A growing area of interest in the world today is DNA. So many companies have popped up promising to show you your true heritage. Ancestry.com, 23 and Me, Helix, and more. It makes sense that with all the new access to your heritage, outside of family stories and legends, people would want to take part in exploring the areas their DNA hails from. Heritage Tourism has been a growing niche in the Tourism industry for years.

Eventually, I got curious and snatched up an Ancestry.com deal. I got my results in June, 2016. The way it works, to my understanding anyway, is that they take your DNA and compare it over a series of tests to the samples they’ve taken in each region. Those tests come back with a certain percentage match for DNA markers, and the number they report to you is the average of all those markers. For example, at the time Ancestry ran my DNA 30 times, and in some of the tests I had 0% Cameroon/Congo, and in some I had as high as 19%, but on average it was 17%. Here were my 2016 Results:

All my life we lived under the impression that we had some Native American in our family tree, but to my, and a lot of family members’, surprise my results came back primarily West African, and Central European.

And it was with this map in hand that I decided I needed to visit some of the places of my ancestors while we were traveling the world. We visited Kenya, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Botswana, ALL amazing locations worthy of your travel dollars, but it was not until we headed Northwest to Senegal that I truly felt I was on a Heritage journey.

In Dakar, I was able to truly immerse in a different part of Africa than the other countries we had visited. Senegal was a French colony, unlike the other British and Dutch areas we had visited. Additionally, it is also a primarily Muslim area, and we were in the middle of Ramadan. Finally, unlike the other countries, we were here specifically interested in Heritage Tourism. We hired a man who described himself as a tour guide, story teller, historian, and griot, named Papa Douda Koume, aka David (you’ll find that most guides around the world feel they need to dumb down their names for Westerners).

David took us around Senegal telling us stories and the history of the country and region. Showing us important locations and giving us the deep dive on culturally important items like the baobab tree. We visited the Pink Lake to watch the salt workers ply their trade, and Goree Island to explore the Mansion of the Slaves, were many African American’s ancestors saw their home continent for the final time. It was a truly amazing and spiritual experience, and our trip through Senegal is worthy of its own post in the future.

Heritage Tourism wise, I was already thrilled with everything I had seen and experienced, but my biggest revelation came towards the end of our adventure with David, when he was taking us to his cousins shop in the heart of Dakar so we could pick up some authentic cloth as gifts. As we explored the shop, David, and his cousins, were talking about the different tribes around the area. We got to joking about how some of his cousins looked a lot like some of mine. Paraphrasing David: “Well, that makes sense, this guy here is Fulani, just like you.” He said it matter-of-factly, as if I was supposed to know all this time that one of the tribes I had descended from was the Fula tribe.

This is what Heritage Tourism is all about. Connecting to your roots, and finding out things about yourself you may have never known. I did more digging into the Fula People, and found that they are one of the largest ethnic groups in West Africa, and are majority semi-sedentary (maybe this explains my nomadic nature?). Geographically they stretch from West to East all through the Sahara which would account some for my DNA being so spread across the region.

An entire new world opened up to me. I was no longer just a Black man in America, I no longer had to generically say that I “probably have roots in West Africa somewhere”; now I had a piece of the puzzle that I can dive into, research, and take pride in. A piece of me is Fulani. My story didn’t have to start with slavery anymore, now I had access to the long and rich history of people. And not just the generic “we are descendants of Kings and Queens” narrative that so many blacks in America have to hold on to to have some semblance of connection to their past before slavery ripped our ancestors from their homelands. Fulani Kingdoms have risen and fallen throughout the ages. Numerous West African leaders have Fulani heritage. Fulani have cultural heritage, food heritage, a weird caste system that I’m not necessarily into and more.

That is the gift, that David had no idea he had given me, of Heritage Tourism. Sure you’re from Africa, but which peoples? You might know your family is from Ireland, but do you know which part, and the history of that area? Germany wasn’t a country 200 years ago, so which kingdoms did your ancestors call home? The only world we have truly known is a post World War 2 world, but if you look at older maps, you’ll find that the world was a much more divided and evolving place from the 14-1900s and before. There’s richness in the past that the present, even with all its technological wonders, can’t compete with in some ways.

Over the years Ancestry has done a great job continuously updating my results based on new science and new sample data. In May, 2020, it looks like this:

My European has shifted North and West away from Germany and France, while my West and South African has been fleshed out. The Bantu peoples have joined my Cameroon and Congo slice, my family finally got 1% of its Indigenous story back, and apparently the Middle East has made an appearance. Ancestry has also begun giving more regional information. For example, my DNA matches North American Blacks from Virginia and the Louisiana/Oklahoma/Texas area. (Notice the Orange and Blue blobs in North America on my DNA map.)

I’m 1000% positive that there are way more tribes, kingdoms, and peoples around the world that have contributed to my DNA. Ancestry’s DNA maps have given me a lot of areas to explore at home and abroad. I’ve explored some, and can’t wait to hit up the rest. I cannot recommend looking into a one of these services enough. Be careful though, you might end up with a whole new hobby going down your family’s recent and distance past. There are obviously controversies surrounding data privacy and genome mapping, but I think the benefits outweigh the risks.

Too often we’re too focused on the present or looking to the future. We connect too tightly with where we and our parents were born, letting xenophobia and fear of the other take root. The problem is, when you’re too locally minded, you ignore the rich story of the world that has made all of us children of so many different places. Diversity is a great thing, and all of us are more diverse than we think.