Ancestral voices

I think I am very typical of a black Caribbean person in wanting to know who I am and from where I came. The history of the slave trade is such that most of those decended from slaves have very little idea of who truly is part of the family. Typically, we have focused on the names we now carry, none of which have any relationship to the names our African ancestors had. Yet, people proudly utter phrases such as "I'm a Cumberbatch..." or "You can tell they are Bethels..." rpoduly hanging on to names given by a European slave owner of overseer.

Maybe some families in the Caribbean had the fortune to be descended for a known African line that had some social cohesion before slavery.True, in the short history that exists since slaves were brought to the Caribbean families have been built in the islands and countries. But because we do not know our true origins, it is impossible to know who is really descended from whom, and who are the true cousins. I have a fear that there is a genetic time bomb ticking in the region because there have been clear instances of deliberate interbreeding. But there have been many inadvertent episodes of interbreeding because we do not know our lineage, with many so-called cousins who are really half-brothers and half-sisters.

As far as the modern history is concerned, for a long time I have wanted to build a family tree. I started that today, using software on http://www.tribalpages.com/. I admire those families who have for generations guarded and nurtured their ancestral history. I regret that many people never had the chance to have a family portrait painted or a family photograph taken. I have been a keen photographer for years and now I can start to make some of the family pictures I have make my family tree come to life.

In the Caribbean, we have some odd lineage anyway. We have some clean lines of ancestry, meaning families built around the social norm of marriage before children, and no children procreated by either partner outside the marriage. Let's loosen marriage to say "long-term relationship", because the slave history created many generations who were not allowed to marry, yet were encouraged to breed.

We also have to a very large extent, maybe greater in some cases, confused lines of ancestry. In Jamaica, where I was last week, all the talk is about two national pastimes. One is "bunning", where a man is being cheated on by his woman. The other is the lethal offshoot of bunning, "jacketing", that is getting a man to accept as his a child conceived with someone else. You get the meaning of this from statistics recently released in Jamaica showing that some 33 per cent of Jamaican men have been named "father" to children they have not sired. Put this into the context of a country that has 85% of children born out of wedlock and over 50% with no registered father (Jamaica's Statin 2000) and you will guess that there is an ancestral nightmare unfolding. Some argue that this is a kind of promiscuity that has its roots in slavery and the way that normal pair-bonded relations were not allowed to develop.I think Jamaica's situation is extreme in the Caribbean, but I do not believe it is unique in Caribbean.

But with that as background, today I embarked on trying to build my family tree. "Shame and scandal in the family" was a great hit because many people could relate to it: "...that girl is your sister, but your Mama don't know..." and "Your Daddy ain't your Daddy, but your Daddy don't know!" can be all too familiar (bad pun?). Every family has skeletons in the closet and I dont know how much of that I will uncover. My simple objective is to try to map what my family looks like.

When all of that is done, I would then like to know who were my true ancestors. If reparations really means something to Caribbean countries I would advocate that they push for every citizen to have a DNA test. That way we could dismiss some of the stories about from where in Africa we came.