I married my cousin. Before you judge me, let me explain. We are divorced (unrelated to above confession) but remain great friends — could this be because of a warm, familiar connection?

Much hilarity about this discovery aside, we are only seventh cousins, which means there are a few hundred years between us and our common ancestor. This might sound alarming but, apparently, if you still live in the general area your relatives did, it’s likely you have met, and perhaps even married, a distant cousin. 

Start looking into your genealogy, the study of ancestors and family history, and you are sure to find a skeleton or 10 in your closet.

I started my genealogy journey in 2019, inspired by the TV series Finding Your Roots. It is the creation of historian Henry Louis Gates, director of the Hutchins Centre for African and African American Research at Harvard in the US. His interest in genealogy came from the 1977 miniseries Roots. It made him dream of finding his African ancestry and helping other people do the same — not easy, because much African American ancestry is unknown and only found in slave-ownership records.

Finding Your Roots is a fascinating investigation into the lineage of well-known Americans, including artist Kara Walker, politician Condoleezza Rice and comedian Andy Samberg. Using records and DNA analysis, it shows humanity at its best and worst. Often focusing on slavery and African-American heritage, it is a sensitive study of the importance of understanding the past and where you came from. 

Following the line

My family tree is still a work in progress but I have unearthed fascinating stories that are interwoven with South Africa’s past.

I learnt that the women in my family were unbelievably brave and strong. Case in point, my three times great-grandmother, Margaret, was a “Kennaway Girl”. This group of 150 young Irish women were given the name because they travelled to South Africa on the Lady Kennaway ship in 1857 to start a new life as wives for a group of German former soldiers who’d settled in the Eastern Cape. 

I also discovered my two times great-grandmother, Mimi, died in an Anglo-Boer War concentration camp. 

Then there was proving who an illegitimate relative’s mother was. For the first time in 118 years, we proudly added her to our family tree. 

Court documents showed this courageous woman sued a man who promised marriage, seduced her, and left her pregnant. Scandalous in conservative 1904, she took him for everything he was worth, including a buggy and some sheep. 

Having recently lost my father, I’m grateful we could build our family tree together while he was still alive. 

Do it yourself

If you’re feeling inspired to do some ancestral digging of your own, there are some practical places to start. My first step was to start a free account on familysearch.org. This non-profit platform is the world’s largest shared family tree, dedicated to helping people discover their family story. The site lets you build your own tree and puts millions of digitised records at your fingertips. 

FamilySearch.org is owned and run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). They have a deep involvement in genealogical research and believe it’s essential for people to strengthen relationships with family members (alive or dead), so they can be together after this life. 

Wayne van As, FamilySearch Southern Africa’s area manager, says: “We go out and negotiate with governments, churches and archives for their records. We then provide them with a mutually beneficial agreement and basically preserve their records. We also provide them with a digital donor copy of everything that we digitised for them, in exchange for allowing us to put these records on familysearch.org.”

An alternative to FamilySearch is ancestory.com, the world’s largest for-profit genealogy company. Although it is pricey — it costs up to $60 (R1 000) a month — it offers over 30-billion records, including census, military and immigration records. Chatting to older family members — even if their memories are vague — was useful, because there is generally some truth in what they recall. 

Googling historic events that acted as a backdrop for my ancestors’ stories helped, as did online national archives. The result — my family tree now runs to the 1400s. I also did a course with Natalie da Silva of the Joburg branch of the Genealogical Society of SA. This is a great introduction to the extensive archives and records available, especially for those who are not comfortable with online searches and apps.

If research isn’t your thing, you can hire an expert to put in the hard miles. 

Heather MacAlister, a respected family tree and genealogy researcher, runs ancestors.co.za. Of her work she says: “Clients come to me for all sorts of reasons. From helping people who are adopted to try and source original birth entries that home affairs can’t find, to naturalisations, to working with film companies to do research. And even aiding probate lawyers from around the world looking for heirs in South Africa.”

Not so easy

It would be remiss not to discuss what this ancestral-tracing process is like for black South Africans. When I spoke to friends of colour, a general thread was that they knew very little, despite having strong family stories and a tradition of family names. 

This got me thinking about what colonial and apartheid records are like for people of colour and what effect the migrant labour system and cross-border migration had on the genealogical record. I tried researching two friends’ families, one Pedi from Limpopo, the other coloured, from Johannesburg. This was harder than researching my own line — the paper trail is severely limited. 

MacAlister explains, “One also needs to distinguish between black and coloured and Indian. For example, coloured is much easier [to trace] than black ancestry.”

Most experts I chatted to had seldom been asked to research people of colour’s families. On this point, Van As says: “For a long time, people of African descent didn’t think records were kept but they were. If a person of colour had an estate, or if they have left something behind, their last will and testament is recorded at the master’s office.”

The department of home affairs also has records, such as death notices, births and marriages, of African people.  There are lots of sources of African records if you know where to look but, too often, people focus on European descent. 

Da Silva has been working on compiling a database of indigenous marriages in early Johannesburg. And FamilySearch is always looking for opportunities to digitise records. Van As says a good example of this is the apartheid-era “dompas”, or pass, records which the LDS church has been trying to track down for years, having heard there are shipping containers full of them somewhere. 

Van As advises a good way to get started is to contact family members. 

“Go back to the family village and sit down with the village elders to discuss your family. Find out who the first ancestors were and gather as much info as possible. Of course, bearing in mind many people have migrated from villages to the city, and don’t go back to their homes often. 

“Once you have that info, you can start adding it to familysearch.org. 

“If you are allowed to, record the elders speaking — oral history recordings are important as it’s normally done in people’s own language.”

The LDS church has long recognised the significance of oral record-keeping. FamilySearch has been gathering oral histories in Africa for years, in over 14 countries and are expanding and looking to expand to several countries, including Malawi, Zambia and, hopefully, South Africa. 

“We have just done our millionth interview and from that preserved over 170-million names of people and their ancestors. This is something we are trying to do, so that we can provide an experience on FamilySearch for people that can’t get back to their villages, so then the village will come to them,” says Van As.  

He added, “We have over 10 000 field agents, who go to villages and do the interview on a cellphone. They also take a picture of the person, their family and the village. So, you have the pictures and audio. We then print out and bind all the info we have recorded, giving a copy back to the village and community.”

Cracking the code

Archival and oral history research go hand in hand with a DNA test. 

“The paper trail can be full of errors, so having your DNA tested will complement your paper research,” MacAlister says, “especially if you don’t know who your parents, grandparents or great-grandparents were.” 

She recommends doing this on ancestry.com as it’s the best for an autosomal DNA test. Once you have got the results, you can download your DNA and upload it to platforms like MyHeritage, FamilyTreeDNA and GEDmatch, where you will find even more DNA matches.

The implication of DNA research is widespread and surprising. For example, the Continuum Project uses genetic science and the arts to explore the identity of African American children who descend from enslaved people. By testing their DNA, they can pinpoint where in Africa they originate from and instil pride in their heritage.

So, skeletons in the closet aside, researching your heritage, whether through oral history, archives or studying genetic makeup, is valuable. After learning about his ancestors on Finding Your Roots, actor Leslie Odom Jr said his search had led to a reimagining of himself. I couldn’t agree more — the roots of your family tree are like an anchor, keeping you steady in a storm.

Source

Source

Source

The Revd John Chilembwe – whose statue will adorn Trafalgar Square from next Wednesday – is notorious for the church service he conducted beneath the severed head of William Jervis Livingstone, a Scottish plantation manager with a reputation for mistreating his workers. The night before, Chilembwe’s followers had broken into his house and chased him from room to room as he tried to fend them off with an unloaded rifle. Eventually, they pinned him down and decapitated him in front of his wife and children. It was the most significant action in the 1915 Chilembwe rebellion, a small, short-lived affair in an obscure corner of the British Empire today known as Malawi.

It says a lot about our times that a figure with Chilembwe’s record should be vaunted with a public statue. The Fourth Plinth Commission announced the decision in July last year, when dispute about statues was intense. The summer before, Black Lives Matter riots had erupted in Britain. Edward Colston was torn down, Gandhi and Churchill were daubed with graffiti. The Chilembwe statue was chosen to shine ‘a spotlight on important issues that our society continues to face’, said Sadiq Khan. In other words, it was a deliberate salvo in the already heated culture wars. But Chilembwe’s real story is an ambiguous one, and I wonder if the Fourth Plinth Commission has got more than it bargained for with this particular contribution to the vexed debate about our past.

The installation is actually a pair of statues: the second figure is John Chorley, an otherwise unremarkable English missionary who was Chilembwe’s friend. An iconic photograph exists of the two men standing together, and it is on this that the statues are based. The artist, Samson Kambalu – a Malawian professor of fine art at Oxford – has cast Chorley much smaller, to diminish him and exalt Chilembwe. Nevertheless, what is astonishing is that Chorley should be there at all: a white missionary to Africa is hardly a common subject for public statuary in the age of identity politics.

‘We have to start putting detail to the black experience… to the African experience, to the post-colonial experience,’ Kambalu has rightly said. And to that end, the story of Malawi is especially useful because it encapsulates so much of Britain’s imperial record in Africa. But it comes with a trigger warning: this is not a straightforward tale of black and white, good and evil. The detail is complicated, and sometimes uncomfortable.

Why is Chorley on the plinth with Chilembwe? Ultimately because British missionaries were essential in the formation of modern Malawi. Before their arrival, it was the land that fed the vast Indian Ocean slave trade, whose largest market was in Zanzibar. For centuries, the Arabs and their indigenous, Islamised accomplices had been capturing and trading slaves in incalculable numbers. David Livingstone called it ‘the open sore of the world’. The issue obsessed him and, in response, he stirred up one of the greatest moral crusades of modern times.

From the 1850s onwards, thousands of young men answered Livingstone’s call, and volunteered for missionary service in Central Africa. In the early years, they died in droves, mostly of disease, their graves scattered throughout the region, and still venerated today. But their sacrifice was matched by their achievement. The societies they encountered were near disintegration thanks to slave raids, war and the ensuing disorder and famine. When the missionaries proposed peace and goodwill to all men, their message was widely welcomed.

Of course the slavers resisted, and an early attempt at armed confrontation ended in disaster. Thereafter, the missionaries operated mainly just through a heroic appeal to better nature. Only a handful of slaver strongholds were subdued by force after the British government had reluctantly established a protectorate in 1891. Otherwise, it is striking how peacefully slavery was extirpated from Malawi. The missionaries then established schools and colleges of towering academic ambition, which quickly produced the first crop of campaigners for independence.

The flip side to missionary endeavour was the colonisation that quickly followed. White settlers and entrepreneurs never came in large numbers as in Kenya or Rhodesia, but the society they created was nonetheless like those that existed throughout the Empire: capable of cruel exploitation, and always permeated with racial injustice. It was against this that Chilembwe reacted with violence.

Born in the 1870s, his mother seems to have been a slave, his father her captor. As a young man, Chilembwe became the servant of an unsuccessful, itinerant English missionary called Joseph Booth, who was to prove the major influence of his life. Booth was a born-again Christian, a socialist, and a fervent critic of colonialism. He was also an enthusiast of an evangelical American cult that believed Christ had returned to Earth a few years earlier and was biding his time until the Battle of Armageddon, scheduled for 1915.

In 1897, Booth took Chilembwe to the United States on a fund-raising tour. The pair were fêted by black American churches, and Chilembwe was sponsored to enrol at a Baptist seminary in Virginia. Two years later, he returned to Malawi as a pastor and founded his own mission. At first he prospered, but his radicalism – acquired from Booth and from America – put him at odds with colonial society, which regarded him with suspicion and disdain. He quarrelled with his white neighbours and denounced them and the government in his sermons. This was grudgingly tolerated until the Germans invaded the colony in 1914, and Chilembwe wrote to a local newspaper objecting to Africans fighting in a war that did not concern them. In response, the authorities decided to deport him. His health and business ventures had been deteriorating for some time. It was also 1915: the year appointed for apocalypse. In what seems to have been a knowingly reckless decision, Chilembwe incited his congregation to rebellion.

Besides the infamous decapitation, the rebels attacked another plantation manager and a business in the town of Blantyre. But far from rising in support, the local population responded with bewilderment and, later, even hostility. A further attack was attempted on a nearby mission station, with whose leaders Chilembwe had long feuded. But the rebels found the place already evacuated, apart from one sick child too unwell to leave, and a missionary who had stayed behind to look after her. The rebels tried to stab him to death, though he later recovered from his wounds.

Everything then petered out as government forces ruthlessly took control of the situation. In the aftermath, 36 of the rebels were sentenced to death, 300 imprisoned. Chilembwe fled into the forest where he was hunted down and shot dead by askaris. His final act had been to write to the Germans seeking alliance. Though the message failed to reach them in time, it was an unedifying gesture. Just a few years before, Germany had suppressed a rebellion in its immense colony to the north by massacring up to 300,000 people.

So why should Chilembwe be celebrated at all? It would, from one angle, be easy to condemn him as a murderous lunatic of little real consequence. And yet there is a poignancy to his example. ‘We will all die by the heavy blow of the whiteman’s army,’ he is reported to have said on the eve of the uprising. ‘The whitemen will think, after we are dead, that the treatment they are treating our people is bad, and they might change to the better for our people.’ In these words, there is dignity of purpose as well as real foresight by which it is difficult not to be moved. Chilembwe bequeathed an example of defiance, courage and sacrifice. The next generation took inspiration from this, though they chose mostly peaceful means in their pursuit of independence. When this was granted in 1964, one of Chilembwe’s own children was still alive to see it.

When you examine the detail, you can ignore neither the injustice nor the beneficence of Empire: both are essential to the story of Malawi. If we celebrate Chilembwe as a hero, there are many others we should also acknowledge, especially the British missionaries: ‘Men good and brave who, to advance knowledge, set free the slave, and hasten Christ’s kingdom in Africa, loved not their lives even unto death’ – to quote the plaque that commemorates them in Zanzibar’s Anglican cathedral.

It is these contradictions that Kambalu captures so admirably, and without rancour, in his pair of statues. Our sententious age needs urgently to be reminded that history is complicated, and the figures who have shaped it are seldom unproblematic. In atonement for his faults, perhaps Chilembwe can now teach us to learn from statues, rather than topple them. Let the Fourth Plinth be his cenotaph, and a place for us all to make peace with our past.

Source