FREETOWN - In Sierra Leone, African Americans who traced their roots to the West African country are being given citizenship based on DNA tests showing their ancestral ties — becoming the first African country to do so, writes Adama Munu for Okayafrica.
Several Black Americans are paving the way for members of the diaspora to find their way back to their ancestral home of Sierra Leone.
It has paved the way for “hundreds of thousands of Black people in the diaspora” to discover their links to African ethnic groups or present-day nation-states, after slavery severed those ties.
It is December 2022, dozens of African-Americans sat under a tent on the grounds of the Sierra Leonean Presidential Palace complex waiting to receive their Sierra Leonean passports.
