Rocky Mountain News

Documentary filmmaker donnie l. betts, 54, stands in front of African art at his Aurora home while holding a drum that he brought back from a visit to the continent. Betts became very interested about his heritage when he went to Africa to show his first film, Dearfield.

From stolen past, kindred lives

By James B. Meadow, Rocky Mountain News
February 17, 2007

It was history's greatest identity theft.

For five shameful centuries, an untold number - some say as many as 20 million - of Africans were hunted and sold, fodder for the slave trade. The Temne, Mende, Kru, Fulani, Mandinka and Yoruba - a vast web of peoples were torn from the heart of western and central Africa and shipped 3,700 miles across the Atlantic Ocean, the so-called Middle Passages leg of the despicable operation.

But if the overt aspects of degradation visited upon the Africans eventually began to end in 1863 with the Emancipation Proclamation, one of slavery's terrible legacies would be visited upon descendants of the enslaved: the curse of stolen identity.

White slave owners had been brutally efficient at dismembering families, severing linkages. The oral histories that had been passed down among the early generations of slaves had long ceased to be whispers. Written records of births were nonexistent. Rapes of females by slave owners launched new generations whose pasts were buried at birth.

For the waves of generations spawned from this, their histories, their identities, were unsolvable mysteries.

Until recently.

When DNA testing emerged, 21st-century science was able to reach back 500 years and allow today's African-Americans to shine a light on hidden lineages. Last year, a number of Denver blacks had their cheeks swabbed, had their DNA collected. Then they waited for their pasts to emerge.

What follows are the first and second stories in a series that sketches the personal discoveries made by eight Denver residents, a celebration of Black History Month.

FIRST IN A SIX-PART SERIES

It took half a century for donnie l. betts to reach the start.

The path he once sought in books and maps had unfurled across hundreds of lost years and thousands of strange miles through jungle, out to shore, over an ocean and, eventually along roads of billowing Texas dust. A journey initially stitched with fear and confusion and nightmares of stolen people.

About the particulars, betts knew little - great mouthfuls of his family's history had been swallowed up and silenced by time and death. But today, in 2007, the abyss he used to look across and wonder at is less overwhelming. Today, betts at least has a good idea where his story began.

"I'm fascinated by history; I'm actually a historian myself," says the 54-year-old documentary filmmaker. "But my family used to tell me, 'You've done so much about other people's lives, what about us? What about our history?' "

Sure, the youngest of 12 siblings knew something about his past, back to his dad's grandfather. Not very far, but further back than his maternal line. His mother died when he was only 9 - and she had been adopted on top of that.

And while he grew up nurtured and a little sheltered by his big farm family in DeKalb, Texas, doubt and curiosity always seemed to be gnawing inside him. Where do I fit into the scheme of things? Where did my people come from originally?

Reading history books and absorbing information from National Geographic, like a sponge absorbs water, helped. Still, "I always felt something was missing."

'I know your people'

Then, in 1998, something wonderful and odd happened: Donnie l. betts had an "experience."

He was going to show one of his films at a festival in Burkina Faso, one of the biggest festivals in Africa. He went to the embassy in Washington to get some information about the country. The woman at the desk looked at him.

"I know your people. You look like my people," she said.

"What do you mean?" betts said.

What she meant was he was big, tall. His facial features resembled those of her people, the Mende of Sierra Leone.

That encounter kept resonating with betts.

It hummed inside him when he landed in Burkina Faso and bent down to collect some dirt in a bag.

Maybe this wasn't his country, but it was his continent. Part of the homeland.

The woman's words stayed with him when he was out in the countryside, talking to some boys who looked like him and they kept saying, "Welcome home." He felt "incredible; something I just can't explain."

But if he was closer to home, he still didn't know how close.

Then he was back in America, back in his adopted Colorado. Making films. Acting. Still wondering. Historian heal thyself.

Last year he did. At the fundraiser for the Blair-Caldwell Research Library, he saw other people confront their history. He took samples of his DNA and sent them in. He waited.

The packet arrived in six weeks.

Betts waited some more.

"I didn't open it right away; I opened it the next day. Why? I don't know. I'm usually not nervous about anything. This time I was just nervous."

Shared sense of warmth

The first thing that hit him was his mother's people were, in fact, probably the Mende. That woman in the embassy. There were other possible ties. The Timne, also from Sierra Leone.

The Djola and Balanta from Guinea. The Kru in Liberia. Perhaps also the Fulani from Nigeria.

All of a sudden, betts had a "sense of belonging; a start where you possibly came from."

All of a sudden, he wasn't envious anymore.

"Man, there was always a sense of jealousy that people could trace themselves back to - Ireland, Germany, wherever. They knew, they had a sense of where they came from."

Now betts knew, too.

Now he had new photographs to hang.

"You know how sometimes you go into a person's house and on the wall they have photographs? Maybe their mom and dad, their grandmother and grandfather, maybe their great-grandparents? I always have a sense of warmth when I go into a house like that. Well, now, for me, it's like that. In my mind's eye, I have those photographs of my great-great-great-grandparents. I kind of know what they look like now. I know where they probably came from."

No more National Geographic or dusty history books for betts. He knows where the connection began. He knows where to start looking. And he will.

In April, he's off to Sierra Leone to begin work on a documentary.

He's applying for funding, doing more research on the country. But the trip isn't just about the project; it's about finding more about where he's from. And whatever knowledge and revelations betts comes back with, there's something else he just might bring through Customs.

A new bag of dirt. From home.

Tracing a family's past

African Ancestry is a company that provides two DNA tests - either paternal or maternal - for African-Americans to trace their lineage. Because of the incidence of rape by white slave owners, paternal testing does not always lead to African heritage. Conversely, according to AA president Gina Paige, "we find African ancestries about 95 percent of the time when we trace maternal lineage." For this reason, maternal testing is more popular.

• Cost: $349 per test (during Black History Month, the cost is $299)

• Approximate wait for results: Six weeks

• Size of AA database: 25,000 lineages

• Total number of AA clients: 8,000

• Number of Colorado clients: 250

• Average age of AA clients: 55

• Oldest client: 102

• Youngest: 10 months

• For more information: 202-723-0900 or go to africanancestry.com