Barbadians retraced their lineage to Ogun State, Nigeria

Ilaro, a town in the Ogun West Senatorial District of Ogun State witnessed the homecoming of Barbadians who traced their origin to the town. Their visit also coincided with the yearly Badagry Heritage Festival, which came up between August 22 and 23, 2006. Before this august visit, the government of Barbados had written to the Oba (Akran) of Badagry, de Wheno Aholu Menu-Toyil and Oba Samuel Adekanmbi Tella 111, the Olu of Ilaro and paramount ruler of Yewaland. On this glorious event, the government and the people of Ogun State heartily welcomed home their noble descendants from Barbados; they are the branches of Yewa in the Diaspora.

   The home-coming of the Yewa of Barbados had once again demonstrated why Ogun State is Nigeria’s gateway to the Pan African world of the Yoruba, especially those with their ancestral homelands firmly located in Ogun or areas historically associated with the Gateway State, whose cultural influence dominates the wider spectrum of the African Diaspora communities in the New World, notably Brazil, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, and Argentina.

Another past home-coming event was the eventful visit to Ketu in 1967 by Maitre dos Sanctos (the famous Baba Olorisa of Bahia) and the more colorful entourage ten years later in 1977 by Madame Alaketu (also of Bahia), as part of the famous FESTAC ’77 (Festival of the Black and African Arts in Lagos in 1977).

According to Dr. Ikael Tafari, Director, Commission for Pan-African Affairs, Barbados was the first port of call for the slave ships after the horrors of the Middle Passage centuries ago. He further argued that some of the original Africans who passed through the Port of Badagry en route to the Caribbean came from Ilaro province. To buttress his stance, Tafari pointed out that the official residence of the Prime Minister of Barbados is called Ilaro Court.

Ilaro was founded around 1650 A.D. by a brave hunter, Aro from Oyo. The town is situated in the center of Yewa land, midway between the land area comprising Yewa North and South. This central position resulted in its being designated traditionally the administrative headquarters of the entire Yewa from 1914 to 1976 when the new Local Government set-up was established.

Ilaro is located on the rich cocoa belt of South West region of Nigeria and with above-average rainfall. The town occupies an area of some 9.5 square kilometers and has a population of about 150,000. It is worthy of note that Ilaro falls within the sedimentary rock belt, made up of Abeokuta, Ilaro, and Ewekoro formation.

Pauline Black:

Going Back to My Roots

(Culled from The Guardian, Saturday 30 July 2011)

Singer Pauline Black was adopted by a white couple. She tells Hannah Pool how confusing it was and how 2-Tone music became the surrogate family that saved her.

Pauline Black. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

Pauline Black’s earliest memory is of throwing up her breakfast in response to the news that she was adopted. It was 1958, in Romford, Essex, and Pauline was four. Until then, she had been in “blithe ignorance” about her origins, despite the fact that she was the only non-white person in her family. She knew her skin colour was different from that of the rest of her family, and that this seemed often to be worthy of negative comments, but she hadn’t understood why. “It was something that never came up, I had no notion of it,” she says.

Aware that her little girl was about to start school, where questions were bound to be asked, Pauline’s mother, Ivy, told her daughter that her “real” mother was a Dagenham schoolgirl and her “real” father was “from a place called Nigeria”.

Throughout her childhood, Pauline felt like a “cuckoo, in somebody else’s nest,” she writes, in her new memoir, Black by Design. It wasn’t until 20 years later, when she was lead singer of the 2-Tone band, the Selecter that she felt she finally belonged somewhere: “Any band is like a surrogate family,” she says.

In the 1950s and 60s, Essex was not an easy place to be an adopted mixed-race girl. “It was totally unreconstructed,” says Pauline. Her memoir is full of shocking stories, such as her mum telling her she looked “like a bloody golliwog” when she decided to grow an afro. Were Pauline’s family racist? “I’m not going to say they were racist – they weren’t racist. The word hadn’t been invented then. They were xenophobic, absolutely, but that wasn’t just confined to black people, that was anybody,” she says.

In her 40s, Pauline’s mother had developed Bell’s palsy, a facial paralysis that made her reluctant to leave the house. The family doctor suggested the 1950s cure-all for depressed women – a baby. As Ivy had had a hysterectomy (after her fourth son), adoption seemed the answer. “The story I was given was that she had difficulty leaving the house and the doctor said, ‘What you need is a baby,'” says Pauline. She was fostered and then adopted when she was 18 months old.

Pauline describes her mother as uptight and fearful of the world, but also “home-loving, a woman who loved babies”.

How did such a fearful woman come to adopt a black child in the 50s? “I don’t think colour really came into it. I don’t think they’d actually thought that question through. I think there were only boys around that day and she wanted a girl,” says Pauline. Her parents were so unprepared for the arrival of a newborn baby that they didn’t have anywhere for her to sleep: “They didn’t have anything. They didn’t have a cot – I spent the first few weeks of my life in a drawer. This was the family joke,” she says.

Pauline’s relationship with her mother had become strained by the time she was 11, but she felt more affinity with her father, Arthur, a mechanic, whom she describes as “working-class and proud”. “He was a very loving and very open man. I can never consciously remember him saying anything about a black person that was derogatory, but I can remember my brothers and uncles, saying things,” she says.

Looking back, Pauline believes her father was a depressive. He used to take to his bed for a week at a time and she would be sent upstairs to cajole him out of his bedroom. How was her parents’ relationship? “Pretty weird. I guess they loved each other in their own peculiar little way, but it wasn’t all beer and skittles,” she says.

Many of Pauline’s memories will be familiar to anyone who has grown up adopted, mixed race or black in a white family: the sense of isolation, the alienation, the sheer loneliness of looking and feeling so different from your family, compounded by the guilt of having these feelings and the frustration of not having the vocabulary to express it at the time.

In her book, Pauline likens adoption to a full blood transfusion: “It may save your life in the short term, but if it’s not the perfect match, rejection issues may appear,” she writes. What would have made things easier? “To have known another black family. To have known other black kids. I needed to know there were black people who had jobs, were living normal lives,” she says.

Her mother taught her to fear black people, particularly men: “I suppose all mothers make you scared of men, but black men were definitely bogey men, they got you pregnant, they didn’t care, they’d run off and leave you, and if that happened – ‘If you revert to type’ she was trying to say – then we wash our hands of you.”

Does she wish she’d been adopted by a black family? “That would have been better because I’d have had role models. But it isn’t who brings you up – a black or mixed-race family could have adopted me and been absolutely dreadful, just like a white family could have been dreadful, but it’s the lack of role models,” says Pauline.

As she grew older, her relationship with Ivy became uncomfortable: “By the time I was 11, things had changed irreparably and that was because I was more conscious of who I was,” says Pauline.

Education created another chasm: “My parents had both left school pretty much by the time they were 12, so I was just allowed to get on with it. By that time I was a very secretive child. I mistrusted adults. I went inside myself.”

Even today, wearing a beautiful black silk shirt and looking at least a decade younger than her 58 years, Pauline seems shy and reserved, rather than the exhibitionist one might expect of a stage performer who was arguably the most influential women on the male-dominated 2-Tone music scene.

By the late 60s, early 70s, the American Black Power movement had given Pauline the vocabulary she needed to express herself, often with mixed results. She combed out her hair, wore an afro to school and painted “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” on a poster in her bedroom. This new found pride in her identity infuriated her mother, who was convinced no good would come of it: “She wanted me to be Shirley Bassey – I wanted to be Marsha Hunt.”

In 1971, Pauline left Romford for Lanchester Polytechnic (now Coventry University), to study science before training as a radiographer in Coventry. It was around this time that she met her husband, Terry, an engineer – they have been together 38 years, quite an achievement for someone who says she has “little concept of family”.

By 1976, Pauline was singing in local pubs, earning £10 a gig. Then one day in May 1979, she went to a rehearsal with a group of friends and left as the lead singer with the Selecter. A few months later, the band had their first hit, On My Radio. Within seven weeks of being a fully formed band, the Selecter were supporting the likes of Madness and the Specials and Pauline was being hailed as the Queen of Ska.

It was around this time that she changed her surname from Vickers. The name Black came to her after a session with the band – she was naming the elephant in the room, she says: “I thought, that is just absolutely amazing! My family, for the first time, will have to say it,” she says.

“[The term] coloured was still used in those times. Black was still an underground thing, and to actually name yourself Black, as far as my family was concerned, was quite a big bone of contention. I don’t think I’ve ever been fully forgiven. If I’d changed my name to Smith, that wouldn’t have been quite so bad,” she says.

If changing her surname to Black was radical for the time, so too was her androgynous “rude-girl” uniform of a sharp black and/or white suit with a grey fedora.

Though never quite as successful as Madness and the Specials, the Selecter had their own loyal following and a string of UK hits after On My Radio, including Too Much Pressure and Three Minute Hero. What made them different from other bands on the 2-tone scene was not only the fact that they had a black female singer, but there was only one white member, out of a line up of seven. “Madness were all white, there were only two black people in the Specials. And then there was us,” says Pauline.

It was a time of racial tension in Britain and it was not uncommon for rightwing skinheads and National Front supporters to launch into sieg heil chants during 2-Tone gigs. Wasn’t Pauline disheartened when the music she loved was appropriated by “bonehead skins,” as she calls them? “It was never appropriated, they were just there. In Top Rank clubs and Tiffany’s, and all those kinds of places, you would have 2,000 people in there and 40, possibly 50 people who sieg-heiled at you that particular night,” says Pauline.

How did she deal with it? “I rather naively thought they could be shown the error of their ways. That didn’t happen, but we tried. We’d ask the audience: ‘Do you want these people in here?’ Sometimes that would shame them into shutting up,” says Pauline.

When the Selecter broke up in 1982, (they have since reformed and have a new single out this week) Pauline built a successful career as an actor. But in their Top of the Pops heyday, when she was regularly on television and featured in the press, Pauline began to wonder if her birth mother might see her and get in touch.

Out of loyalty to Ivy, Pauline didn’t try to trace her birth mother until she was 42, eight years after Ivy’s death – her father had died in 1976.

“I knew I couldn’t do it while she was alive. It would have been too upsetting for her,” she says.

Once she had decided to trace her birth mother, Pauline became “a whirling dervish” of activity. Within a couple of weeks she had found an address and telephone number. This was fast work given that her birth mother, Eileen, was a “£10 Pom”, one of the wave of Britons encouraged to emigrate to Australia in the mid-60s – she had left when Pauline was 13 and knew nothing of her daughter’s success.

Pauline wrote to Eileen right away and within a week her telephone rang at 5am. When she answered, a woman with a strong Australian accent said: “Darling, it’s Mummy.”

Eileen told her that her father had been an engineering student who had come to London from Nigeria to study. His name was Gordon Adenle. Pauline hit the phone book and rang every entry under that name. The following day, she found herself in the London flat of Gordon’s second wife. She was shown pictures of her father, who, it transpired, was a Yoruba prince. She felt an instant physical connection with him: “It was the strangest thing, walking into the room and there was my father, staring at me, I wasn’t prepared for that, at all, or the whole story about him,” she says.

Sadly, he had died a year earlier, so he still remains a mystery: “Almost like a fantasy figure,” she says.

She has yet to visit Nigeria, although she has met a half sister: “I’ve tried to talk to people, I’ve written letters about my father, their impressions of him, but you don’t get anywhere … A cousin went there and photographed my father’s grave. That was cathartic because that’s a bit like a full stop.”

There was, however, a proper reunion with her birth mother. A few weeks after first speaking to Eileen, Pauline stepped off a plane in Sydney to meet her and, as she writes, was “enveloped in 42 years of love”.

After the initial euphoria of their reunion, came the hard work of building a relationship. “When you’ve done with all the introductions – this is my life story, this is your life story, where do you go from there?” she asks.

Reunion is a little bit like a love affair, she says: “For the first two weeks, it’s absolutely wonderful. They’re the most adorable thing in the world, your heart flutters, you’ve got so much to learn about each other.” Then things become more prosaic: “You’ve just got to get on with it,” says Pauline. (She maintains a good relationship with her four older adoptive brothers, but they have shown little interest in the connections she has made with her birth family.)

Eileen, who writes once a week, told Pauline that she used to stand at the end of her street in Romford and watch her go to school.

What kind of advice would she give anyone who is considering tracing their birth family? “Don’t just think about the object of your desire – your birth mother – think about everything that’s going to come with it, and think about that quite hard. Be prepared for it. She’s going to come with a whole heap of other people and they are going to have a whole heap of other agendas. Be prepared for that, but don’t let it stop you,” says Pauline.

She thinks not enough is done to support adopted children: “They’ve addressed the needs of everybody else, but not the child.”

She also believes adopted children should have follow-ups with social services and, where possible, contact with birth parents. If it’s not possible? “They should have photographs, some sort of family history, who you came out of. You should grow up knowing that – be able to assimilate that – so that by the time you are 18 you’re not feeling as though you are bereft or you don’t belong to – or never belonged to – something.”

(Black by Design: A 2-Tone Memoir, by Pauline Black, is published by Serpent’s Ta.)

……..

Diaspora Movement

In recent times, there has been an unprecedented movement of the black Americans to Africa. African Americans are returning to the lands of their ancestors as life becomes precarious and dangerous in the United States. Many African Americans have come from the cities of San Francisco, Chicago, and the New York. Thousands of them have visited Africa and some refuse to return.

A new wave of black people is escaping the incessant racism and prejudice in the United States. From Senegal and Ghana to Gambia, communities are emerging in defiance of conventional wisdom that Africa is a continent everyone is trying to leave.

It is estimated that between 3, 000 and 5, 000 African Americans live in Accra, the Ghanaian capital. They are teachers in small towns in the west or entrepreneurs in the capital. Even though living in Ghana is not easy, they feel free and safe.

Take Muhamunida el – Muhajir, a digital marketer from New York City, who left her job to move to Accra. She says that she moved because despite her education and experience, she was always made to feel like a second – class citizen. Moving was an opportunity to fulfill her potential and avoid being targeted by racial violence.

On the prospect of more African Americans moving, she said, “I think more will come when they begin to see it as a viable alternative. But it’s not easy and it’s not cheap. I can’t say what’s happening in America today is any worse than what’s been happening at any other time. I think now is the time that people are starting to see they can live somewhere else.”

The exodus of African Americans in Ghana

Ghana’s President Nana Akufo – Addo declared 2019 to be the “Year of Return”, saying it was Ghana’s responsibility to “welcome home” Africans whose families were forced into slavery. The “home coming” was seen as an opportunity to strengthen links and to give the Diaspora a chance to explore the possibility of settling in Ghana – something that civil rights leaders Marcus Garvey and WEB Du Bois championed in the 1920s.

Du Bois made Ghana his home, and died there in 1963 at the age of 95. He was buried in Accra – Ghana.

Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali all paid high profile visits to Ghana to reconnect with their African roots.

Ghana has long prided itself as a bastion of pan – Africanism. Its founding leader, Kwame Nkrumah declared the West African state the “Black Mecca”, and showed strong support to Marcus Garvey Back –to- Africa movement in the 1960s.

Various governments have continued in this tradition – for instance in 2001 then – President John Kufuor’s government passed the Right of Abode Law, allowing Africans in the diaspora to settle in Ghana.

In 2016, Dr. Kanbon – along with 33 other Africans in disapora – petitioned President John Mahama, to grant them citizenship.

In what was his last act in office after losing elections in December of the same year, Mr. Mahama used his presidential powers to accede to their request.

Leadership in Africa

The question of leadership in Africa involves three categories of players: politicians, business leaders, and the intellectual elites. The role of each of these players has been a deciding factor in the management of the State and society since the start of independence in 1960.

 The world today is driven by permanent competition where the only differentiating factor is intangible capital which, when applied properly, effectively compensates for a lack of natural resources. The world is becoming more and more immaterial. Africa must take account of this to carry out several changes. To start with, mindsets have to be changed (abandoning the mentality of servitude) and Africa must realize that it has to stay “connected” with the rest of the world and be understood by it. In fact, the biggest reproach regarding Africa today concerns its inability to look towards the future. In essence, we need future minded leaders. Africa’s hope for leadership is expected to be a younger generation that, for the time being, remains on the margins. There is therefore a need to get younger generations involved in leadership.

Also, the renewal of intellectual elites should allow for a better contribution of both Africans at home and in Diaspora to the development of the continent and lead to the training of a new generation of leaders. Unfortunately, the intellectual elites at home do not have the money to flaunt around like the politicians to secure positions of presidency and strategic national leadership in the African nations. Up until the time desirable people are chosen to positions of leadership by merit, Africa will still continue to be in the hands of the present crop of rulers (not leaders).

The African Diaspora is spread over three main geographic regions: Europe, the United States of America and the Gulf States. The emergence of Africans in Diaspora in leadership could be useful to Africa in three main areas:

• Improvements in technical competence and university teaching;

• Attracting financial resources for development. The transfer of fresh money from the Diaspora to Africa is currently estimated at more than 10 % of the gross domestic product (GDP) of certain African countries;

• Better representation of Africa in the world through relations that this Diasporas have established in various host regions.

The promotion of a new generation of leaders implies the emergence of elites that bring together different abilities, including in particular an aptitude for:

• Assimilating the current debate on development;

• Acquiring new knowledge that is missing in Africa;

• Adopting a long-term approach and using good negotiating skills;

• Exploiting new information and communication technologies;

• Marrying the new developmental values with those of equality, integrity, good governance and shared management of the wealth available.

Finally, in inviting fellow black folks to Africa, our root, The Black Jewels Network wants our black folks to align with the principle of late Nelson Mandela who, at his inaugural presidential speech in South Africa said:

“We understand it still that there is no easy road to freedom (colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism and other evils)…none of us acting alone can achieve success. We must therefore act together as a united people (Black folks), for national (and regional) reconciliation, for nation (region) building, for the birth of a new world (Black African World).”

        (*The bracketed words are for emphasis by the author.)

 ………

Tani Sanchez traced her ancestry to Ghana
By: africanews.

August 2019 marks the 400th anniversary of slavery, an opportunity for many African Americans to trace their origins after the first ship carrying African slaves, which docked at James Town in Virginia in the United States in 1619.

Many in this process have undertaken to return to the land of their ancestors, as is the case in Ghana, where this anniversary has been called “ the year of return”, and some have gone as far as to undertaken DNA tests to find the the history of their ancestors, or at least the ethnic groups to which they belonged about 4 centuries ago.

This is the case, for example, of the famous actor Samuel L. Jackson who recently received a Gabonese passport after discovering his affiliation with the Benga ethnic group in Gabon in 2013.

Tani Sanchez is one of many African-Americans tracing her roots. She and her daughter Tani Sylvester travelled to Ghana after discovering through DNA tests that they belonged to an Ashanti ethnic group through their great-great-great grandfather Charles Wright, a black soldier in the Maryland Union who married Mary Ann Moss, their great-grandmother of three generations born in slavery in Alabama around 1838.

Tani Sanchez therefore took the opportunity of a welcoming ceremony by some chiefs in the Ashanti Kingdom to do this.

During the ceremony, Tani met Nana Boakye, a chief from this ethnic group, who, as a genetic instinct, gave her a warm welcome.

Sanchez sat down next to chief Nana Boakye and asked him if she should undetake a DNA test for her to find out if they had any genetic ties.

Listening to the drums she collapsed into tears knowing that she was part of the direct lineage of her ancestors.

……….

10 African American Celebrities who have traced their African roots

A growing number of people are beginning to use ancestry and genealogical databases to discover their African roots. Celebrities are no different. Many of them were surprised to find that their lineage traced back to Africa, and you may be surprised, too, when you find out where these 10 African American public figures are really from.

  1. Tiffany Haddish – Eritrea

2. Blair Underwood – Cameroon

3. Idris Elba – Sierra Leone

  4. Ludacris – Gabon

  5. Samuel L. Jackson – Gabon

  6. Oprah Winfrey – Liberia and Cameroon

  7. Q Tip – Bisau

8. Anthony Anderson – Equatorial Guinea

  9. Erykah Badu – Cameroon

10. Isaiah Washington