A Man from Another Land: How Finding My Roots Changed My Life (10 page)

For the next two months I remained captivated by what I saw of the power of this mysterious and ancient land, Africa. I witnessed
the magic of the moon and the sun rising together. I ran along an uneven fence and watched as it rained on one side of the
fence and not on the other, just as it had on either side of the street when I was a little boy riding bikes with my friends
back in Houston. I jumped back and forth over the fence standing first in the rain and then in the dry wind and sunshine.
“The devil is beating his wife,” I thought to myself.

There was an Ovambo man on the set. The Ovambo live in parts of southern Africa, especially in Angola and Namibia. He intensely
admonished me daily, demanding I speak my “native language” and refusing to believe that I was American.

When my satellite phone didn’t work, I watched elder
Himba women read the entrails of a goat and ensure me that my pregnant wife, Jenisa, was fine. I traveled for hours across
the Namib-Naukluft Desert to Walvis Bay and Swakopmund without seeing a single other vehicle, only ostriches and baboons.
One day I climbed sand dune #7 in Sossusvlei, Namibia, and captured one of the dung beetles I first learned about from Ivahn
Van Niekerk on the plane ride over. I later brought it home with me to Los Angeles, hoping it would bring me good fortune.
It was there, sitting at the top of the dune, where I vowed to someday return to Africa and help my people.

I
t was October 2004. My career and my life had been steadily on the rise in the almost seven years since my first trip to Africa.
I had appeared in several critically acclaimed films including
True Crime
directed by Clint Eastwood, Warren Beatty’s
Bulworth,
and
Romeo Must Die
. I was now shooting episodes of my new TV show,
Grey’s Anatomy,
and I felt at peace. Life was pretty damn good.

I received a call from the Pan African Film Festival’s Moza Cooper. She left a message that I had been selected to receive
the 2005 Canada Lee Award and that I should call her. I was confused and a bit taken aback. Ironically, I had just finished
reading Mona Z. Smith’s book,
Becoming Something: The Story of Canada Lee.
Lee was among the most respected African American actors of the 1940s, and a tireless civil rights activist. Yet he is mostly
unknown today, reduced to a historical footnote. His death was one of a handful directly attributable to “the blacklist” of
the late forties and fifties.

Lee was a Renaissance man: a violin prodigy, successful jockey, and champion boxer who became an actor and shot to stardom
in Orson Welles’s Broadway production
Native Son
. His meteoric rise to fame was followed by a tragic fall. When he was labeled a Communist by the FBI and House Un-American
Activities Committee in 1949 and condemned in the press, his career was ruined. He died penniless at forty-five years old.

When I talked to Moza, she could hear me preparing to decline the honor so she said, “We are doing the award ceremony differently
this year, Isaiah. This year we are asking the recipients to take a DNA test that would reveal their ancestral lineage to
the African peoples. Will you do it?”

I said, “DNA test? Canada Lee? Moza… thank you for considering me, but I think I have to pass.”

She was not easily deterred. “No, no, no, Isaiah!” she was practically shouting. “You have to do this. You are perfect for
this.” I hung up and thought to myself, “I’m perfect to do what? To get blacklisted?” The next day, I called Gina Paige of
African Ancestry, founded in 2003 by Gina and Dr. Rick Kittles and specializing in helping people trace their African roots.

Gina explained to me how the testing process worked. I expressed my concerns about cloning and having my DNA out there somewhere
to possibly fall into the wrong hands. But when she explained, “African Ancestry is a privately owned company with no attachments
to any forensic or government institution,” I sighed in relief. “It takes about three hundred parts to test for ancestral
links in our database and about three billion parts to clone a human being, Isaiah,” she said in her unique below-the-Mason-Dixon-Line
drawl. “What makes you think that someone would want to clone you anyway?” she asked.

I paused for a moment and then laughed out loud at myself. And with that, I agreed to take the test. I hung up feeling like
Christmas had come early.

Two weeks later the kit arrived. It contained two small envelopes for two long cotton swabs, a FedEx envelope, and a return
label addressed to African Ancestry. The instructions were inside. It was a surprisingly simple process. I rinsed out my mouth
with water as directed and then swabbed the inside of my cheek with each of the cotton swabs, careful to follow the warning
to let each one dry before placing them in the envelopes and sealing them up to send back. I was anxious to get my results
and learn which peoples and which land in Africa I had originated from.

On the evening of February 12, 2005, I stood tightly gripping the African staff that was the PAFF Canada Lee Award I had just
received. Dr. Kittles approached me holding a reddish brown–colored folder. The room at the Magic Johnson Theater, in Baldwin
Hills, California, seemed to go still. It felt like no one was breathing as Dr. Kittles started to speak. My ears were ringing
loudly with anticipation and my heart pounded hard in my chest. “Sss…” is all I heard before I had the feeling a scream was
about to explode from my body. I pride myself for my ability to think fast on my feet, so I quickly covered my mouth and buckled
over.

Did he say Senegal? Of course, I had heard that on the streets of New York and DC for years; there had been the lady on the
bus who was certain I was Wolof, from Senegal, West Africa. But no, wait, what was that? What did he say?
Sierra
what? I blinked my eyes a few times as if that would help me hear him better. I waited a second… then I heard Dr. Kittles
say, “Sierra Leone.”

WHAM! Another surge of energy tried to leap out of me. I instinctively cupped my hand over my mouth even tighter as if to
prevent the hundreds of spirits that were all trying to
speak through me at once. It was all I could do not to pass out. I began to feel dizzy, and my legs felt weak; still, I refused
to succumb. I felt transformed and complete at that moment. I took a deep breath, my blood pressure slowly lowered, and I
heard him say, “Isaiah, your results show that you share ancestry with the Mende and Temne peoples of Sierra Leone.”

I couldn’t stop smiling. I stood there next to actress Vanessa Williams and Congresswoman Diane Watson, who had both just
received the results of their DNA tests from Dr. Kittles as well. He told me I shared 99.9 percent ancestry with the Mende
and Temne peoples of Sierra Leone on my maternal side. And, on my paternal side I shared 99.3 percent with the Mbundu people
of Angola.

Now I understood that intense feeling of connection I felt with Angola. It all made more sense. Perhaps it was my DNA rebooting
my memory of my father’s lineage of the Mbundu across the Kunene River in Angola. Or maybe this was the reason for my intense
feeling of emotion when I first stepped foot on Namibia’s soil back in 1999, as well as the incredible and unexplainable experience
I had while meditating at the Kunene’s banks. Had my DNA given me that connection? Did my DNA “remember” that place?

I was stunned. I stood there, in a tailored suit, with my beautiful wife, my manager, Eric Nelson, and a camera crew from
ABC News watching me. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. No European? No Native American? I was nearly 100 percent African?
Was this really happening?

It was. It was scientifically official. Not only did I now know where my ancestors were from, but so did a room full of other
people.

I felt reborn that night. No longer did I need cowrie shells hanging from my locks, African jewelry, African dance classes,
or African drumming circles. There would be no more need to
hang portraits of Negresses or Moorish chiefs or wear kente cloth around my neck. All the external things that I thought I
needed to connect me to Africa were now unnecessary. Africa had been inside of me all along. She was inside my DNA. She was
beckoning me and guiding me my entire life through my dreams.

And for my dreams to come true, I decided I needed to go and see the country of my ancestors, Sengbe Pieh’s people—my people—for
myself.

I started to ask myself, “Could DNA be the bridge that closes the gap between Africans and African Americans?” I thought about
the possibility of helping to create a radical break with the international capitalist system and the idea of “taking back”
Sierra Leone from its colonialist constructs. I started to imagine myself with a group of competent American businesspeople
helping Sierra Leone achieve its economic development goals one village at a time. I wondered if African Americans could come
together long enough to help rebuild a nation only the size of South Carolina and show the world how and why we were able
to build pre-European civilizations centuries ago.

I decided that I would be the guinea pig in my own experiment and see just how much of an impact I could make over the next
ten years. I closed my eyes and began to meditate. In my mind’s eye I saw images of “the Rerun.” “This is it,” I thought to
myself. “This is what I was born to do. This is my purpose.”

I
t is difficult to explain the sense of oneness I felt with the people of Sierra Leone, even though I had yet to visit the
country. For eight months I conducted intense research, learning all I could about it, its people, and its history. The Portuguese
gave Sierra Leone its name in 1462. It means “Lion Mountain.” Those same Portuguese goods traders turned into slave traders
during the 1550s, making Sierra Leone the “testing ground” to kick off the transatlantic slave trade.

The story that interested me most was that of Sengbe Pieh, later known as Joseph Cinque, who was the most well known defendant
in the case of the slave ship
La Amistad.
Like me, he was a child of Sierra Leone.

The case involved fifty-three Africans who were abducted from Sierra Leone in February 1839 by Portuguese slave hunters to
be sold as slaves in Havana, Cuba. About five months into the journey, the Africans took control of the ship, killing the
captain and the cook in the process, and ordered the ship to return to
Africa. When the ship was captured by a U.S. brig off the coast of New York, the Africans were initially imprisoned on charges
of murder which were later dismissed. Yet the Africans were still held as “property” even though they had been made slaves
illegally. Former president John Quincy Adams represented the Africans.
²

I had some awareness that Sengbe Pieh was the Mende leader who led the revolt on the slave ship
La Amistad,
but as I read more about him, it hit me. “Wait a minute,” I thought. “This guy is one of my ancestors!”

I believe we owe Sengbe Pieh and the people of Sierra Leone a huge debt for the courage that many, including the great Professor
Joe Opala, a Sierra Leonean expert and historian at James Madison University, considered to be the beginnings of the Civil
Rights Movement. I would later have the honor to meet and work with Professor Opala.

I pulled the book
Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience,
edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr., off my shelf and read about the history, politics, language, and
culture of Sierra Leone.

I discovered that in 1839 Lewis Tappan, a wealthy New York merchant and prominent abolitionist, for whom the Tappan Zee Bridge
is named, launched a campaign to defend the
Amistad
Africans and created the Amistad Committee. Three long trials later, the United States Supreme Court issued its final verdict
in the
Amistad
case on March 9, 1841, that the Africans on board were kidnapped and transported illegally. The captives at last were free!
John Quincy Adams had overturned President Van Buren’s attempt to have the
Amistad
Africans sentenced to death for mutiny.

Sengbe Pieh became such a public figure in the United States that the newspapers compared him to the heroes of ancient Greece
and Rome. Pieh’s cause and return to Sierra Leone gar
nered the attention of thousands of people and raised millions of dollars for the Amistad Committee and its Mende missions.
The first Mende mission arrived in Freetown with Sengbe Pieh in 1842, designed to persuade their new African friends to adopt
the American dress and manners. This attempt failed once the
Amistad
Africans became anxious to return to their individual villages. The Amistad Committee evolved into the American Missionary
Association and built the most celebrated schools of its time—the Harford School for Girls and the Albert Academy, which predated
the government-run Bo School by several years.

The village of Bo the school is named for has an interesting story behind its name which I found on the Web site
www.sierra-leone.org
. The peoples of Bo have a reputation for warmth and determination, and the town is named after its generosity.

An elephant was killed close to what is now known as Bo Parking Ground. People from the surrounding villages came to receive
their share. Because the meat was so large, the hunter spent days distributing it and the words “
bo-lor
” (which in Mende language means “this is yours,” with reference to the meat) was said so much that the elders and visitors
decided to name the place Bo. “
Bo-lor
” in Mende also translates to “this is Bo.”
³

The impact of this quest for excellence left its mark in the United States. Two important examples are Sierra Leoneans Barnabas
Root and Thomas Tucker, who both attended the original Mende Mission School. Root became a powerful pastor for the Congregational
Mission Church for Freedmen in Alabama and later returned to Sierra Leone. Thomas Tucker stayed on in America and along with
Thomas Van Gibbs founded the State Normal College for Colored Students at Tallahassee, Florida, in
1877. Thomas Tucker was the first president of the college which grew into the present-day Florida A&M University.