Strong partisanship started in Ghana when Kwame Nkrumah divided the nation into patriots and traitors. Patriots were those who accepted that he should be president for life, practice communism and one party state, and indulge ... read full comment
Strong partisanship started in Ghana when Kwame Nkrumah divided the nation into patriots and traitors. Patriots were those who accepted that he should be president for life, practice communism and one party state, and indulge in Leftist anti-Western propaganda using the small country's meager resources to challenge centuries' old, well-established Western countries. They even accepted that he should be a savior of the Blackman around the world, while tyrannizing his own Black people at home because they have alternative views for the development of their country.
Those who wanted him to concentrate on the needs of the young nation and tone down his rhetoric to our level were called traitors, reactionaries, and agents of imperialism that should be liquidated and imprisoned dead or alive. Could you believe that the opposition members he was tyrannizing were the very people who started and lead the struggle for our independence? They employed Nkrumah and paid for his ticket from the UK to come and work as a General Secretary of the group, saving him from the tyranny and indignity of joblessness in London. The independence struggle Vanguards were senior civil servants in the Gold Coast. And as the struggle was gaining momentum and the scope of the activities widening, they needed someone to work full time for the group; free from official work constrains to further spread the message of the struggle.
Under their responsibility and protection, Nkrumah used the platform to become the public face of the group and his popularity soared. In those days, most of our people could not differentiate between a spokesman like "General Mosquito" and Chairman or leader of the NDC party. As such, they saw him as the person, or the only person fighting for our independence. So when he learnt from the Governor General's British female secretary, who was later on sacked, that the British were preparing to grant us independence, Nkrumah increasingly used unnecessary militant tactics to annoy the Colonial Master, when it was clear that the wind of change was blowing, and also provoke his leaders in order to outfox them. He then used the opportunity to break away from them, forming his own party and slapping them from behind to take power.
This explains the strong partisanship in the country and why Nkrumah didn't want the liberation vanguards to ever get power in his life time. Maybe he was afraid of his own ghost. And despite all that, his supporters still want us to believe that he initiated, spearheaded and single handedly fought for our independence, and therefore name every national project after him as if we were in a kingdom.
Bonsu 9 years ago
How are you Sarpong,the man with a thousand monikers.Only evildoers do that.
How are you Sarpong,the man with a thousand monikers.Only evildoers do that.
Ghanaman 9 years ago
For once you are on target
For once you are on target
Ugly Akufo Addo 9 years ago
He died this morning
He died this morning
Bonsu 9 years ago
You just rush to write anything that comes to mind without checking the facts.Such infantile goofs are not the hallmark of acdemics but not Ahoofe whose descent in academic protocol has become a breathtaking exercise.
For ... read full comment
You just rush to write anything that comes to mind without checking the facts.Such infantile goofs are not the hallmark of acdemics but not Ahoofe whose descent in academic protocol has become a breathtaking exercise.
For your knowledge attention,Uhuru Kenyatta has been absolved of all charges and is now presently a free man.it should not take the world to fond out this simple matter but here you are indulging in your usual buffonery.
odikro 9 years ago
Don't let your mouth get you into something that your stinky ass can not get you out of.
PS: And I am no fan of Ahoofe.
Don't let your mouth get you into something that your stinky ass can not get you out of.
PS: And I am no fan of Ahoofe.
Pastor 9 years ago
Odikro, you dirty creature in Belgium who calls himself Nana, "Kwasea" get youself a job doing and stop you primitive nonsense.
Odikro, you dirty creature in Belgium who calls himself Nana, "Kwasea" get youself a job doing and stop you primitive nonsense.
KOLA outside LONDON 9 years ago
Ah! that is the Odikro, the "Tanii" Ali Masmadi who calls himself Nana Akyea Mensah. What is your beef here? Know that you can probaly run but you can't hide, everywhere you go, just like MTN in Ghana, you will forever remain ... read full comment
Ah! that is the Odikro, the "Tanii" Ali Masmadi who calls himself Nana Akyea Mensah. What is your beef here? Know that you can probaly run but you can't hide, everywhere you go, just like MTN in Ghana, you will forever remain a "Pepenii" Okoampa is not your co-equal simply because he, Kwame Ahoofe Okoampa is a pure "Okyenii" and you are a "Tanii" despite all your insults. Get it clear. Find some work doing in Belgium and hail your primitive nonsense, ok!!!
Mawu 9 years ago
When will you will write about the barbaric shootings of african-Americans everyday in the US?
When will you will write about the barbaric shootings of african-Americans everyday in the US?
Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe 9 years ago
Eii this fake Prof. Ahoofe-DNA-Technologist again:
We all know the next forgery you, Professor Perpetual Liar, are going to come up is to tell the world that this Ghanaian is from Akyem, and that this Ghanaian is an ances ... read full comment
Eii this fake Prof. Ahoofe-DNA-Technologist again:
We all know the next forgery you, Professor Perpetual Liar, are going to come up is to tell the world that this Ghanaian is from Akyem, and that this Ghanaian is an ancestor of JB Danquah, the well-know political and intellectual failure!
This guy who calls himself a professor! How of President Obama’s writings have you read? You are always disgracing yourself with ignorance. If you had followed President Obama’s maternal ancestry closely, you would have realized that the African ancestry of President Obama’s mother’s side (Y-DNA) is Cameroonian. Read more about JOHN PUNCH (and Ralph Bunche, first Black American awarded the Nobel Peace Prize). The Punch (or Bunch) family of whom President Obama’s mother is partly believed to have come from is Cameroonian. Moreover, there are many questions surrounding the Ancestry.com analysis. YOU DON’T SEEM TO HAVE ANY CLUES ON ANY TOPIC YOU WRITE ON. WHAT A SHAME?
NO WHERE DOES ANY OF THE DNA FINDINGS SPECIFICALLY POINT TO GHANA. IN ANY CASE, ARE YOU TALKING OF THE OLD “GHANA” EMPIRE OR THE GHANA OF 1957? DID YOU MEAN THE GOLD COAST AS SLAVERY WAS NOT GOING ON IN THE 1950s IN GHANA?
Read the following from The New York Times:
Obama Has Ties to Slavery Not by His Father but His Mother, Research Suggests By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: July 30, 2012 WASHINGTON — President Obama’s biography — son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas — has long suggested that unlike most African-Americans, his roots did not include slavery.
Rajah Bose for The New York Times
One tool used by a team of genealogists over the course of two years was an online database maintained by the Bunch family.
Now a team of genealogists is upending that thinking, saying that Mr. Obama’s mother had, in addition to her European ancestors, at least one African forebear and that the president is most likely descended from one of the first documented African slaves in the United States.
The findings are scheduled to be announced on Monday by Ancestry.com, a genealogy company based in Provo, Utah. Its team, while lacking definitive proof, said it had evidence that “strongly suggests” Mr. Obama’s family tree — on his mother’s side — stretches back nearly four centuries to a slave in colonial Virginia named John Punch.
In 1640, Mr. Punch, then an indentured servant, escaped from Virginia and went to Maryland. He was captured there and, along with two white servants who had also escaped, was put on trial. His punishment — servitude for life — was harsher than what the white servants received, and it has led some historians to regard him as the first African to be legally sanctioned as a slave, years before Virginia adopted laws allowing slavery.
Historians say there was a trade in human labor, of both whites and blacks, during this period in American history. There were also some free African-Americans. Beginning around 1617, indentured servants were bought and sold, as were debtors, in the Chesapeake Bay region, said Ira Berlin, a University of Maryland professor and expert in the history of slavery. But while those people were in an “unfree condition,” he said, historians cannot pinpoint a date for the beginning of the slave trade.
“What makes the John Punch case interesting is here is a guy who is definitely a slave,” said Professor Berlin, who did not participate in the examination of the president’s ancestors.
The Ancestry.com team used DNA analysis to make the connection, and it also combed through marriage and property records to trace Mr. Obama’s maternal ancestry to the time and place where Mr. Punch lived. The company said records suggested that Mr. Punch fathered children with a white woman, who passed her free status on to those children, giving rise to a family of a slightly different name, the Bunches, that ultimately spawned Mr. Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham.
The findings come as more and more Americans are discovering their own mixed-race heritage. Elizabeth Shown Mills, a former president of the American Society of Genealogists, said the Internet, coupled with the ease of DNA testing and heightened interest among both amateur and professional genealogists, was helping to reveal the extent of racial intermingling over the centuries.
“It is becoming increasingly common now because people are discovering it,” Ms. Mills said. “In the past, very few records were available. Very few people made the effort to do the research.”
The Ancestry.com team spent two years examining Mr. Obama’s mother’s past, focusing on the mixed-race Bunch line. The researchers said that over time, as the Bunches continued to intermarry, they became prominent landowners in colonial Virginia and were known as white.
“We sort of stumbled across it,” said Anastasia Harman, the lead researcher. “We were just doing general research into the president’s family tree, and as we started digging back in time, we realized that the Bunch family were African-American.”
There is no evidence that Ms. Dunham had any inkling that she might have had African-American ancestry, said Janny Scott, her biographer. By the mid-1800s, according to a 2007 article in The Chicago Sun-Times, one of Ms. Dunham’s Bunch ancestors had a son who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War.
The Ancestry.com group traced two major Bunch family branches, one that lived as white and stayed in Virginia for generations and another that left for the Carolinas. In North Carolina, the Bunches were recorded as “mulatto” in early records, and their descendants are also the president’s cousins.
Mr. Obama descends from the Virginia branch, which eventually migrated to Tennessee, where his great-great-great-great-grandmother Anna Bunch was born. Her daughter Frances Allred, who was born in 1834, moved to Kansas. Four generations later, in 1942, with the family still in Kansas, Mr. Obama’s mother was born.
But the research left open a question: Was John Punch, the slave, a Bunch ancestor? Because records have been destroyed, there is no definitive proof.
Still, some factors led Ms. Harman and her group to a conclusion. The surnames were similar. There was DNA evidence showing that the Bunches had sub-Saharan African heritage. And a very small number of Africans were living in Virginia in the mid-1600s. All that convinced the team that the nation’s first black president was descended from Mr. Punch. “The odds, based on what does actually survive, strongly suggest that President Barack Obama is a descendant (he would be the 11th great-grandson) of the first enslaved African in America,” Ms. Harman and her team wrote in a research paper that Ancestry.com intended to release on its Web site on Monday.
The team shared its findings with The New York Times, which consulted two independent genealogists — Ms. Mills, who specializes in Southern genealogy, and Johni Cerny, who specializes in black ancestry — about the findings. Both said there was no way to be certain of the Punch-Bunch connection. But both also said the Ancestry.com team made a solid case.
“The research, I am convinced, is sound,” said Ms. Mills, who also reviewed the findings at Ancestry.com’s request. “The P and the B are virtually meaningless in historical context. What matters is the historical evidence that can be mustered to place the same people in the same area.”
Ms. Cerny was more skeptical but said the research team’s careful wording was appropriate. “I’m sure people will be tantalized and try to prove or disprove it,” she said. “But what they’re saying is very safe and appropriate. I would be tempted myself to try to make that connection.”
One reason the Ancestry.com team could make the connection was the Bunch family itself. The extended family maintains an online database that traces the family tree. It is supplemented by DNA testing showing that the men in the family have genetic markers consistent with sub-Saharan African descent. The Ancestry.com paper said the Bunches’ particular DNA profile was common in Cameroon.
“I consider myself Caucasian, but I find that my mixed-race roots go way back,” said Mark Bunch, who administers the Bunch family project.
Mr. Bunch, 53, the finance director for a community hospital in the agricultural town of Othello, in eastern Washington State, learned of the project several years ago from a cousin. He bought a home DNA test kit, swabbed the inside of his cheek three times and sent it off for analysis. What came back — a genetic blueprint that included sub-Saharan African roots — surprised Mr. Bunch. Then came another surprise: President Obama was a distant cousin.
“I’m his fifth cousin twice removed,” Mr. Bunch said. “Of more surprise was the African Y chromosome. The relationship to President Obama was kind of the icing on the cake after that.”
Read this also from The Guardian (take note of the phrase “may be”):
Barack Obama may be descendant of first African slave in colonial America
Genealogy website Ancestry.com finds that the president's white mother is the progeny of America's first documented slave
President Obama is distantly related to Warren Buffet, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh, according to Ancestry.com. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP Amanda Holpuch
Monday 30 July 2012
A study of Barack Obama's family history has revealed that he is likely to be a descendant of the first African enslaved in the American colonies.
Perhaps surprisingly, the line to the president's 11th great-grandfather was traced through the president's white mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, whose ancestors were some of the first African American settlers of colonial America. According to the genealogy website Ancestry.com Dunham is a descendant of John Punch, who was an indentured servant in colonial Virginia and became enslaved for life in 1640 as punishment for an attempted escape. His case is the first documented proof of someone being enslaved for life in the colonies and happened before Virginia enacted slavery laws.
"Two of the most historically significant African Americans in the history of our country are, amazingly, directly related," said Ancestry.com genealogist Joseph Shumway in a statement. "John Punch was more than likely the genesis of legalized slavery in America. But after centuries of suffering, the civil war, and decades of civil rights efforts, his 11th great-grandson became the leader of the free world and the ultimate realization of the American dream."
The genealogy website said that after discovering Obama's mother's African heritage, they decided to delve deeper into the president's African roots. Their findings assert that Dunham's Virginia land-owner ancestors were the progeny of Punch and a white woman whose free status passed on to their children.
To make the connection, the genealogists analyzed historical documents and conducted DNA analysis. Due to the destruction of certain historical documents, their analysis relies on some impossible-to-prove conclusions, but the team is confident with their results. The New York Times reached out to genealogist Elizabeth Shown Mills and another genealogist not affiliated with Ancestry.com to confirm that the study was sound.
Mills, who specializes in southern genealogy, said in a statement: "Genealogical research on individuals who lived hundreds of years ago can never definitively prove that one man fathered another, but this research meets the highest standards and can be offered with confidence."
Johni Cerny, a specialist in black ancestry, told the New York Times: "I'm sure people will be tantalized and try to prove or disprove it, but what they're saying is very safe and appropriate. I would be tempted myself to try to make that connection."
Previous Ancestry.com findings on Obama's family tree show that the president has Irish and German roots and is distantly related to Warren Buffet, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh.
Read this also:
Obama Slave-Ancestry Report Misses Mark
Two scholars dispute assertions that a 17th-century forebear was one of the first documented slaves. By: Linda Heywood, Ph.D., and John Thornton, Ph.D.
Posted: July 31 2012 3:17 PM
Barack Obama (Jim Watson/AFP); Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham (The Root) -- Monday's New York Times article on President Obama's roots in Southern slavery through his mother has reopened the contention that the first Africans brought to Virginia were indentured servants and not slaves. While some observers, such as writer Alondra Nelson, may contend that genealogy studies prove little beyond how closely all members of the human family are related, they are invaluable for understanding the greater past.
Yesterday's news was also about real historical events and the ability to bring the past alive. There was a real John Punch, real laws that defined his status in a racializing America and real descendants who made certain decisions in the evolving marketplace of American race relations. These past decisions have major implications about the way that contemporary Americans view themselves and fellow Americans.
That being said, the issue is a complicated one. As professors of history and African-American studies at Boston University, we have been unraveling the story of the first African arrivals in Virginia over the past decade, and despite suggestions to the contrary in the New York Times article, we can assert that Africans were not indentured servants as Europeans were.
As stated in the Times piece, genealogists from Ancestry.com said they have evidence that "strongly suggests" that through his white mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, President Obama had an enslaved ancestor in the 17th century named John Punch: "In 1640, Mr. Punch, then an indentured servant, escaped from Virginia and went to Maryland. He was captured there and, along with two white servants who had also escaped, was put on trial. His punishment -- servitude for life -- was harsher than what the white servants received, and it has led some historians to regard him as the first African to be legally sanctioned as a slave, years before Virginia adopted laws allowing slavery."
We should immediately note, though, that the word "slave" was rarely used in documents generated in Virginia in 1640 -- at least, not in the legal sense of a condition of constant and
inheritable servitude. Africans were, however, usually identified in documents as "negroes." In fact, this was by far the most common term for people of African descent in Virginia records.
"Negro" was not, of course, an English word but, rather, a Portuguese one. It entered English in the late 16th century and with specific reference to Africans because Portugal was the only European nation engaged in the slave trade, and the Portuguese used this word specifically to designate slaves.
The word was not confined to slaves from Africa. Brazilian records routinely use the term negros da terra (Negroes of the country) to describe Native Americans held as slaves in sugar plantations during the same period.
When the word appeared in Virginia in 1619, it referred to Africans taken from Portuguese ships -- as were all slaves brought to English and Dutch colonies in North America -- and took on the Portuguese meaning of slavery. For the Portuguese, there was no confusion about what slavery was: a permanent, lifelong and inheritable condition of servitude that could be relieved only by manumission from the master.
The question then, is, would Africans arriving in Virginia under these circumstances be given contracts of indenture for a specified term of service, as Englishmen and other Europeans were? There are few records of indentures for anyone in early Virginia, since many contracts were only verbal, but we think it most unlikely that they would have been.
Virginians in general probably understood things this way: The Africans were captives of the Portuguese, were held as slaves by them and were now recaptured by English privateers. This made the terms of their service indefinite, and the person who bought them decided what the term would be. For some it meant a lifetime; for others, maybe less time. The fact that the courts formalized the Africans' status in a series of rulings between 1639 and 1664 and ruled that they could be held indefinitely thus differentiated them from the English, Scots, Irish and so on. This is the first formal indication that white Virginians viewed Africans as people with indefinite tenure, different from Europeans.
In fact, we would argue that for a while -- perhaps as many as 30 years from 1639 -- the whole approach was quite ad hoc. The community might have had a say in these matters, sort of general opinion, but we have absolutely no way of knowing what their mindset was.
When John Punch was captured as a runaway with two white servants, the court extended his term of service to lifelong. In this case, the court made a definitive decision only about his length of service, but the other Africans may well have had to serve for life before him, lacking the contract needed to be guaranteed freedom. In their cases, the terms were irregular and determined by their masters. The Times article also mentioned that Punch had a DNA haplogroup common in the Cameroon. We consider this extremely unlikely. Our research shows clearly that the overwhelming majority of Africans brought to America on Portuguese ships before 1640 were enslaved in Angola. At that time, there was no slave trade at all from Cameroon.
We also know that the DNA haplogroups commonly found in Cameroon today are also widely distributed in Angola, but because existing databases of DNA have large samples from Cameroon and much fewer from Angola, the Cameroon matches are much more likely to be from Angola.
John Punch, therefore, was likely an Angolan, not a Cameroonian.
Linda Heywood, Ph.D., and John Thornton, Ph.D., are professors of history and African-
al 9 years ago
Women harassment happens everywhere in Africa even in Ghana. Stop pretending it doesn't happen. Kenyans are just too connected nowadays,unlike many other African Countries, that's why the news is spreading fast, but this happ ... read full comment
Women harassment happens everywhere in Africa even in Ghana. Stop pretending it doesn't happen. Kenyans are just too connected nowadays,unlike many other African Countries, that's why the news is spreading fast, but this happens in many African Countries and nothing happens to the perpetrators.
Its actually a good thing that folks are putting the videos online so as to bring attention to an issue that happens allover Africa alot.
Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D. 9 years ago
Eii this fake Prof. Ahoofe-DNA-Technologist again:
We all know the next forgery you, Professor Perpetual Liar, are going to come up is to tell the world that this Ghanaian is from Akyem, and that this Ghanaian is an anc ... read full comment
Eii this fake Prof. Ahoofe-DNA-Technologist again:
We all know the next forgery you, Professor Perpetual Liar, are going to come up is to tell the world that this Ghanaian is from Akyem, and that this Ghanaian is an ancestor of JB Danquah, the well-know political and intellectual failure!
This guy who calls himself a professor! How of President Obama’s writings have you read? You are always disgracing yourself with ignorance. If you had followed President Obama’s maternal ancestry closely, you would have realized that the African ancestry of President Obama’s mother’s side (Y-DNA) is Cameroonian. Read more about JOHN PUNCH (and Ralph Bunche, first Black American awarded the Nobel Peace Prize). The Punch (or Bunch) family of whom President Obama’s mother is partly believed to have come from is Cameroonian. Moreover, there are many questions surrounding the Ancestry.com analysis. YOU DON’T SEEM TO HAVE ANY CLUES ON ANY TOPIC YOU WRITE ON. WHAT A SHAME?
NO WHERE DOES ANY OF THE DNA FINDINGS SPECIFICALLY POINT TO GHANA. IN ANY CASE, ARE YOU TALKING OF THE OLD “GHANA” EMPIRE OR THE GHANA OF 1957? DID YOU MEAN THE GOLD COAST AS SLAVERY WAS NOT GOING ON IN THE 1950s IN GHANA?
Read the following from The New York Times:
Obama Has Ties to Slavery Not by His Father but His Mother, Research Suggests By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: July 30, 2012 WASHINGTON — President Obama’s biography — son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas — has long suggested that unlike most African-Americans, his roots did not include slavery.
Rajah Bose for The New York Times
One tool used by a team of genealogists over the course of two years was an online database maintained by the Bunch family.
Now a team of genealogists is upending that thinking, saying that Mr. Obama’s mother had, in addition to her European ancestors, at least one African forebear and that the president is most likely descended from one of the first documented African slaves in the United States.
The findings are scheduled to be announced on Monday by Ancestry.com, a genealogy company based in Provo, Utah. Its team, while lacking definitive proof, said it had evidence that “strongly suggests” Mr. Obama’s family tree — on his mother’s side — stretches back nearly four centuries to a slave in colonial Virginia named John Punch.
In 1640, Mr. Punch, then an indentured servant, escaped from Virginia and went to Maryland. He was captured there and, along with two white servants who had also escaped, was put on trial. His punishment — servitude for life — was harsher than what the white servants received, and it has led some historians to regard him as the first African to be legally sanctioned as a slave, years before Virginia adopted laws allowing slavery.
Historians say there was a trade in human labor, of both whites and blacks, during this period in American history. There were also some free African-Americans. Beginning around 1617, indentured servants were bought and sold, as were debtors, in the Chesapeake Bay region, said Ira Berlin, a University of Maryland professor and expert in the history of slavery. But while those people were in an “unfree condition,” he said, historians cannot pinpoint a date for the beginning of the slave trade.
“What makes the John Punch case interesting is here is a guy who is definitely a slave,” said Professor Berlin, who did not participate in the examination of the president’s ancestors.
The Ancestry.com team used DNA analysis to make the connection, and it also combed through marriage and property records to trace Mr. Obama’s maternal ancestry to the time and place where Mr. Punch lived. The company said records suggested that Mr. Punch fathered children with a white woman, who passed her free status on to those children, giving rise to a family of a slightly different name, the Bunches, that ultimately spawned Mr. Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham.
The findings come as more and more Americans are discovering their own mixed-race heritage. Elizabeth Shown Mills, a former president of the American Society of Genealogists, said the Internet, coupled with the ease of DNA testing and heightened interest among both amateur and professional genealogists, was helping to reveal the extent of racial intermingling over the centuries.
“It is becoming increasingly common now because people are discovering it,” Ms. Mills said. “In the past, very few records were available. Very few people made the effort to do the research.”
The Ancestry.com team spent two years examining Mr. Obama’s mother’s past, focusing on the mixed-race Bunch line. The researchers said that over time, as the Bunches continued to intermarry, they became prominent landowners in colonial Virginia and were known as white.
“We sort of stumbled across it,” said Anastasia Harman, the lead researcher. “We were just doing general research into the president’s family tree, and as we started digging back in time, we realized that the Bunch family were African-American.”
There is no evidence that Ms. Dunham had any inkling that she might have had African-American ancestry, said Janny Scott, her biographer. By the mid-1800s, according to a 2007 article in The Chicago Sun-Times, one of Ms. Dunham’s Bunch ancestors had a son who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War.
The Ancestry.com group traced two major Bunch family branches, one that lived as white and stayed in Virginia for generations and another that left for the Carolinas. In North Carolina, the Bunches were recorded as “mulatto” in early records, and their descendants are also the president’s cousins.
Mr. Obama descends from the Virginia branch, which eventually migrated to Tennessee, where his great-great-great-great-grandmother Anna Bunch was born. Her daughter Frances Allred, who was born in 1834, moved to Kansas. Four generations later, in 1942, with the family still in Kansas, Mr. Obama’s mother was born.
But the research left open a question: Was John Punch, the slave, a Bunch ancestor? Because records have been destroyed, there is no definitive proof.
Still, some factors led Ms. Harman and her group to a conclusion. The surnames were similar. There was DNA evidence showing that the Bunches had sub-Saharan African heritage. And a very small number of Africans were living in Virginia in the mid-1600s. All that convinced the team that the nation’s first black president was descended from Mr. Punch. “The odds, based on what does actually survive, strongly suggest that President Barack Obama is a descendant (he would be the 11th great-grandson) of the first enslaved African in America,” Ms. Harman and her team wrote in a research paper that Ancestry.com intended to release on its Web site on Monday.
The team shared its findings with The New York Times, which consulted two independent genealogists — Ms. Mills, who specializes in Southern genealogy, and Johni Cerny, who specializes in black ancestry — about the findings. Both said there was no way to be certain of the Punch-Bunch connection. But both also said the Ancestry.com team made a solid case.
“The research, I am convinced, is sound,” said Ms. Mills, who also reviewed the findings at Ancestry.com’s request. “The P and the B are virtually meaningless in historical context. What matters is the historical evidence that can be mustered to place the same people in the same area.”
Ms. Cerny was more skeptical but said the research team’s careful wording was appropriate. “I’m sure people will be tantalized and try to prove or disprove it,” she said. “But what they’re saying is very safe and appropriate. I would be tempted myself to try to make that connection.”
One reason the Ancestry.com team could make the connection was the Bunch family itself. The extended family maintains an online database that traces the family tree. It is supplemented by DNA testing showing that the men in the family have genetic markers consistent with sub-Saharan African descent. The Ancestry.com paper said the Bunches’ particular DNA profile was common in Cameroon.
“I consider myself Caucasian, but I find that my mixed-race roots go way back,” said Mark Bunch, who administers the Bunch family project.
Mr. Bunch, 53, the finance director for a community hospital in the agricultural town of Othello, in eastern Washington State, learned of the project several years ago from a cousin. He bought a home DNA test kit, swabbed the inside of his cheek three times and sent it off for analysis. What came back — a genetic blueprint that included sub-Saharan African roots — surprised Mr. Bunch. Then came another surprise: President Obama was a distant cousin.
“I’m his fifth cousin twice removed,” Mr. Bunch said. “Of more surprise was the African Y chromosome. The relationship to President Obama was kind of the icing on the cake after that.”
Read this also from The Guardian (take note of the phrase “may be”):
Barack Obama may be descendant of first African slave in colonial America
Genealogy website Ancestry.com finds that the president's white mother is the progeny of America's first documented slave
President Obama is distantly related to Warren Buffet, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh, according to Ancestry.com. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP Amanda Holpuch
Monday 30 July 2012
A study of Barack Obama's family history has revealed that he is likely to be a descendant of the first African enslaved in the American colonies.
Perhaps surprisingly, the line to the president's 11th great-grandfather was traced through the president's white mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, whose ancestors were some of the first African American settlers of colonial America. According to the genealogy website Ancestry.com Dunham is a descendant of John Punch, who was an indentured servant in colonial Virginia and became enslaved for life in 1640 as punishment for an attempted escape. His case is the first documented proof of someone being enslaved for life in the colonies and happened before Virginia enacted slavery laws.
"Two of the most historically significant African Americans in the history of our country are, amazingly, directly related," said Ancestry.com genealogist Joseph Shumway in a statement. "John Punch was more than likely the genesis of legalized slavery in America. But after centuries of suffering, the civil war, and decades of civil rights efforts, his 11th great-grandson became the leader of the free world and the ultimate realization of the American dream."
The genealogy website said that after discovering Obama's mother's African heritage, they decided to delve deeper into the president's African roots. Their findings assert that Dunham's Virginia land-owner ancestors were the progeny of Punch and a white woman whose free status passed on to their children.
To make the connection, the genealogists analyzed historical documents and conducted DNA analysis. Due to the destruction of certain historical documents, their analysis relies on some impossible-to-prove conclusions, but the team is confident with their results. The New York Times reached out to genealogist Elizabeth Shown Mills and another genealogist not affiliated with Ancestry.com to confirm that the study was sound.
Mills, who specializes in southern genealogy, said in a statement: "Genealogical research on individuals who lived hundreds of years ago can never definitively prove that one man fathered another, but this research meets the highest standards and can be offered with confidence."
Johni Cerny, a specialist in black ancestry, told the New York Times: "I'm sure people will be tantalized and try to prove or disprove it, but what they're saying is very safe and appropriate. I would be tempted myself to try to make that connection."
Previous Ancestry.com findings on Obama's family tree show that the president has Irish and German roots and is distantly related to Warren Buffet, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh.
Read this also:
Obama Slave-Ancestry Report Misses Mark
Two scholars dispute assertions that a 17th-century forebear was one of the first documented slaves. By: Linda Heywood, Ph.D., and John Thornton, Ph.D.
Posted: July 31 2012 3:17 PM
Barack Obama (Jim Watson/AFP); Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham (The Root) -- Monday's New York Times article on President Obama's roots in Southern slavery through his mother has reopened the contention that the first Africans brought to Virginia were indentured servants and not slaves. While some observers, such as writer Alondra Nelson, may contend that genealogy studies prove little beyond how closely all members of the human family are related, they are invaluable for understanding the greater past.
Yesterday's news was also about real historical events and the ability to bring the past alive. There was a real John Punch, real laws that defined his status in a racializing America and real descendants who made certain decisions in the evolving marketplace of American race relations. These past decisions have major implications about the way that contemporary Americans view themselves and fellow Americans.
That being said, the issue is a complicated one. As professors of history and African-American studies at Boston University, we have been unraveling the story of the first African arrivals in Virginia over the past decade, and despite suggestions to the contrary in the New York Times article, we can assert that Africans were not indentured servants as Europeans were.
As stated in the Times piece, genealogists from Ancestry.com said they have evidence that "strongly suggests" that through his white mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, President Obama had an enslaved ancestor in the 17th century named John Punch: "In 1640, Mr. Punch, then an indentured servant, escaped from Virginia and went to Maryland. He was captured there and, along with two white servants who had also escaped, was put on trial. His punishment -- servitude for life -- was harsher than what the white servants received, and it has led some historians to regard him as the first African to be legally sanctioned as a slave, years before Virginia adopted laws allowing slavery."
We should immediately note, though, that the word "slave" was rarely used in documents generated in Virginia in 1640 -- at least, not in the legal sense of a condition of constant and
inheritable servitude. Africans were, however, usually identified in documents as "negroes." In fact, this was by far the most common term for people of African descent in Virginia records.
"Negro" was not, of course, an English word but, rather, a Portuguese one. It entered English in the late 16th century and with specific reference to Africans because Portugal was the only European nation engaged in the slave trade, and the Portuguese used this word specifically to designate slaves.
The word was not confined to slaves from Africa. Brazilian records routinely use the term negros da terra (Negroes of the country) to describe Native Americans held as slaves in sugar plantations during the same period.
When the word appeared in Virginia in 1619, it referred to Africans taken from Portuguese ships -- as were all slaves brought to English and Dutch colonies in North America -- and took on the Portuguese meaning of slavery. For the Portuguese, there was no confusion about what slavery was: a permanent, lifelong and inheritable condition of servitude that could be relieved only by manumission from the master.
The question then, is, would Africans arriving in Virginia under these circumstances be given contracts of indenture for a specified term of service, as Englishmen and other Europeans were? There are few records of indentures for anyone in early Virginia, since many contracts were only verbal, but we think it most unlikely that they would have been.
Virginians in general probably understood things this way: The Africans were captives of the Portuguese, were held as slaves by them and were now recaptured by English privateers. This made the terms of their service indefinite, and the person who bought them decided what the term would be. For some it meant a lifetime; for others, maybe less time. The fact that the courts formalized the Africans' status in a series of rulings between 1639 and 1664 and ruled that they could be held indefinitely thus differentiated them from the English, Scots, Irish and so on. This is the first formal indication that white Virginians viewed Africans as people with indefinite tenure, different from Europeans.
In fact, we would argue that for a while -- perhaps as many as 30 years from 1639 -- the whole approach was quite ad hoc. The community might have had a say in these matters, sort of general opinion, but we have absolutely no way of knowing what their mindset was.
When John Punch was captured as a runaway with two white servants, the court extended his term of service to lifelong. In this case, the court made a definitive decision only about his length of service, but the other Africans may well have had to serve for life before him, lacking the contract needed to be guaranteed freedom. In their cases, the terms were irregular and determined by their masters. The Times article also mentioned that Punch had a DNA haplogroup common in the Cameroon. We consider this extremely unlikely. Our research shows clearly that the overwhelming majority of Africans brought to America on Portuguese ships before 1640 were enslaved in Angola. At that time, there was no slave trade at all from Cameroon.
We also know that the DNA haplogroups commonly found in Cameroon today are also widely distributed in Angola, but because existing databases of DNA have large samples from Cameroon and much fewer from Angola, the Cameroon matches are much more likely to be from Angola.
John Punch, therefore, was likely an Angolan, not a Cameroonian.
Linda Heywood, Ph.D., and John Thornton, Ph.D., are professors of history and African-
Military Man 9 years ago
' As of this writing, Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta, son of the country's first postcolonial leader, was facing criminal charges at The Hague, over the massacre of tens of armless civilians in the aftermath of the country' ... read full comment
' As of this writing, Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta, son of the country's first postcolonial leader, was facing criminal charges at The Hague, over the massacre of tens of armless civilians in the aftermath of the country's last general election. The then-Candidate Kenyatta was accused of having ordered the brutal "pacification" of many of the victims'.
I hope this is a misprint...
I know you pride yourself in the use and understanding of the Queen's English but you got me confused here, Kwame.
I know I don't have degrees coming out of my ying yang but I'm also an admirer of the Queen's English even though Engineering is my stock in trade.
Reading and understanding the English language was a passion I developed in my elementary school days in Ghana and it has served me well in my professional life.
I short, I like to have a good grasp on any material I read so I'm trying to understand the quotes above.
Were these civilians amputees (as in without arms and legs) or were they un-armed( as in without weapons like guns, machetes, clubs, etc.)?
Just trying to understand your paragraphs so that I can string them together to get a full picture or understanding of your piece.
I like reading your pieces.. I might not always agree with you on some topics but I still like to read them and get an understanding of where you are coming from.
YAW 9 years ago
Pacification is an attempt to create or maintain peace.What is brutal pacification? The Mau Mau uprising started from 1952-1960.Only a hopeless professor like Okoampa can claim it started from 1940"s to 1950"s.Once Okoampa to ... read full comment
Pacification is an attempt to create or maintain peace.What is brutal pacification? The Mau Mau uprising started from 1952-1960.Only a hopeless professor like Okoampa can claim it started from 1940"s to 1950"s.Once Okoampa touches a topic,the facts are lost forever.
Agyeman 9 years ago
Huge blunder by this author.Kenyatta was not even running for office that time,it was Odinga vs Kibaki.
Huge blunder by this author.Kenyatta was not even running for office that time,it was Odinga vs Kibaki.
Stupid oldman
Strong partisanship started in Ghana when Kwame Nkrumah divided the nation into patriots and traitors. Patriots were those who accepted that he should be president for life, practice communism and one party state, and indulge ...
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How are you Sarpong,the man with a thousand monikers.Only evildoers do that.
For once you are on target
He died this morning
You just rush to write anything that comes to mind without checking the facts.Such infantile goofs are not the hallmark of acdemics but not Ahoofe whose descent in academic protocol has become a breathtaking exercise.
For ...
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Don't let your mouth get you into something that your stinky ass can not get you out of.
PS: And I am no fan of Ahoofe.
Odikro, you dirty creature in Belgium who calls himself Nana, "Kwasea" get youself a job doing and stop you primitive nonsense.
Ah! that is the Odikro, the "Tanii" Ali Masmadi who calls himself Nana Akyea Mensah. What is your beef here? Know that you can probaly run but you can't hide, everywhere you go, just like MTN in Ghana, you will forever remain ...
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When will you will write about the barbaric shootings of african-Americans everyday in the US?
Eii this fake Prof. Ahoofe-DNA-Technologist again:
We all know the next forgery you, Professor Perpetual Liar, are going to come up is to tell the world that this Ghanaian is from Akyem, and that this Ghanaian is an ances ...
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Women harassment happens everywhere in Africa even in Ghana. Stop pretending it doesn't happen. Kenyans are just too connected nowadays,unlike many other African Countries, that's why the news is spreading fast, but this happ ...
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Eii this fake Prof. Ahoofe-DNA-Technologist again:
We all know the next forgery you, Professor Perpetual Liar, are going to come up is to tell the world that this Ghanaian is from Akyem, and that this Ghanaian is an anc ...
read full comment
' As of this writing, Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta, son of the country's first postcolonial leader, was facing criminal charges at The Hague, over the massacre of tens of armless civilians in the aftermath of the country' ...
read full comment
Pacification is an attempt to create or maintain peace.What is brutal pacification? The Mau Mau uprising started from 1952-1960.Only a hopeless professor like Okoampa can claim it started from 1940"s to 1950"s.Once Okoampa to ...
read full comment
Huge blunder by this author.Kenyatta was not even running for office that time,it was Odinga vs Kibaki.