AfricanAncestry.com: Promoting African heritage through DNA testing

By Aria Brent
AFRO Editor in Chief
[email protected]

Local company AfricanAncestry.com has been dedicated to empowering Black people by connecting them more to their African heritage for over 20 years. Using a unique genetic testing system that traces people back to their African tribes, it provides consumers with personalized DNA results like no other.

Gina Paige, co-founder and president of AfricanAncestry.com, spoke with the AFRO on the work of the organization, the importance of being informed about one’s heritage and how the genealogy process works.

AFRO: What is genetic ancestry research and how does it work?

Gina Paige: Genetic ancestry tracing is the process of tracing a person’s family lineage using DNA. Genetic ancestry tracing works in a few different ways. Basically, a company collects a person’s DNA, either through a saliva swab or a buccal swab, and then sequences the DNA. As a non-scientist, I like to say that they “unlock the code.” The lab unlocks the code of the DNA, and then they take that code, which is your genetic signature, and compare it to the genetic signatures of other people. In our case, we take your DNA and we unlock the code of the DNA that you inherited strictly from your mother. So we look at your mtDNA, which is inherited from your mother and her mother, her mother and her mother. That mitochondrial mtDNA gives us an informative record of all the women who came down your maternal line, and we get your code from that. Then we compare it to the world’s largest database of African genetic lineages and look for matches.

AFRO: What makes you different from classic Ancestry.com?

General practitioner: We are different from them in many ways. We were in business before them. First of all, they don’t have black scientists or black leaders like we do. We have a database of over 33,000 African reference samples and that’s what we use for comparison. They have 1,825 African reference samples. Also, they don’t look at your mother’s lineage or your father’s lineage. They don’t look specifically at the Fulani tribe in Nigeria or the Mandinka tribe in Senegal like we do. They look at all the DNA that’s mixed and they compare you to 70,000 Europeans and 1,800 Africans. A certain percentage of your ancestry comes from Europe. Another percentage comes from Africa. Some percentages may come from elsewhere in Africa. Based on those 1,800 comparisons, some percentages come from this area we call Ivory Coast and Ghana and another percentage comes from Cameroon, Congo and the Bantu region. Another percentage comes from Nigeria. They give you a snapshot that ultimately tells you that you are from West Africa, which you already know without DNA.

AFRO: When was AfricanAncestry.com founded?

General practitioner: We started African Ancestry in February of 2003. It’s been 21 years and our company is a collaboration between myself and an African American geneticist, Dr. Rick Kittles. He compiled this database because he wanted to know where he came from. He started his research out of a personal desire to know where he came from. As he progressed in his career as a geneticist, he was part of the team of scientists that went to the African Burial Ground in New York City when it was first discovered in Lower Manhattan in the late 90s and he was tasked with identifying the ancestry of the bones that were found in this slave cemetery. When the community discovered that he could identify ancestry using bones, he was inundated with requests to do so. We partnered and I commercialized his research to make it available. Before February 21, 2003, there was no way for us to know where we came from in Africa because there were no records.

AFRO: Why is it important for African Americans to have access to this kind of

awareness?

General practitioner: Slavery worked, that’s my answer. Slavery worked and when you understand that, you don’t make stupid accusations like, “You know you don’t know where you come from.” No Black person in the diaspora knows where they come from. We just don’t know because their intention was to disconnect us from our power. They took us away from the source of power. African ancestry exists to help Black people in the diaspora transform the way they see themselves. We’ve been sold the image that we’re not this or that and that we’re descended from slaves. We have no history and all these negative things that are categorically false. When you don’t know where you come from, it’s very easy to fall into those kinds of traps and negative thinking. We help people transform not only the way they see themselves, but the way they see Africa. Our goal is to reconnect the African diaspora and the motherland and we do it through DNA. That’s what we do and it’s important because if you don’t know where you come from, you don’t know who you are.

AFRO: How has AfricanAncestry.com been used as a tool for empowerment or liberation among diaspora populations?

General practitioner: People take this test for all sorts of reasons. They may have traveled to Africa and people have said, “Welcome home,” and they’re like, “Oh, am I from there? Is this my home?” Or they may have friends here in the cities where they live who are from Africa and they say, “You look like my cousin.” Or they may have studied countries or they may just have an affinity for a country or they may have done their genealogy and gone back as far as they can and hit a wall because there are no census records before 1870. There are all these things that happen to our records—if they were ever kept—and they want to fill in the gap. There are so many reasons that mean people are affected in so many different ways once they get their results. Knowing where you come from opens the door to a different travel experience because now you can go to a place and lay eyes on people who look like your cousins, aunts, and uncles.

*This story has been edited for clarity.