Translated by Trembley

Tages-Anzeiger, Swiss German Translation

A new sense of self-knowledge
By Gina Kirchweger, New York
With genetic information, an African-American finds out where her
ancestors lived before they were enslaved.

"DNA tells my own story, a view of the past that I have not heard until
now," explains Pearl Duncan. The African-American travel writer was able
to trace back her family history from birth and estate documents nearly 300
years to Jamaica. But she wanted more. Above all, she wanted to be certain
about the part of Africa in which her ancestors lived, before they were
forcibly torn from their communities and sold as slaves to plantation-owners in the Caribbean.
Extensive DNA-tests finally corroborated what Duncan was only able to
surmise after a decade-long investigation. Her ancestors belonged to the
Akuapim tribe, who then as now live in the southern highlands from which
the capital of Acra and the shore of Ghana can be seen. "I had the feeling
for a long time that I lived in Noman's land in some sense," remembers the
52-year-old. "As my research finally was confirmed, I was relieved. A new
feeling of connectedness and self-knowledge replaced the old confusion,"
she says with a glowing face.
In the search for their African forebears, descendents of earlier
slaves come up repeatedly against insurmountable hurdles, and usually the
trail stops in the southern states before the Civil War. Written documents
of birth and marriage exist only sporadically. But genetic analysis is
able to create bridges exactly where unbridgeable gaps in written
documents stop even the most tenacious genealogical researchers.
"Molecular genealogy has considerable influence on research. It is a
binder that permits the single pieces of puzzles to be fitted together,"
explains Charles Bronson, expert in Afro American genealogy at Temple
University in Philadelphia.

In the beginning was the word Duncan wrote only the last chapter of her book, "DNA Dawns Bringing
Daylight" with the help of genetic technology. The book, which describes
her decade-long search for her African roots, should appear at the end of
the year. Before she turned to geneticist Michael Hammer of the University
of Arizona and asked him to help her, she already had good linguistic
hints that her family forbears came from Ghana. She had taken years to put
together the individual pieces of evidence.
When she still lived in New York, her Jamaican parents Elisha and
Annie Duncan called one another by the nicknames of Pari and Daakye. Moreover,
there was an abundance of other strange chiming words, which the daughter
always hoped her elders would not use when her friends came to visit.
When Duncan heard these same words again during her travels in the
Caribbean, she contacted the National Museum of African Art in Washington.
Peter Pipim, a expert in African culture, had little problem
connecting the expressions Duncan had gathered with the Twi language,
spoken by the Akan in Ghana. When a rare copy of a dictionary of an 1881
Twi language dictionary by Swiss missionary Johann G. Christaller came
into her hands, she was able to define her possible forbears even more closely.
(Another article says the dictionary is an Asante- and Fante- language.)
Most of the expressions gathered by Duncan pointed to the Akuapim
tribe, one of 12 subgroups of the Ashanti. "Pari," her father's nickname,
proved to be the shortened form of the family name of Opare, commonly
found among the Akuapim. This name showed up the logbook of a British
slavehandler around 1660 and helped the eager researcher establish a link
with Jamaica.

Especially stubborn, rebellious slaves The Akuapim were considered especially stubborn and rebellious slaves, who
clung to their own names and speech, as Duncan was able to glean from the
inventories of Caribbean plantation owners. In Jamaica, they participated
in the so-called Maron uprising and finally received their freedom from
the English crown. This information coincided with old family documents, in
which the Duncans were described as "Free Negroes" in the Blue Mountains
of Jamaica.
When the scholar Hammer published his 1999 study, according to which,
analysis of the Y-chromosome established a genetic link between the Lemba
tribe of southern African and the Jewish Cohanim, a priestly clan going
back to Biblical times, the next step was clear for Duncan. The previous
year, the so-called Jefferson affair had stirred controversy --
geneticists had proven without a doubt through the Y chromosome that at least one of
the descendants of the slave Sally Hemings was related to Thomas
Jefferson, the third president of the United States.
Admittedly, for Duncan there was a problem: in order to gather the
information, coded in the DNA of each person, for a specific African
people, one needs extensive databanks for valid comparison. Although these
collections grow daily, for three years, no lab had sufficient material
from the west coast of Africa, and the pioneer in matters of molecular
genealogy herself needed to determine where to conduct suitable tests.
"Originally, I wanted to travel to Ghana, but then I noticed that many
people from the region in question lived right in New York. In the
Ghanaian Presbyterian Church in Harlem I found Akupaim who are still called Opares
today and were ready to make their DNA available," she said. Within three
years, she gathered 43 samples, including her father's and sent them to
Hammer's lab in Arizona.

Many feel hurt Then the researchers began to track minimal DNA sequence changes shared by
people of Ghanaian origin. They actually found an unusual but harmless
gene mutation that turned up with nearly 100 percent frequency. Her father's Y
chromosome showed the same mutation and consequently established, although
not with complete certainty, that at least a branch of the family tree
reached into the highlands of Ghana.
Although Y chromosome analysis led to desired results for (Duncan) the
descendant of the inflexible Akuapim, many blacks, especially those with
ancestors in other parts of the world, could use this method in vain to
search for molecular references to their old homelands.
An estimated 2 to 30 percent of all male African Americans will be
confronted with a Y chromosome of European origin. "Many react very
emotionally and feel betrayed by indicators left by events of the past,"
points out Bronson, who himself has Indian and European ancestors. But he
hopes that through the new technology, all families, whether white, black,
Latino or mixed, learn to value their unique backgrounds.
"The power of genetics lies in showing how related we really are. In
the end we are one big family," Duncan (said) optimistically looking into the
future.