Out of Africa – Bryan Rostron

SOUTH Africa still boils with complex racial antagonisms. After the xenophobic explosions in many townships in May, comes the furious – and sometimes racist – response of several black professional bodies to a court ruling that South African Chinese should be considered “black” in terms of legally-defined “previously disadvantaged status”.

Even 14 years after the fall of apartheid, we still have to fill in our racial category every time we complete an official form.

But the absurdity of such ethnic fixation was emphasised by DNA tests that my goddaughter, Vuyelwa Ngqase, and I had recently, as part of the Africa Genome Project. The aim is to create a genetic map of migration patterns of groups that have settled South Africa over thousands of years.

Vuyelwa is 18 and black while I am – well, check out the photo that accompanies this column. But there’s a link between this umlungu (white person) and an isiXhosa-speaking teenager. Our DNA tests were from simple cheek swabs. They’ve produced amazing results.

Vuyelwa’s lineage is associated with the “Out of Africa” move 60,000-80,000 years ago. Some branches left to populate the rest of the world, others dispersed through Africa. Vuyelwa’s subgroup “possibly arose in Central Africa near Sudan around 35,000 years ago”. So it’s been one heck of a journey all the way to school in Cape Town today.

Women can only trace their female lineage, however, and need a male of their immediate family to trace paternal roots. Men (once again) have an unfair advantage: both sides of the family can be traced through that DNA sample.

My grandparents immigrated here at the turn of the 20th century: from Scotland, Lancashire and Ireland. These days they’d be known as “economic refugees”, fleeing poverty and, fortunately for them, able to seek better prospects in the colonies.

Beyond that, the family tree faded out. Now I discover that, on my mother’s side, the lineage arose about 30,000 years ago, mainly in north-west Europe, probably part of the population following the retreat of the ice sheets from Europe. The surprise was on my father’s side: going back many thousands of years to south and central Asia, Iran and the Caucasus – and before that to the Romany people, who have their origins in India.

There was an even stranger result. It seems I’ve a distant connection to Angola. My paternal Y chromosome “haplotype” sequence, according to the database for worldwide matches, showed only one single match on the global map: Cabinda, Angola. Heeran Makkan, chief medical scientist at the Johannesburg laboratory where testing was done, confirmed the result. “Given the history of the slave trade routes and the European settlements along the coasts of Africa in recent times”, he said, “it is quite likely that while an individual identifies as a Cabinda individual, he may carry a Y chromosome that would have been passed down to him from a forefather in recent times that could have been European or Asian.”

So what on earth does this signify in terms of my own link with Africa? The connection must go way back, possibly centuries.

The Cabinda enclave of Angola was one of the first points on the West African coast where Europeans began trading. Could it be that one of my ancestors – of whom we have no idea or record – was a sailor on a ship trading down that part of the coast in the 17th or 18th centuries; or, even, that I have a ancestor who was either a slave trader or took part in slaving expeditions? It’s a sobering thought.
Nevertheless, the fact that the only match-up I have in the entire world is in Africa adds to the extraordinary complexity of our enduring obsession with skin colour and identity.

Nelson Mandela had his DNA tested as part of this project and the result showed that included in his ancestry were the San people, formerly known as Bushmen.

There have been similar results for white Afrikaners: many of whom have (hidden) black roots, too. The idea of racial purity is not just toxic; it’s a myth, pure hogwash.

Yet, following the recent court ruling, our minister of labour made spiteful and racially-charged comments regarding Chinese people. We should all have a DNA test to demonstrate how utterly foolish are such exclusivist manias. After all, what should I say for “race” the next time I fill in a government form?

The fact is that, for both sides of my family, it had been a long trek out of Africa. And finally, many millennia later, it was also a long haul back. And that, I surmise, is where there’s a link between Vuyelwa and myself.

Vuyelwa’s group is linked to the “Out of Africa” migration, but her own ancestors stayed behind and eventually moved south. Mine left Africa, on foot, and had – like all whites in South Africa – to await the invention of technology (ships and guns) to return home.

Now it’s up to all of us to work out what the hell we’re actually doing here.