News & Events

Genetic homeland
BY HERB FRAZIER

Of The Post and Courier Staff

SENEHUN NGOLA, SIERRA LEONE--On a genetic trail to her African roots, a Florida woman received a joyous welcome in a Mende village in Sierra Leone's lush rainforest.

During a three-day visit to this rice-farming community, men carried Barbara Morrison-Rodriguez of Tampa, Fla., in a hammock supported on their heads, a ride reserved for chiefs. Women served her heaping piles of red rice, spicy cassava leaves and fish. Children followed her, squeezing her fingers in their tiny hands. To the sounds of drums, people danced and sang just for her.

Morrison-Rodriguez was at home among the Mende, who were happy to embrace a black American who told her admirers that a genetic test shows her mother has a Mende ancestor and her father has a Temne ancestor.

The test, done by African Ancestry in Washington, D.C., found that one lineage on each side of her family springs from the two predominant ethnic groups in Sierra Leone, West Africa, the source of free labor during the Atlantic slave trade to North America.

Since 2003, the company has made other African connections for about 3,000 other black Americans, but Morrison-Rodriguez, a former member of the faculty at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, is among a very few who've followed that genetic trail back to Africa, the company said.

While the slave trade has cut the path through history that Morrison-Rodriguez followed to Africa, the advances in DNA technology were her compass to Sierra Leone. Genetic research has extended the study of DNA beyond proving paternity and solving crimes.

Geneticists can compare DNA, the substance in human cells that contains genetic information from an individual's ancestors, to determine a person's origin when written records lead to a genealogical dead end. African Ancestry says it usually can trace at least one family bloodline to a specific region of Africa.

It is that claim, however, that has skeptics wondering whether the company has not revealed all of the flaws in an imprecise science. Nevertheless, the advances in DNA research could have practical benefits, too, such as curing diabetes, hypertension and obesity, diseases that are prevalent among black Americans.

Within a half-hour of Morrison-Rodriguez's arrival here, Martha Koker, a village nurse, embraced the stranger and uncannily gave her a Mende name befitting of her former career as a clinical psychologist.

"Your name is Nyanehpor," Koker announced, explaining that in Mende the name means someone who consoles a person when they are sad.Morrison-Rodriguez repeated her new name in unison with the Mende-speakers, laughing as she said Nyanehpor (pronounced Yani-po).

Before she received her Mende name, Morrison-Rodriguez lamented that she has only a Western identity. "That's the problem," she told the people gathered around her. "When they took us away, the first thing they did was take away our name. We don't know family name. We don't know tribal name. All I know from the genetic test is that my mother is (part) Mende and my father is (part) Temne."

Morrison-Rodriguez's parents live in Tampa. "My father (Lester Jones) is 85, and my mother (Janet Jones) is 90," said Morrison-Rodriguez, who is a consultant for nonprofit groups. "We are five generations still living, and I am here to represent them and tell them about the Mende people, to tell them about your village so they will know our history."

Morrison-Rodriguez traveled to Senehun Ngola with a Georgia man whose family made a connection with Mende people through history, not science.

Last month, Wilson Moran, who lives in a coastal community south of Savannah, returned to Senehun Ngola eight years after he visited the village with his mother, Mary Moran. She sings a Mende funeral song that she learned from her mother, Amelia Dawley. The song is believed to have been brought to America in the 1700s by an enslaved Mende woman. In March 1997 at Senehun Ngola, Mary Moran met Baindu Jabati, who also knows the song.

After receiving the DNA results, Morrison-Rodriguez said she read everything she could find about the Mende and Temne people. In her research, she found references to Mary Moran's Mende funeral song, and she contacted the Moran family. .