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Shazel Muhammad-Neain, 50, grew up in a small town in southern New Jersey. Her family was one of the only Black families. Her parents had moved there from Alabama to escape racism in the South. A great-grandfather and grandfather had both been targets of racial violence. But, in the late 1970s, when she was seven, a cross was burned in front of her family's New Jersey home.
As a child, Muhammad-Neain wrestled with her identity. Until fifth grade, she was the only Black kid in her school. She struggled to fit in. She wasn't white. But she didn't feel like she was Black either.
"I didn't feel like I belonged in either," she recalled. "We were taught that to stay safe and stay alive, we were not to be racially proud. I grew up with a disconnection to my Blackness."
The expression African-American especially confused her.
"This African-American thing threw me for a loop as a kid," she recalled. "How am I African? I don't know anything about Africa. I was rejecting it."
She would come to embrace Black culture, but she remained troubled by questions of identity. Who am I? Where did I come from? As with most African-Americans, her ability to research her family history ran into a dead end at the 19th century.
In 2012, she took one of the DNA tests that can trace genetic markers. The result she got was so broad, the geographic area to which her DNA connected her was so large -- a huge swatch of west, central and even southern Africa -- that she felt it was all but worthless.
"That did nothing for me, except frustrate me," she remembers.
Still, she became increasingly curious about and intrigued by Africa and where her ancestors were from.
At the end of 2019, she took another DNA test, this one done by the company, African Ancestry. She then left for an extended trip to Ghana, her first visit to Africa.
In January 2020, while still in Ghana, she received an email with the result of her matrilineal* test. It said she was from the Mende people of present day Sierra Leone, a former British colony in West Africa.
"The first thing I thought was, 'oh, ok, Sierra Leone,'" she told me. "What do I know about Sierra Leone? Nothing. So, I said let me learn about Sierra Leone. When I started doing research about it, that's when I started really to own it."
Shazel Muhammad-Neain in Sierra Leone
From a Google search, Muhammad-Neain found photos of women in Sierra Leone. She was stunned.
"I thought, oh my gosh, that lady looks like my mom, looks like my gramma, that one looks like my auntie," she said. "I had this feeling like, ahhh, it's my family. And I just started crying."
In recent years, genealogical research by Americans has become increasingly popular. Many Americans can easily trace their roots back many generations, even hundreds of years. Others know not much more than that their family tree contains, say, Irish, English and German ancestors. They can take pride in knowing their heritage.
For Black Americans, the ability to follow their family histories usually comes to a screeching halt at slavery. Ever since I was a little kid, I wondered where my ancestors were from in Africa. I had white friends who could easily chart their family histories. I envied them. I kept imagining my family's past as a closed door that could never be opened. I envisioned an actual door in a darkened room with tantalizing slivers of bright light leaking between door and frame. On the other side were answers I thought I would never get.
Then, about 20 plus years ago, genetic tests were developed and marketed that claimed they could take a person's DNA, e.g., from saliva, and essentially match a signature sequence to records in a database of DNA to determine the origins of a person's lineage. The larger the database, the more specific and reliable the result, according to the companies that did the tests.
Here was the key to open that closed door.
In late 2005, I took the test with African Ancestry and did a story about it for ABC News, where I was a correspondent. The plan was for the results to be revealed to me live on Good Morning America.
I was nervous that morning, anxious about what I was about to discover. I came onto the set and introduced the edited story I had done about DNA testing and what it meant for Black Americans. I was joined by the actor, Isaiah Washington, who had himself taken a genetic test that connected him to the Mende of Sierra Leone. He would later write a memoir, A Man From Another Land: How Finding My Roots Changed My Life.
Photo credit: ABC News
Robin Roberts, the GMA host, sat across from us and read it aloud.
"You come from the Ashante people of Ghana," she intoned. They wheeled out a huge cardboard map of Africa. Ghana was highlighted in yellow. I stared at it.
I said something but I don't remember what. I was in a daze. I do remember Washington clapping me on my shoulder and saying something about kente cloth. Later, I would watch it on video. A stupefied grin lit up my face.
After the segment ended, I left. I walked outside. I felt elated. Ashante. Ghana. I walked and walked, heading uptown from the GMA Times Square studio. I was only dimly aware of my surroundings (never a good idea in New York). I went down into the subway to go home. A song, a piece of a song, began to play inside my head. Buffalo Soldier by Bob Marley.
Stolen from Africa, brought to America
Fighting on arrival, fighting for survival
That was when my elation turned to anger. I wondered about, imagined this distant ancestor, no doubt terrified and confused, taken into captivity and shipped in chains across the Atlantic to America. It made me mad.
By the time I got home, I had settled down. Suddenly, I thought: I have to go to Ghana. I got on the phone and booked a flight to Accra for a few months later.
Gina Paige (photo credit: African Ancestry)
Gina Paige is president and co-founder along with geneticist Rick Kittles of African Ancestry. She said there has been a surge into DNA testing by Black Americans since George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis in 2020.
"We saw a huge explosion during the pandemic, what I call the Black pride renaissance," Paige told me. "The whole idea of 'Who are we?' and our identity and what it means to be Black and how we're treated as Black people. To really understand who you are as a Black person, you've got to go back to the roots of who you are."
"As African-Americans," she added, "because we don't know where we're from, we have a void. We're the original victims of identity theft. We don't know our original names. We don't speak our original languages. We don't know who our ancestors are."
Paige said the genetic test results can hit people differently. At first, almost everyone is shocked and overwhelmed, she said. Some feel joyful with the knowledge. Some become angry at the injustice. Many begin to research everything they can about the ethnic group to which their family line was attributed. Some travel there to see the country, to soak it up. Some are inspired to express themselves through art or music or writing. Some become politicized and lobby Congress on behalf of the country they've been connected to.
About one-third get back a patrilineal test result linking them to White Europeans.
"They're not happy," Paige said.** "That can be psychologically jarring for people."
Shazel Muhammad-Neain with Sierra Leone President Julius Maada Bio
In the spring of 2021, Shazel Muhammad-Neain returned to Africa, this time to Sierra Leone. She was one of a group of 69 Black Americans whose DNA test had connected them to Sierra Leone. They traveled there to visit the country and to collect Sierra Leone passports which the government was granting to people with Sierra Leone ancestry.
"The Sierra Leone president gave each of us our passport personally," she said. "He said, 'You are welcome. You are royalty here. Do you understand what I am telling you? I cannot say it any clearer.' And his voice just resonated and it was deep and powerful and he meant every word that he said."
When they walked through the streets of the capital, Freetown, people applauded and came up to greet them.
"It (was) indescribable and so electrifying and so real and palpable," Muhammad-Neain said.
On my trip to Ghana, I visited the capital, Accra, then took a bus to Kumasi, the capital of the Ashante region in the interior. I was shown around town by the brother of a Ghanaian cab driver in Chicago who I had met a few weeks earlier and told my story to. I kept thinking: These are my people. I have finally found them.
From Kumasi, I went to Cape Coast, the coastal site of one of the most infamous Portuguese fortresses, from where countless slaves were held until they were loaded onto ships bound for the Americas. That fortress is haunted by ghosts.
For Shazel Muhammad-Neain, the whole experience -- the DNA test result, researching the country, telling her children and family, her trip to Sierra Leone, the passport -- has helped her to begin to "heal."
"I'm now the bridge," she said. "I imagine myself standing between these two worlds with my arms stretched out in both directions, being the bridge for my ancestors from the past who never returned. And those of you of my future, my children, grandchildren, my future progeny. I stand there as a bridge for you also."
This fall, she plans to visit Ghana again to take a group of six Black high school students from a project she founded and runs called Africa Link Initiative, an identity development program for Black youth. As part of it, the teenagers she'll be traveling with all recently took DNA tests, which revealed their African lineages. For them, the door to their heritage stands wide open.
(cover photo credit: Getty Images)
* Matrilineal tests trace one's mother's side of a family line. Patrilineal tests trace your father's side. I received my patrilineal test result months later: Temne people of Sierra Leone. Women can only get results for their matrilineal side because they have XX chromosome pairs. Men have XY.
** Paige explains that this normally means the side of the family genealogical line traceable to Africa is on the maternal side.
