The High Point Enterprise from High Point, North Carolina • Page 26

fr, fc: WC High Point Enterprise, Sunday, April 27, IMS Quesf fakes Them To Darkest Parts Of Africa Black Americans Searching For Ancestral Roots i A A silituae npnnPFft £fl By HUGH A. MULLIGAN AP Special Correspondent ACCRA, Ghana (AP) The journey up an African river 200 years into the past to reach one of mankind's darkest midnights can be terribly sad, maddeningly frustrating and ruinously expensive, but each year more and more black Americans feel compelled to undertake it. The goal they seek is themselves. Who am Where did I come from? Which people are mine? Africa's newest and most exciting safari is the hunter hunting for himself down unmarked trails of history through a jungle of undecipherable records to a tropic night, seven or eight generations back, when a long boat came out of the rain forests with its mournful, manacled cargo and a slave ship set sail at the dark of the moon they always sailed at night as the dark coastline receded inexorably into the mists. Was my great-great-great grandfather in the fetid hold that night? Does my heritage lurk in that forest fastness? The hunter may spend a lifetime pursuing his quarry.

That nightmare scene was repeated on 10,000 and more moonless nights in the bays of Benin and Biafra, at the mouths of the Congo, Gambia, Senegal and Niger rivers. The British alone shipped two million West African slaves to their Caribbean colonies between 1680 and 1786, and every European power except Italy engaged in the slave trade. The Dutch West Indies Co. became almost exclusively a slave importer. Alex Haley, the American Negro writer, spent 10 years on three continents poring over plantation files and census reports in more than 50 libraries, and public records offices, unscrambling the crabbed handwriting of 1,023 ships' manifests to trace his African past to Kunta Kinte, a 17-year-old Mandika tribesman kidnaped on the banks of the Gambia river in 1767 and put aboard the slave ship Lord Ligonier, bound out for Annapolis, Md.

His tragic and fascinating book, "Roots," has inspired hundreds of other Afro- Americans to follow the few meager clues maybe only a snatch of song or a bedtime story or a favorite herb recipe handed down the years and make the epic journey into their own past and into themselves." "It's a melancholy expedition," admitted Dr. Robert E. Lee, a dentist from Charleston, S.C., who traced his own slave ancestors and has helped many pilgrims along the way. "But the thrill of discovery, the joy of filling a great vacuum in your soul, can be the greatest experience of your life." With his wife, Sarah, also a dentist, Lee emigranted to Ghana 10 years ago and now heads the African Descendants Foundation, which is trying to restore Fort Amsterdam, one of the many slave forts and castles built between the 15th and 18th centuries along Ghana's cape coast. Courage, too, is required for the fateful voyage into the past.

Black Americans have been known to faint dead away or go into hysterics when visiting the slave yards of the old trading stations or venturing down the stony ramps at the bat-hung slave dungeons where the ankle chains, neck irons, thumb screws and metal mouth openers for those who refused to eat are kept on display for tourists. "When they realize that this happened to their ancestors, they just come apart," said Nana Kow Bondzie, executive secretary of the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board. "Even before they get here, the search has become an emotional experience, undoubtedly the most soul- searing of their lives." Where does one begin? The trial can lead back hundreds of years. The African slave trade began in 1441, when a Portuguese sea captain presented Prince Henry the Navigator with 10 kidnaped West African natives as a souvenir of his voyage, as he would have offered an exotic plant, a tropical bird or a rare butterfly. In 1625, the first shipment of blacks landed on Manhattan Island, but already there were 15,000 in Brazil and by the end of the century slaving accounted for one-fifth of the commercial activity 'of all French ports.

In, 1739 the port of Bristol alone fitted out 52 slave ships, and the docks of Liverpool are still spoken of by sailors as. being "paved with slave blood." Surprisingly for so debased a profession, the European slave traders often kept meticulous journals and manifests. The Arab dealers kept no records. Museum director Bondzie -suggests starting the search with a face: "Physique and profile can narrow down 'which part of Africa, which ethnic group a person is descended from. Some Brazilians and West Indians, for instance, have a marked resemblance to modern-day Ghanaians." A name remembered across the years or handed down as a nickname would be invaluable.

"In Africa, if I know your name, I know a lot about you," expalined Dr. J.H. Nketia, director of African studies at Ghana University. "Osei would suggest you belong to the Kumasi Royal house in Ashanti country. Among the Akan, you are named for the day you were born: Kwame means Saturday, Kodwo is Monday, Kofi, Friday." Dr.

Nkeita, an expert in music and linguistics who also is professor of music at the University of California at Los Angeles, suggests that if a grandfather beat out a certain rhythm in doodling with a pencil it could identify jiis forebears with a particular clan or abusa. Certain body movements in modern dance, certain rhythms in soul music, the steady beat of early jazz are a direct link to West Africa. "A lot of the old music that has survived is geared to the traditional institutions of chieftancy," said Nketia, pointing to the similarity between Caribbean calypso and the "high life" music of a Saturday afternoon jump" in present "day Accra. Alex Haley began his search for "Roots" with the childhood stories of slaves and "massas" that he heard from his grandmother and old aunts.sitting in rocking chairs on the family veranda in Kenning, Tenn. Dentist Lee was led along the trail by the stories handed down in his family of "a remarkable Captain Inflation Hits Puerto Ricans By EDGAR MILLER Associated Press Writer SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) Puerto Rico has been caught in a whiplash of the inflation and recession in the United States.

This sunny, overcrowded Caribbean island has been hit by soaring prices averaging about 20 per cent higher than New York, unemployment which has topped 17 per cent, labor troubles and a wave of crime highlighted by an average 50 homicides a month. The predominately leftist- Socialist independence movement has stepped up its activities. Gov. Rafael Hernandez Colon, whose majority Popular Democratic party is dedicated to preserving the commonwealth association the island has with the United States, drew a bleak picture of Puerto Rico's economy in a recent state of the commonwealth message. Among "drastic measures" he called for were curtailment of many government programs and elimination of salary increases for many government employes.

Hastily by the legislature was a 5 per cent surtax on incomes. The tax was designed to offset part of the expected $200 million budget deficit. A 5 per cent sales tax was levied on imported consumer goods. Hernandez Colon proposed a $1.3 billion budget for the coming year, a budget which for the first time in history was lower than the previous year when the outlay was $1.5 billion. Adding to inflation woes have been hefty hikes in public utility rates electricity, water and telephones.

The electric bill for a family of four has risen on average from $28 a month to $38. The fixed-rate telephone bill went up from $10.30 a month to $14. Water bills went up from $13 to $25 a month. The budget cutbacks could mean layoffs within the ranks of Puerto Rico's 110,000 government employes. About 25,000 school teachers and 9,000 policemen face a temporary hold-back of $75 monthly salary increases.

Sen. Ruben Berrios, leader of the Puerto Rico Independence party which wants to see ties with the United States completely severed, said the governor's state of the commonwealth message "is the final proof that this country is in the hands of a party without imagination or courage, firmly tied to the big economic interests." Joshua," a slave freed by Union forces during the Civil War who tried to land a shipload of liberated slaves on the coast of Sierra Leone, but was turned back by the British. "Even a bedtime story can be a clue," said Dr. Nketia. "The Brer Rabbit tales told on the porches of'slave cabins are derived from the 'anacy' folk fables of West Africa.

Family supersititions, remembered ghost stories, favorite foods and rarer still, old fetish dolls and amulets preserved in an attic or bureau drawer can close the gap with the past for the searcher into the long ago. These mournful and tormented human cargoes came naked into the new world carrying with them only their traditional beliefs and household cutoms. James Fort, in the Gambia River, where Alex Haley's ancestor was sold to British slavers, had been built by the Baltic Germans. Names of slaves were not only destroyed or lost in translation as.the fort came under new proprietorship, but seldom put down correctly in the first place. Before the 19th century, few if any Europeans are known to have spoken any African language.

Back from the trading station and into the rain forest, the trail becomes even more indistinct and costly to follow. Interpreters usually several, become a necessity. Ghana, for instance, has five major ethnic groups speaking 36 languages, only six of which are written. A tribal map of Upper Volta shows 46 ethnic groups. Widespread polygamy in West Africa makes the family tree an impenetrable maze, and the matrilineal system of inheritance, common among the Ashanti, traces tribal descent through the female line, which means the mother's name is passed on.

Linguists and "griots," keepers of the oral tradition attached to the "stool" or chieftancy, can be employed to help unravel the genealogical threads. Some Afro-Americans on the trail of their heritage spend a summer or two at Ghana University learning basic Akan, in wide use along the slaving coast but not so useful in the Congo Delta. Others turn back at the first cultural shock. They are saddened by the poverty and filth of an African village, depressed by flies and heat, shocked by filed teeth, spidery hair-dos, faces striped with tribal scars, and the endless drumming and the. antics of the witch doctors.

"It's appalling how little they know of Africa when they set out," laments Bernard Glover, assistant director of tourism for Ghana. "They always thought they were African and all of a sudden they can't identify. They realize for better or worse, they're Americans from Chicago or Philadelphia. Even the food gets to them: they don't like fu-fu, our heavy pounded yam soup. Africa isn't home after all." Identifying the clues and following them up can be depressingly time consuming and expensive.

Dr. Lee figures a minimum of $5,000 for travel and rudimentary research, but says the cost can go as high as $200,000, counting professional help and time off from work. "It's not like going to Castle to find out which county in Ireland your grandfather came from," Dr. Lee said. Where records exist, they frequently consist of dubious journals in an illiterate scrawl and ships' books of lading listing ivory tusks, cloves, peppers and and female slaves" in crabbed The Dutch and British sla-1- vers invariably separated families as a precaution; against slave uprisings mutinies.

Portuguese keptjs: brothers and sisters together but complicated thep genealogical trail baptis- ing their captives, assigning them Christian first names and quite often, inter- marrying with slave families. THE EARLY BIRD CATCHES THE BEST BUY! ON Carrier AIR CONDITIONING from HUNTER HEATING i AIR CONDITIONING 1217 WARD ST. PH. bcluirvtly through Mirtln-Stnour! warm, rich colors of Co'toniil Willlimaburf ciptund and exactly matchtd In exterior and interior fin- lihu of utmost quality. Slightly men than you'd pay for ordinary than worth cvtry panny In addad graca and charm.

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