For those African governments reluctant to provide dual citizenship to Diasporans who cannot legally establish a line of descent, the African Ancestry test offers a means of providing scientific evidence of descent.
Genetic ancestry testing now plays a part in black Americans’ desires to solidify ties to the African continent, including a quite literal and practical sense of reconciliation—reconstitution of the far-flung African diaspora. Some people of African descent are not merely seeking a sense of reconnection to an identity or a family lost during the Middle Passage. They further aspire to translate this usable past into bases for present-day affiliation. These new affiliations, which include friendship, DNA kinship, and citizenship, may be further recast into the promise of social, economic, and political collaboration. Like the struggle for slavery reparations, this yearning for affiliation has global implications; the diasporic social network is its modality.
The sociologist Rogers Brubaker has diagnosed a “ ‘diaspora’ diaspora” in recent years, arguing that as the term “diaspora” has proliferated, the meaning of the word has been stretched.1 The hallmarks of diaspora are widely agreed upon, however, and include dispersal of people from long-held geographic homes; the creation of a collective identity or consciousness in response to the experience of dispersal; connection to a place of geographic origin forged through correspondence, tourism, practices of symbolic ethnicity, philanthropy, and political engagement; and the circulation of memories, myths, or imaginaries about the homeland. Diverse diasporas—born of distinct historical, political, and economic push-and-pull factors—share these general contours.
For some, the African diaspora that began in the sixteenth century is “exceptional” among human dispersals of the past and present because it was a forced migration set in motion by the demand for slave labor, and one which spurred the process of ethnogenesis—the substitution of specific African identities for more general collectivities, such as Pan-African, African American, and Afro-Caribbean.2 As political scientist William Safran maintains, a “specific homeland cannot be restored” to the descendants of enslaved men and women.3 But attempts to restore and return a sense of home persist.
How Africa has been envisioned by its slave descendant diaspora is a topic of debate. At issue is the ethics of imagining Africa and diasporic connection: What is the substance of diaspora? Who in the diaspora gets to imagine “home”? How is it imagined and to what ends? Conceptions of Africa that underlie diasporic consciousness may have many sources, including artistic expressions, common experiences of oppression or redemption, communication practices, and today, even DNA.
Notions of diaspora rooted in technologies of kinship such as genetic ancestry testing are “cultures of relatedness” in which biological facts are not the necessary conditions of possibility for social ones.4 In Carol Stack’s classic ethnography, All Our Kin, for example, kinship among urban blacks in “The Flats” is based on the exchange of economic resources and caring labor between residents.5 As Stack shows, members of the community use kinship terms such as “aunt” and “brother,” but these categories do not connote blood ties; rather these terms are engaged despite lack of demonstrable genetic links. The forms of sociality fostered by genealogy ancestry testing—both the aspirations for affiliation that inspire its use and the various kinds of relationships it may occasion—are conduits through which diaspora may take shape. The creation of responsibilities and rights, and forms of exchange across the African diaspora, is a common end-result of genetic ancestry practice, with DNA testing facilitating the formation of a diasporic network.6
I attended a conference of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society that took place at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC. During a “sharing dinner,” root-seekers were invited to stand and share highlights of their experiences with the group. Although none at my table availed themselves of this opportunity, we spoke amongst ourselves about our respective genealogical research projects. Seated next to me was Bess (a pseudonym), an African American woman in her fifties who lives near Baltimore, Maryland. I told her about my ethnographic study of conventional and genetic root-seeking—including my preliminary foray into my own family’s history. Bess shared that she had been conducting genealogical research on her family for about a decade and had recently received genetic genealogy test results from African Ancestry.
The next morning, I ran into Bess in the hotel lobby, where vendors, including African Ancestry’s Gina Paige, were setting up their displays for the day. “I have something for you,” Bess told me. As we sat together in the hotel atrium, she volunteered her genetic ancestry test results, arranged neatly in a binder. A letter from African Ancestry indicated that mtDNA analysis had linked Bess to the Kru of Liberia “plus/or Mende-Temne of Sierra Leone.” Her result package also contained a Certificate of Ancestry signed by Kittles, a printout of the genetic markers from which Bess’s African ethnicity was inferred, a map of the African continent with Liberia foregrounded, and a flyer advertising Encarta Africana, a CD-ROM encyclopedia, at a discounted rate.
Bess explained to me that she wants to “do something” with her results, like perhaps “travel to Africa.” Curious as to which of the two possible ethnicities suggested by African Ancestry was most compelling to her, I asked Bess whether she planned to visit Liberia, neighboring Sierra Leone, or both countries in the future. “My sister was married to a man from Sierra Leone; his name was Abdul,” she replied obliquely, intimating that she would likely travel to the natal home of her deceased brother-in-law. “When will you be ready to travel to Africa?” I asked. “After I get back further in time [with my genealogical research],” she responded. As is common with other root-seekers who make use of genetic ancestry testing, Bess assumed a role in determining her test’s significance and its potential import. Yet her intentions for how the test results would be utilized in her life were already apparent. A visit to Sierra Leone was likely in Bess’s future, inspired by both a deceased family member and genetic ancestry testing. Her intention to engage in practices motivated by the findings she received from African Ancestry after she advanced with her conventional genealogy effort underscores the interpretative work that commences following the receipt of genetic genealogy results. This more deliberative process can involve root-seekers’ efforts to align the DNA analysis with other information about their ancestry as well as with their expectations, prior experience, or existing relationships.
Another root-seeker, Marvin (a pseudonym), also used Paige and Kittles’s service and found diaspora close to home. The recent family reunion of Marvin, a genealogist from the southern United States, featured an appearance by someone he described as a “genetic kinswoman.” Some months prior, Marvin had purchased a genetic genealogy kit from African Ancestry that associated him with the Mbundu people, the second-largest ethnic group in the south-central African country of Angola. Marvin shared his results with a friend, who subsequently put him in touch with Gertrudes, an Angolan immigrant neighbor of Mbundu ethnicity. At their first meeting, Marvin recalled Gertrudes as being “very accepting.” He continued, “She said that one of her passions is to connect with African Americans and tell them about their history in Africa and to let them know that, as she always says, ‘we are one.’ [She believes that] there is a disconnect between African Americans and Africans, and she’s trying to bridge the gap. One of her missions is to connect with more African Americans [and] teach them about Africa.” They took different approaches, but both Marvin and Gertrudes sought, in their own way, to reconcile the African diaspora.
Gertrudes subsequently invited Marvin to attend a celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of Angola’s independence from Portugal, hosted by the voluntary association for immigrants from the African country that she helms. Here, Marvin and a cousin who attended the party with him felt accepted by the larger Angolan expatriate community as well. “Once we told everyone there that our family came from Angola, they all said, ‘Welcome home. You’re home now.’ They even made me and my cousin get up on the dance floor. You know, they do a ring dance? . . . They told us, ‘You gotta come dance. Dance for your homeland!’ ”
In turn, Gertrudes would attend Marvin’s family reunion some months later. “Her presence was powerful,” Marvin recollected. “[She talked] about the importance of us coming together as a group of Africans. She expressed that we are all Africans and that Europeans try to divide us but now we must come together. And she also told our family some very interesting facts about the Mbundu people. And that was awesome, just for the family to hear about the people we descend from . . . directly from an Mbundu person. It was very powerful. She had the full attention of the whole family. Everybody was just sitting there in awe of her presence. . . . It was uplifting and powerful just to hear her tell us something about our African roots.”
The social exchange carried out between Marvin and Gertrudes points to how genetic ancestry testing circulates as a “diasporic resource.”7 As anthropologist Jacqueline Nassy Brown describes, diasporic resources can include “cultural productions such as music, but also people and places . . . [and the] iconography, ideas, and ideologies” of one black community that are employed by another as formative schema for political consciousness, collective empowerment, and identity formation.8 In Brown’s work, the concept describes, for example, how knowledge of a historic era such as the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth-century United States circulated globally via the media, popular culture, and social networks to become an important touchstone of self-determination for blacks in Liverpool, England, in the 1990s.
In the context of ancestry testing, the concept of diasporic resources elucidates how genetic information occasions the weaving of a social mesh between African communities and their dispersed members, even in the absence of specific kinship ties. An imprecise pedigree connects Marvin and Gertrudes as “genetic kin,” as “DNA Mbundians,” “DNA Angolans,” and “Africans.”
There are also economic and cultural resources at stake in the DNA diaspora. The international press has reported on attempts by leaders on the continent to have prominent African Americans “correctly” affiliate with their DNA kin on the continent. After the actor Whoopi Goldberg was inferred to be related to Papel and Bayote communities of Guinea-Bissau using African Ancestry testing on the African American Lives television show, the Associate Press reported that “the government of one of the world’s poorest nations” wanted her to come “home.” “She’s our daughter. She’s ours,” a government official said.9 While a specific request for support from Goldberg was not conveyed in the AP story, this implication was clear. For to say “she’s ours” is to try to enlist her in diasporic obligations.
It was also on African American Lives that we learned that media mogul Oprah Winfrey discovered that she has been affiliated with the Kpelle people in the country of Liberia via Kittles’s genetic ancestry test. The rub was that two years earlier, Winfrey had proclaimed publicly that genetic genealogy testing showed her to be Zulu. “I always wondered what it would be like if it turned out I am a South African. . . . Do you know that I actually am one? I went in search of my roots and had my DNA tested, and I am a Zulu,” she declared. Having established her Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa in 2007, the appeal that a genetic association with the Zulu-speaking Nguni people held for Winfrey was clear. After she was subsequently affiliated with Liberia in a televised “reveal,” Winfrey conveyed that she still feels “at home” in South Africa and wished that she “had been born [there].”10 However, soon after, Winfrey backed an effort to “place Liberia on the front burner of donor and philanthropist attention.”11
Isaiah Washington became one of the few US citizens to ever be granted dual citizenship in Sierra Leone. This formal affiliation with his “homeland” was allowed based on his mtDNA genetic ancestry test—and undoubtedly also his prominence. As is always the case with genetic genealogy, Washington’s status as a “DNA Sierra Leonean” was owed to the presence of genetic samples from people of that country in African Ancestry’s reference database. Whether this is a few people or hundreds of people, we cannot know for sure. What we do know is that the authenticating DNA markers residing in the proprietary African Lineage Database, and in those of other DTC genetic testing companies, are their own kind of diasporic resource. This fact in and of itself may create a sense of obligation to the ethnic groups with which one is associated. Although Washington never mentioned this specific debt to Sierra Leone or the African continent, he is clear that much of his life’s work lies there with the creation of social welfare programs, the recent fight against the Ebola epidemic, and other endeavors.
While diasporic resources are transnational, they may be unevenly distributed. Unlike the circuits described by Brown in which music and affects like “freedom” and “moral authority” are the stuff of the black diaspora potlatch, the celebrity nature of ancestry “reveals”—which, as Paige explained, derive from the early days of the company—highlight yawning inequality across the network and foreground economic exchange explicitly.
The DNA diaspora is also being forged through organizational efforts. The continuing work of the Leon H. Sullivan Foundation (LSF) exemplifies this. The LSF is a nonprofit organization with roots in the civil rights movement. It is named for an influential African American Baptist preacher and activist who, for decades before his death in April 2001, was a longtime crusader for racial equality and economic advancement for blacks. Sullivan was also a zealous promoter of African diasporic cooperation and mutual aid. He would liken himself to Robin Hood: “I make no excuses about it . . . I take from the rich and give to the poor. It is high time at last for the world to wake up and do more for Africa.”12 In recognition of these efforts, during his lifetime he was granted (mostly titular) citizenship in Cote d’Ivoire, Gabon, and The Gambia, in honor of his social and economic development work in each of these countries.
Beginning in 1991, the LSF inaugurated the Leon Sullivan Summit, a gathering of elites from across the United States and the African continent. The conferences consist of dialogues between politicians, bureaucrats, and business leaders from varied African countries and their American counterparts. Prominent American attendees at past summits have included George W. Bush, Bill Clinton (an honorary cochair of the board of the LSF), Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and business leaders such as Paul Wolfowitz, a former World Bank head.
“Inspired by Rev. Leon H. Sullivan’s belief that the development of Africa is a matter of global partnerships,” the first summit took place in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, in 1991.13 Subsequent summit gatherings took place in Libreville, Gabon (1993), Dakar, Senegal (1995), Harare, Zimbabwe (1997), Accra, Ghana (1999), and Abuja, Nigeria (2003, 2006). The 2008 meeting, held in Tanzania, would mark a turning point for the organization, culminating in an initiative that reflected Sullivan’s spiritual calling as a bridge builder.
Leon Sullivan was born in Charleston, West Virginia, in 1922. As a child, he was deeply influenced by his religiously devout grandmother, Carrie, who raised him for several years, while his mother worked in Washington, DC. Maturing quickly under the tutelage of Reverend Moses Newson of the First Church of Charleston, Sullivan became a preacher at the age of seventeen. By eighteen, he was pastor of two churches. He served in the ministry in West Virginia for a total of four years before moving to New York City to attend Union Theological Seminary; Sullivan joined the seminary at the urging of the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a fellow preacher, who served as a US congressman representing New York City’s Harlem community for more than two decades. The activists and intellectuals of Harlem caught Sullivan’s attention soon after his arrival in 1944, showing him examples of how to combine his religious zeal with his passion for social justice. While in his early twenties, Sullivan became involved in some historic events and important institutions. He was a leader of the March on Washington movement, and an assistant pastor at the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church.
In 1945 Sullivan took a post as deacon at the First Baptist Church of South Orange, New Jersey, where he began to experiment with using the church to develop and foster community-service programs. As he wrote in his autobiography, Build, Brother, Build, Sullivan dedicated himself to “the problems of the community and did all [he] could to assist colored youth there with employment opportunities, as well as scholarships and other educational assistance programs.”14 In 1950 he became pastor of the Zion Baptist Church in Philadelphia. With Sullivan at the helm, Zion became an “urban Christian center,” whose mission included ministry as well as programs such as a day care center, adult education courses, and a credit union.15 Because the preacher believed that economics were key for black uplift, employment and job training remained a priority. He and other ministers organized a series of successful boycotts in Philadelphia in the 1950s and early 1960s as leverage to open up job opportunities and eliminate employment barriers for blacks in the city. In 1963 he launched his Opportunities Industrialization Centers (OIC) to provide job-skills training. By the late 1960s, there were more than seventy-five centers across the United States; the program even went international, with OICs established in eighteen countries, including several in African states.16
Widely hailed for his ingenuity in creating economic opportunities, Sullivan would become the first African American member of the board of directors of a major multinational company when he joined General Motors. On the GM board, he led an effort to get the company—which has business interests in South Africa and was the largest employer of blacks there—to divest from the country until the apartheid regime had ended.17 In recent history, he is perhaps best known for developing “The Sullivan Principles” in 1977, an explicit anti-apartheid effort that established ethical, egalitarian codes for how non-white workers should be treated by US-based multinationals conducting business in South Africa.18 Sullivan’s corporate activism was inspired by his experience traveling in the country. He recalled the experience: “In 1974 I met with hundreds in South Africa and I realized that apartheid was sinful. . . . When I was getting on the plane to go home, the police took me to a room and told me to remove my clothes. A man with the biggest .45 I’d ever seen said, ‘We do to you what we have to.’ I stood there in my underwear, thinking, ‘I’m the head of the largest black church in Philadelphia and I’m on the board of directors of General Motors. When I get home, I’ll do to you what I have to.’ ”19
The self-proclaimed African American Robin Hood drew attention to South African social and political conditions. As leverage, the Sullivan Principles held nothing but “moral capital” (to borrow historian Christopher Leslie Brown’s phrasing); yet by 1986, 183 firms were on board and the principles had been expanded to “include direct challenges to the law and institutions by which apartheid [was] maintained.”20 As the New York Times put it, “Virtually all American companies doing business in South Africa . . . abide[d] by [Sullivan’s] guidelines.”21 In 1991 George H. W. Bush honored Sullivan with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
In 1998 Sullivan recalled how his vision for transnational African diasporic meetings evolved in this way: “I had heard and heeded a call from God and from Africa and from African Americans and others of the black diaspora to try at least to unite people of African heritage with Africa, to make a link, to build a bridge. . . . The building of this bridge would lead to a series of landmark African-American summits.”22 It was at the eighth such summit, in Arusha, Tanzania, in June 2008, that the diasporic connection which Sullivan had fostered for decades was transformed from an imagined transnational community based upon shared historical experience into a bridge soldered with biological ties. At the close of this summit, the participants, including the African American actor and genetic genealogist Isaiah Washington, approved a resolution to formally recommend that US blacks purchase DNA testing from African Ancestry. These root-seekers would then be encouraged, but not required, to embark upon philanthropy and economic development projects in the countries to which they were genetically matched.
The Arusha declaration was an outgrowth of work the Sullivan Foundation was already carrying out. In 2004 it began to focus on “the promotion of dual citizenship” as one of the cornerstones of its work.23 Gregory Simpkins came to this work through a meeting with Hope Sullivan Masters, the daughter of the late Leon Sullivan and LSF president, at an organizing meeting for the African American Unity Caucus. “Later, they were looking for someone to do some work . . . and they asked me to come work with them. I had found out that Reverend Sullivan had been interested in dual citizenship, had been given dual citizenship in Cote d’Ivoire and Gabon and a couple of other countries as a result of the summits, and I thought, ‘Let me look into that.’ ”24 After Simpkins joined the LSF as vice president, a presentation by a State Department official at a subsequent Leon Sullivan forum in Washington, DC, confirmed to him and his colleagues that US citizens were permitted to hold dual citizenship as long as they did not renounce their American nationality, or become embroiled in a conflict against the United States. “Looking at . . . what [Sullivan] had done with the dual citizenship,” Simpkins, along with Anthony Archer, a California-based attorney, and others in the LSF, wanted to use genetic genealogy testing to achieve the same end. “What we wanted to do was to engage people in the diaspora and I think to be able to do that you have to have some ownership, some connection . . . the DNA test certainly provides that now . . . [we] felt that blood tie is a connection you have to have. [But] some countries . . . Nigeria, Gabon, they don’t require that at all. A country like Sierra Leone [where] Isaiah Washington . . . [and] Andrew Young [have genetic ancestry matches] . . . they do prefer that. I don’t know that they actually require that, but they do prefer that.”25
Simpkins had first met African Ancestry’s Kittles in 2003. Hearing of Kittles’s work, he eagerly made the quick trip across Washington to visit the geneticist and assistant professor in his lab at Howard University. This encounter would stay with him. In 2007, Simpkins proposed genetic genealogy testing as a “mutually beneficial” partnership between the Leon Sullivan Foundation and African Ancestry. He described the relationship further: “It was a collaboration, because the Foundation was in a sense recruiting people, giving them a rationale for taking the test. The test built interest in the summits and other programs of the foundation. So, it was a symbiotic relationship.”26
For the 2008 meeting in Arusha, at which genetic genealogy testing would be recommended, Archer presented a report, drafted with the assistance of African Ancestry’s Gina Paige, describing the goal of the company’s DNA testing partnership with the Sullivan Foundation:
Recently, the African Ancestry company has developed a DNA test that can provide genetic linkage to African ethnic groups and the country in which that ethnic group now resides. As the company states, the test indicates where the particular strain of an ethnic group is located today and not where they were when ancestors were taken off the continent. This test does not establish an identifiable link to a specific African country or countries, since most tests reveal multiple ethnic heritages located in more than one country. There are 27 countries providing ethnic matches to those taking the African Ancestry test, but the leading countries with links identified by the test are: Nigeria, Cameroon, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Ghana and Sierra Leone. For those African governments reluctant to provide dual citizenship to Diasporans who cannot legally establish a line of descent, the African Ancestry test offers a means of providing scientific evidence of descent.27
Paige took meetings with the LSF’s leadership to develop this partnership and proposal. “They called me; I went to the office,” she remembers. “That was when the idea of incorporating [African Ancestry’s genetic genealogy testing] into the summit arose. The idea was to encourage people to purchase it with their registration and then we could reveal everybody” at the Tanzania summit meeting. “A link where people could buy the test kit” was included on the website for the summit. “There was a grand vision,” she continued, “but it wasn’t part of their plan from the beginning.”28
As part of this vision, Archer proposed three levels of possible citizenship for members of the African diaspora: symbolic, partial, and active. Simpkins, who is now a staffer on the House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health and Human Rights, explained the three levels to me in this way: “There are those who just want to be able to go back and forth without a visa, there are those who want to be able to own property and have some of the economic rights of a citizen, but they’re not really going to live there, at least not permanently. And then there are those who are going to want to live part of the year or have that option.”29 On the face of the matter, the benefits of this three-tier citizenship scheme accrued most to the relatively wealthy blacks in the diaspora. But there were also real economic benefits that accrued to African nations as well through tourism, real estate investment, tax revenue, and the like.
Simpkins explained his reservations with respect to the varied dual-citizenship plans, and spoke passionately about the limits of diaspora, even when the affiliation is rendered through DNA:
I don’t think it’s necessary for all of us to become involved in [African] politics, because if you don’t live there I don’t think you know what’s going on in their politics. The other complication is that in Africa ethnicity is a serious issue. Now, I took the [African Ancestry] test and was half Zeframani and Tikar from Cameroon. I know what that means historically, but I don’t have the same feelings as a Tikar about his or her place in society. . . . We’re cousins, we’re not brothers and sisters. . . . Even when you’ve got proof, it would take you some time to adjust to the fact that this is your relative now; you’re cousins. . . . The feeling of kinship doesn’t normally follow. It takes time to establish. . . . You can establish kinship with anyone. . . . But it’s going to take some time; it’s going to take some work.30
The various posts Simpkins has held in the federal government, in the media, and at NGOs have allowed him to travel extensively in Africa, “from Cape to Cairo,” as he put it. Even as Simpkins championed this plan, he was aware of its cultural and technical constraints.
I think I’ve been to like twenty-eight countries. . . . And I don’t try to pretend that I’m African. I’m a descendant, but I’m not an African, I am an American. You know, I get along much better, the people who come and pretend that they’re exactly the same; they have a problem, because you’re not.31
Yet most “diasporic Africans” likely did not share the sentiments of Simpkins, who had spent considerable amounts of time on the continent of Africa and was especially well-versed in its history and politics.
From the other side of the transatlantic equation, the LSF needed to quell African collaborators’ concerns that African Americans would not feel entitled to become full members of the societies to which they were matched. As the LSF report stated, “the African Ancestry test offers a means of providing scientific evidence of descent.” Yet some “African governments [are] reluctant to provide citizenship to historic African Diasporans.” The LSF formed an advisory group to investigate the matter. Because, for some governments, African Ancestry’s tests did not definitively establish relatedness such that root-seekers should be unequivocally granted rights and benefits in their countries, this committee also considered whether and how its genetic genealogy services could be a technically valid method for extending a “right of return” in African countries for blacks in the diaspora.
Paige pointedly conveyed to me that the “grand vision” never quite made it off the ground “because it wasn’t really promoted.” She attended the 2008 Sullivan Summit in Tanzania, but there were no attendees to be revealed. “It never came to fruition. I ended up going on that summit. . . . There was no African Ancestry anything. It’s a grand vision that I think would have been fairly easy to execute but I am not sure that there was any one person who was responsible for making sure that it happened.” Simpkins left the Sullivan Foundation in 2011. He says that the African diasporic DNA initiative “left when [he] left” the organization. However, as I detail in the next chapter, the collaboration did succeed on one weighty occasion.
In the meantime, the DNA diaspora networking continues. African Ancestry has recommend heritage tourism trips to African countries based upon customers’ genetic test results. Soon after I received my own genetic affiliation to Cameroon in September 2010, I also received an invitation from the company to participate in a group visit to that country. I did not join the tour. But in December 2010, Paige led a tour of over fifty African Ancestry customers to Cameroon for a ten-day “Ancestry Reconnection Program” designed especially for “African Americans who have traced their DNA to Cameroon.”
As Paige recalls, the program got started when Denise Rolark Barnes, publisher of the Washington Informer, had her ancestry traced to Cameroon by African Ancestry. This news reached members of a Washington, DC–based, Cameroonian cultural organization called ARK Jammers (ARK stands for Acts of Random Kindness). ARK Jammers proposed an expenses-paid trip to Cameroon for a group of DNA Cameroonians. Travelers only had to cover their airfare. “I started talking to Avline at ARK Jammers. They wanted to take people back to Africa, to their home countries . . . they wanted to start with Cameroon because that’s where they are from,” Paige said. Although Paige and Kittles have no plans to extend their work into the tourism industry, she “felt compelled to go because I felt that [African Ancestry clients] were going based on my recommendation. I felt that I needed to be there.” The first trip of fifty-four people included Howard University psychology and engineering students who “took the tests in advance” and went on the trip “as part of their international exchange” program.32
“It was definitely a transformative experience. . . . We met with the prime minister and people in every level of government except for the president. . . . The tour organizers made sure to give everyone an experience tailored to their ethnic group [i.e., Tikar, Bamileke, etc.]. Fifty-four people convened at Dulles [airport] and they were African Americans who traced their ancestry to Cameroon. When we landed in Douala, they were Cameroonian American. After ten days, when we got back on the plane [to return to the United States], they were Camericans. They completely redefined their identities. . . . It was definitely impactful.”33 Although citizenship was not an express possibility, during this tour, root-seekers were permitted to make “formal requests” for Cameroonian “national identity cards.” When a second Ancestry Reconnection Program trip was held the following year, ninety-two people attended, including both Paige and Kittles.
Following the Leon Sullivan Foundation’s resolve to boost the benefits of genetic ancestry testing, the biennial Sullivan Summits stalled. But in 2010, the organization held a Global African Reunion in Atlanta, Georgia. Organized in late September, just after the close of the UN General Assembly, during a window in which some African politicians would be in the United States, this gathering, described in the next chapter, brought together many of the same kind of stakeholders who had attended past summits: ambassadors, presidents, and other politicians, investors, and other elites from both sides of the Black Atlantic.
Hope Masters, Sullivan’s daughter, organized the LSF’s programming with a much more lavish touch after her father passed away. This strained the organization’s resources. She planned the 2012 Summit for Equatorial Guinea with significant financial support from the country’s leader, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who is a widely criticized authoritarian and who had reigned as president since 1979. But these best laid plans and the organization unraveled in controversy.
After news spread that the LSF had hosted an event in honor of the dictator, support for the organization and the next summit dwindled, with 75 percent of the attendees canceling their participation, the withdrawal of support from corporate backers such as Coca-Cola, and the loss of symbolic support from former president Clinton, whose name and role as honorary chairperson was wiped from the foundation’s website.34 This attempt at diasporic politics had failed, and perhaps too this particular legacy of bridging blacks across the world to which the elder Sullivan had devoted his life. Ghanaian activist George Ayittey explained to the Washington Post that there was something deeply “American” about how Masters had endeavored to extend the legacy of her father’s mission, noting a critical miscalculation: “For African Americans, the solution for advancing civil rights has come from working within government,” Ayittey argued. But he and other Africans “see our government as the problem.”35 As Simpkins advised, one “can establish kinship with anyone,” but doing so requires an investment in the time-intensive work of mutual understanding. DNA alone may not be enough.