European settlers mated with native and African women, and slaughtered the men

European colonisation of South America resulted in a dramatic shift from a native American population to a largely mixed one, a genetic study has shown. It suggests male European settlers mated with native and African women, and slaughtered the men.

But it adds that areas like Mexico City "still preserve the genetic heritage" because these areas had a high number of natives at the time of colonisation.

The findings appear in the journal Public Library of Science Genetics.

The international team of researchers wrote: "The history of Latin America has entailed a complex process of population mixture between natives and recent immigrants across a vast geographic region.

"Few details are known about this process or about how it shaped the genetic make-up of Latin American populations."

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By Hyde Flippo

Black Germans? Non-Germans may be understandably surprised to learn that there are Afro-Germans (Afrodeutsche), but many Germans themselves are unaware of the concept of a German who is also black (ein Schwarzer). While compared to other minorities, such as the 2 million Turks living in Germany, blacks are definitely a tiny minority among Germany's 82 million people. While EU countries do not keep track of ethnicity, there are an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 Blacks living in Germany today.

Early History

The history of black people in Germany goes back much further than most people think. One of the first Africans known to have lived in Germany was Anton Wilhelm Amo (1703-1759). Born in what is today's Ghana, Amo came under the protection of the Duke (Herzog) of Wolfenbüttel in Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen) and grew up in the duke's castle.

He was both the first African known to attend a German university (Halle) and the first to obtain a doctorate degree (in 1729). As a professor, under his preferred name of Antonius Guilelmus Amo Afer, he taught at two German universities and published several scholarly works, including a Latin treatise entitled De Arte Sobrie et Accurate Philosophandi (1736, "On the Art of Philosophizing Soberly and Accurately"). Knowing the level of his achievements, it is all the more surprising to learn that Amo returned to Africa in 1747. Most accounts claim the reason for his return to his native Africa was the racial discrimination he encountered in Germany. Then as now, Africans in Europe were seen as something exotic and foreign.

German writer Ika Hügel-Marshall

Hügel-Marshall is the author of " Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany.” Hügel-Marshall’s book contributes to the ongoing discussion about multicultural issues in Germany and about what it means to be German. This has become particularly important after reunification of West and East Germany and Germany’s search for a new national identity.  Ika Hügel-Marshall is a so-called “war baby,” born just after World War II in a small Bavarian town. Her mother was a white German, her father an African American soldier stationed in Germany. At the age of seven, Ika (Erika at the time) was removed from her mother and placed in a Protestant boarding school hundreds of kilometers away, which proved to be a very traumatic experience.  The book describes her journey to accept herself as a black German who went through different stages to ‘unlearn’ her own internalized self-hatred. In her late 30s, Ika Hügel-Marshall meets other Afro-Germans. It takes another ten years until she gets to know her father in the United States - a life-changing experience for her.

Some historians claim that the first sizeable influx of Africans to Germany came from Germany's African colonies in the 19th century. Some Afro-Germans living in Germany today can claim ancestry going back five generations to that time. Yet Prussia's colonial adventures in Africa were quite limited and brief (1890-1918), far more modest than the British, the Dutch, the French, or other European powers, so there could not have been any great numbers. But Prussia's South West Africa colony was the site of the first mass genocide committed by Germans in the 20th century. In 1904 German colonial troops countered a revolt with the massacre of three-quarters of the Herero population in what is now Namimbia. It took Germany a full century to issue a formal apology to the Herero (in 2004) for that atrocity, which was provoked by a German "extermination order" (Vernichtungsbefehl). But Germany still refuses to pay any compensation to the Herero survivors, although it does provide foreign aid to Namibia.

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By Jamey Keaten

PARIS (AP) - Blacks in France are standing up to be counted, aspiring to become a political factor in presidential and legislative elections later this year.

A small but groundbreaking new poll suggests that blacks face widespread discrimination in France, raising questions about a country long proud of its official colorblindness - and where collecting racial data is banned.

Patrick Lozes

“If you're not counted, you don't count,” said Patrick Lozes, head of the Representative Council of Black Associations, which commissioned the poll that was conducted by telephone. The council has thousands of members, he said.

Officially, France doesn't know how many blacks it has because of its Republican tradition that doesn't distinguish by race or religion. Collecting ethnic data is generally banned - one reason why a poll like Wednesday's had not been done before.

Among more than 15,000 people contacted by the Sofres polling agency to establish a pool, 581 said they felt they had black roots - and that subgroup was questioned in the poll. No margin of error was provided.

Fifty-six percent said they felt some form of discrimination in their daily lives, and 12 percent said they did so “often.” Of those who said they discrimination, 62 percent said the incidents were most often in public or on public transportation, and 42 percent at work.

Sixty-one percent said they had experienced discrimination in the last year.

Based on the poll data, Lozes estimated there are 1.8 million voting-age blacks in France - out of a total population of some 60 million - and about four-fifths of them are French citizens.

France, like many other European countries, has been struggling with how to integrate its ethnic minorities. Nationwide riots in fall 2005 raged through housing projects in France's poor neighborhoods with large minority populations. They were often fueled by broad feelings of discrimination, unemployment and a sense of alienation from society.

“The sectarianism that I denounce is that of the current minority in power - that's to say white men, aged over 50, who are bourgeois and heterosexual,” Lozes said. “They're the minority, but a majority in the National Assembly.”

By Lisa Bryant

More than half of blacks living in France say they face racial discrimination, according to the first-ever survey on the country's black population. The findings are troubling for a country that has long prided itself on its human rights record, and its ostensibly color-blind integration model.

According to a survey conducted by the TNS-Sofres polling agency, 61 percent of blacks living in France say they have experienced at least one racist incident within the past year.

More than one in 10 of the 13,000 respondents said they were frequently the target of racism that ranged from verbal aggression to difficulty finding housing or jobs.

Patrick Lozes

Patrick Lozes The French advocacy group The Representative Council of Black Associations commissioned the survey. Its president, Patrick Lozes, says these are troubling statistics.

Lozes predicts the poll will change things in France. Until now, he says, blacks have never been counted. And a population that is not counted, does not count.

Blacks are not counted because census and other official surveys are barred from compiling statistics based on religion or race. But some experts estimate there are about five million blacks living in France.

The head of the Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between Peoples, Mouloud Aounit, says he is not surprised by the survey's findings.

Aounit says racism exits in French daily life. Look at the Senate, the National Assembly, regional councils, he says. Ethnic representation is totally absent.

By Ron Nixon and Sandra Jamison

HENRY LOUIS GATES JR., whose PBS special “African American Lives” explores the ancestry of famous African-Americans using DNA testing, has done more than anyone to help popularize such tests and companies that offer them. But recently this Harvard professor has become one of the industry’s critics.

Mr. Gates says his concerns date back to 2000, when a company told him his maternal ancestry could most likely be traced back to Egypt, probably to the Nubian ethnic group. Five years later, however, a test by a second company startled him. It concluded that his maternal ancestors were not Nubian or even African, but most likely European.

Why the completely different results? Mr. Gates said the first company never told him he had multiple genetic matches, most of them in Europe. “They told me what they thought I wanted to hear,” Mr. Gates said.

An estimated 460,000 people have taken genetic tests to determine their ancestry or to expand their known family trees, according to Science magazine. Census records, birth and death certificates, ship manifests, slave narratives and other documents have become easier to find through the Internet, making the hunt for family history less daunting than in years past.

Pio Pico's ancestry is said to have included a mixture of ethnicities, including African, Indian, Spanish and Italian.

Pio Pico was the last governor of Mexican California. He was of African, Indian and Spanish ancestry. He was born in San Gabriel in 1801 and resided there until his father’s death in 1819; he then moved to San Diego. It is not clear how he became California’s governor in 1845.

Some accounts state that he took over Governor Manuel Micheltorena’s position in 1845 “following a revolt that ended with a bloodless artillery duel near Cahuenga Pass that forced out Governor Manuel Micheltorena.” As governor, Pico participated in the final process of the secularization of the California missions.

There are different interpretations of this measure by the Mexican government: one asserts that it was part of the liberal discourse of the post-independence movement in Mexico; another asserts that it was a desperate measure intended to obtain revenue by selling the missions for the impending conflict with the United States over California.