My brothers and sisters and I were precocious, cosmopolitan children. We used to ask our parents not to use any of the funny-sounding words and nicknames when our school friends came over to visit. They humored us, and didn’t use the words until after our friends had gone, then they resumed telling their after-dinner, belly-laughing stories about our ancestors. I used to love our Sunday afternoon storytelling fests. I collected the funny-sounding names and let them vibrate on my tongue. Ancestral men nicknamed TunTun, Budhus, Bundu, Prum, Bollo, Cudjo, Bazzi, Cuffie, Nunci, Puizi, and women named Cici, Addi, Ici, Mirri, Nen, NiNi, Mandi came alive in my mind and filled my childhood imagination.

Years later, after I had finished college, I called a linguist-anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution and asked him if there was any way to trace these nicknames to our ancestral homeland. (My nickname is Miss Par; my father’s is Pari, and my mother’s is Dockyi. I also have an uncle nicknamed Ba, and two great-grandmothers nicknamed Nunus and Mmeme.) The linguist told me that Ba means "child" in the Twi language of the Akan people of Ghana, West Africa. He said my father’s nickname, Pari, is a shortened version of the Akan people’s family surname, Opare. And in Africa today, many members of the Opare families use the anglicized version of their surname Pari.

I took a deep breath and sat down. As luck would have it, he had more information about the names of my African American ancestors. He told me that my father’s nickname is unique to the Akuapim people, a branch of twelve of the Akan people of Ghana. The Akuapim people are farmers in the hills near the villages of Aburi, Akropong, Larteh, Mamfe, and Mampong, which overlook Ghana’s coast and the capital city of Accra.

I went to several churches in New York and met Ghanaians whose ancestral homes were the villages of Ashanti, Akuapim, Ga, Fante, Akwamu, Kwamu, and Akyem. And some of these people were named Opare.

I also found the name Opare in the logbooks of a British slave-trading agent from 1650. The agent had met a Captain Opare, an agricultural captain, whose people were farmers in the inland hills. The Akaupim people’s farmlands were on the routes of the gold and slave traders, and they fought many civil wars to preserve their lands and their children’s freedom. When they lost a civil war, the defeated people were shipped to America as slaves. I was able to trace the ships my Opare ancestors traveled on from the African coasts.

In 1999, when I read in the newspaper that geneticists of the Human Genome Diversity Project were able to use DNA to trace ancestors, I contacted Dr. Michael Hammer, a member of the worldwide research project. I told him that I already knew my African ancestors but that I wished to do DNA testing to confirm my search.

I went to church and asked people to use cotton-tipped swabs to swipe the inside of their cheeks. I collected DNA samples from more than three dozen people and sent them to a lab to be compared to my father’s DNA samples. When Dr. Hammer’s research assistant confirmed that my father’s African American DNA matched the DNA of three dozen Akuapim people from Ghana, we recovered four hundred years of history. Our DNA matched the DNA of people who are farmers, ministers, engineers, nurses, attorneys, and writers–all skills similar to my family’s.

But it was the Akuapim heritage of farming that caught my attention. While my father was growing enough vegetables to feed half the neighborhood each summer, my Akuapim people far away were growing food to feed their own villages. I will be going to the Akuapim people’s Harvest Festivals in the hills of Ghana this fall; I’m sure I will discover more about these people whose lives are not so different from mine.

Return to the Ancestry Magazine July/August 2001 Table of Contents.