As dozens of African Americans gather at the Chesapeake Bay in Hampton, Virginia, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first ship of enslaved Africans to English North America in 1619, some 250 African Americans also gathered across the Atlantic Ocean in Ghana where the first ship left Africa.
At an emotional ceremony at the Cape Coast Castle, one of about forty slave castles built in the Gold Coast (Ghana), over 70 families discovered their ancestry during the African Ancestry DNA reveal which is arguably the largest ever in the continent.
AfricanAncestry.com used its most comprehensive database of indigenous African genetic sequences in existence to trace their ancestry back to specific present-day African countries and ethnic groups of origin dating back more than 500 years ago – the only company that can do that.
“We intentionally planned for it to happen at the same time history tells us the ships arrived in the US. To touch the water on both sides of the globe where the ships landed and from where they left 400+ years ago helps to sustain the paradigm shift we feel of Africans throughout the diaspora longing to return at the tectonic plate level under the ocean floor through our bodies on earth up through and above the clouds with thunder and lightning,” says Diallo Sumbry, President and CEO of The Adinkra Group, curators of the historic Jamestown to Jamestown trip to Ghana in partnership with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
He told Face2Face Africa in an interview that: “The return is spiritual in nature but manifests itself physically as it requires our bodies to physically return in order to envoke all our senses. Our spirits have been longing to return for a while,” adds Diallo Sumbry who is also Ghana’s first African-American Tourism Ambassador.
The historic Jamestown to Jamestown trip, co-facilitated by Sunseekers Tours and the Ghana Tourism Authority, enabled 250 people including actor, Danny Glover, to go on the tour from Jamestown, Virginia, to Jamestown, Accra, to trace their ancestry.
