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Abstract
Based on a study of African Americans who have undertaken DNA testing in order to trace their (African) ancestral roots, it is argued that tracing genetic ancestry affects notions of identity, home and belonging, and might serve as a motivating factor for actual or desired travels to, or even resettlement in, a newly discovered ancestral homeland. The paper explores how identity becomes renegotiated and reconceptualised through narratives of imagined ties to a perceived long-lost ‘homeland’. Such narratives often assist in bridging the narrator’s life in the US with that of a ‘reconstructed homeland’ through (new kinds of) transnational narratives of belonging.
Notes
1. For instance the companies DNA Heritage, DNA Roots, Roots for Real, Family Tree DNA, DNA Ancestry Project, Identigene, Ancestry.com, DNA Tribes, AfricanDNA, Ancestry by DNA and African Ancestry.
2. Since the change in government in 2009 the Ministry of Tourism and Diasporan Relations changed its name back to Ministry of Tourism.
3. There is of course a much older history of the ‘return’ of the descendants of the African slave trade to Africa. Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, was founded by repatriated freed slaves in 1792. According to Lake (Citation1995, p. 24), approximately 15,000 people of African descent were shipped to the west coast of Africa, mainly to the colony of Liberia, between 1820 and 1890 by the American Colonization Society and the US government. The ‘return’ of emancipated slaves was not confined to African Americans but also included the Afro-Cuban and Yoruba diasporas’ repatriation to Lagos, Nigeria in the nineteenth century (Otero, Citation2010, p. 2). Much later, Ghana’s first post-independence president Kwame Nkrumah, a leading Pan-Africanist, tried to rebuild Ghana through the recruitment of skilled African Americans (Campbell, Citation2006, p. 319).
4. All names are pseudonyms chosen by the narrators themselves or the author.
5. The ‘Door of No Return’ is a sign placed above the doors at the Elmina and Cape Coast slave castles where the slaves were taken to the ships. It symbolises the last ground they would touch in Ghana before the Middle Passage, the forced passage of more than twelve million Africans to the ‘New World’ during the transatlantic slave trade (Campbell, Citation2006, p. 1).
6. Potter and Phillips (Citation2006) use the Fanonian ‘black skins, white masks’ analysis when describing the racialised reaction of native Barbadians to the ‘return’ of British-raised ‘Bajan-Brits’ to Barbados. They are seen as (physically) black but (symbolically) white by virtue of their British upbringing, accents and habits.
