We will be leaving on our trip to Africa Tuesday evening and I am so excited! I will blog about the experience to keep my Friends up to date and informed about all the people we will meet and things we will do and all the places we will visit. Our itinerary is heavy, so in short I can say that we will visit the slave castles, museums, local shops and several villages in Ghana and Senegal.
We decided to go to Africa last year and saving for it and paying for it was a sacrifice to say the least but I know it will be worth it. I am so glad to be going to the motherland because of my interests in tracing my roots back to where we came from. I am a descendant of slaves as evidenced by my research which I started in 1995. Through this research I was able find out that my family were slaves in Kentucky. As a matter of fact, I also found the the descendants of our slave owners and I went and met them in November 2004, the day after this country re-elected George W. Bush. That experience has been documented by journalist Lori Robinson and published in the Crisis Magazine-NAACP in their black history month issue of 2005. Link:
Last November I decided to take the africanancestry.com DNA test to determine if my roots had any DNA matches to folks in African and on my mother's side I found out that we are a %100 match to the Akan people in Ghana! Lydia Richardson our tour guide who is taking us to Africa is a citizen of the United States and married to an African American but born in Ghana and is Akan! I know...deep.
Anyway, she has made plans for me (and the group) to get a naming ceremony from her family in Kumasi while we are there. She has also planned for me to visit two hair salons so that we may have an exchange of ideas and energy and spirit! I am looking forward to the experience!!!!
TTYL,
Kalimah
