Friday, 14 February, 2003, 08:13 GMT BBC
Black Britons find their African roots

Beaula McCalla, a youth worker from the UK town of Bristol, never
imagined that she would one day meet her relatives in Equatorial Guinea,
6,500 km away.
"It was like blood touching blood... It was like family," she said.

Beaula, an African-Caribbean descendent of slaves, was reunited with her
long-lost family thanks to a unique genetic study undertaken for a BBC
programme, Motherland: A Genetic Journey.


" A romantic ideal I had was shattered "
Mark, a Kanuri from London


She says that she always thought of herself as an African but now she
has the genetic proof, some 200 years, or 11 generations, after her
ancestors were captured, taken across the Atlantic Ocean and made to
work as slaves.

Tests showed that some of her ancestors were from the Bubi ethnic group,
which live on the Equatorial Guinea island of Bioko.

In the village of Moka, eight people were found to have a common
maternal ancestor with Beaula.

They welcomed her with open arms and gave her a piece of land.

"I was just crying, my eyes were just filled with tears, my heart was
pounding. All I just kept thinking was: 'I'm going to my motherland,'"
she said about her arrival in Equatorial Guinea.

"That completed the circuit."

Ethnic identities

The majority of the UK's African-Caribbean community are descended from
the millions of Africans taken from their families and homes to work as
slaves on the Caribbean sugar plantations between the 17th and 19th
centuries.

Click here for a map of the slave trade

For the first time since the enslavement of their African ancestors and
the eradication of their ethnic identities, advances in DNA analysis
have now made it possible for individuals to discover from which African
region or population group their families originated.

The study, the most comprehensive attempt so far to investigate the
specific roots of the descendants of slaves, took anonymous DNA samples
via a swab from inside the cheeks of 229 volunteers (109 men and 120
women).

The only criterion for all volunteers was that they had four
African-Caribbean grandparents.

The universities of Cambridge and Leicester in the UK and Pennsylvania
State in the United States analysed the DNA.

'Homecoming'

Mark Anderson, from south London, discovered that he has blood from the
ethnic Kanuris who live in south-eastern Niger.

He was surprised to find his distant relatives living among the sand
dunes of the Sahara desert, having imagined Africa to be full of lush
forest.


After this initial shock, he too had an emotional "homecoming" and chose
a Kanuri name - Kaigama.

However, he later discovered that this was the name of a Kanuri
slave-trader who captured and sold his kinsmen.

"A romantic ideal I had was shattered," he said. "This is a complex
story."

In contrast, Jacqueline Harriott, a Peterborough schoolteacher, felt no
connection with Africa and was pleased to discover that genetically, she
is 28% European.

As well as individual ancestral profiles, the Motherland study also
quantifies, for the first time, one of the most sensitive genetic
legacies of the Transatlantic slave trade; the extent to which African
female slaves were made pregnant by European slave-owners.

The study reveals that more than one in four British African-Caribbeans
have white male ancestry on their direct father line.

Analysis showed that 27% of British African-Caribbean men have a Y
chromosome (passed directly from father to son) that traces back to
Europe, not Africa.

The autosomal study, investigating DNA inherited from all an
individual's ancestors, demonstrated that on average, more than one in
seven (13%) ancestors of today's Black Britons of Caribbean descent
would be of European origin.

The BBC Documentary Motherland: A Genetic Journey will be broadcast on
BBC 2 at 9pm on 14 February

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