I stood at the end of a long dirt road that reminded me of the TV series Gunsmoke, except that the soil was the russet red color found throughout eastern and southern Africa. I could feel my blouse sticking as the July sun sent sweat streaking down my back. My hands were clammy and my fingers were swollen so much they felt like small sausages.
At twenty-three this was my first trip abroad and everything about it was virgin territory for me: the flight from Chicago to New York, crossing the ocean by ship, taking a ferry from London to The Hague. We’d made a whirlwind trip to the medieval city of Bruges, a brief stop in Communist controlled Prague and then on to view the acropolis in Athens. We had been given a brief history of mid-east tensions by a Jordanian scholar in Aman, visited the pyramids near Cairo, and eaten highly spiced goat meat in Addis Ababa. We had received an overview of Africa in Nairobi before landing in Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanganyika (present day Tanzania).
In the mid 1960s Dar es Salaam was a frontier town – rough and raw – starting from scratch to build something. The dirt road seemed to disappear into cavernous open space blanketed by an impossibly blue sky. A new signboard read Nkrumah Street, recently renamed in honor of the highly celebrated leader of Ghana. On either side of the rusty ribbon road stood low wooden buildings - unpainted, ramshackle, with corroded tin roofs.
Advancing along a row of these wooden sheds, I spotted ahead of us a rickety sign with FRELIMO scrawled in chipping white paint. We arrived at the office of the Mozambique Liberation Front and my heart skipped a beat as my then husband knocked on the shaky door. After a moment, the door creaked open and I could see three dark curly heads hunched over maps on a battered teacher’s desk.
Our research into African liberation movements had begun. We hoped to find clues in post-independence Africa for our work in the black inner city ghetto where we lived in Chicago. I stood among the guerrillas that day and listened to their stories of using community theatre to awaken villagers to the evils of colonialism. My stomach registered so much fear that I felt I might melt into a puddle at any moment. But my head was exploding with electricity.
Looking back, I recall being vaguely aware of Leakey’s discoveries of ancient human skeletons in this area, but I was oblivious to the fact that those dark skinned young soldiers were my distant relatives. We continued to Northern and Southern Rhodesia (present day Zimbabwe and Zambia), Congo Brazzaville, Cameroon, Nigeria, almost to Chad, Ghana, and almost to Timbuktu. At the end of the summer we flew from Accra to Paris and thence to New York and Chicago.
It would be another twenty-five years before mitochondrial DNA research would establish that all humans have descended from one woman in East Africa. It would take another thirteen years after that for the Discovery channel to produce The Real Eve and explain how DNA tracking reveals the migratory routes taken by our ancestors as they left Africa and traveled to all parts of the globe.
Since that summer decades ago, I have traveled all over the world and that first trip had receded into the darker recesses of my memory. It took an event last spring for me to realize it was the trip of a lifetime. Not because it was my only trip to Africa; I made several trips over three decades. Not because I was repulsed by steak ala tartar in a town on the border of Nigeria and Chad. Not because I flew around the continent in six-seat planes and nearly died on the way to Timbuktu when one of the two engines failed.
The significance of that primal trip was revealed when I did a DNA sample for the genographic project of National Geographic. The results of the test showed the migratory route of my maternal ancestors. The trip I made as a young woman had essentially retraced the journey of my mother's ancestors back through Eastern Europe, through the Near East, back all the way to their origin in the Rift Valley of East Africa 170,000 to 50,000 years ago.
I have been to the birthplace of all modern humans. I have breathed the red dust those first humans breathed. I have gazed at the same stars my ancient relatives followed. I know from whence I have come. I am humbled by knowing in my breath and bones what awesome courage it takes to live as they did, in harmony with nature.
