In April of 2022, I returned to Sierra Leone with African Ancestry. I took my shoes off and walk barefoot on the same painful rocks, stones, and shells at Bunce Island, that my ancestors walked before they eventually were brought to the United States. They were brought here to work and toil, unpaid, in unhealthy conditions to build and develop a country not of their own, and not for themselves, but for those that had enslaved them, while their own homes began to fall in ruin, while their lands were being pillaged for its natural resources and shipped miles away. Here today I  still witness, and experience prejudice, racism, and injustices almost 400 years later. I pay thousands of dollars for university tuition, yet more than five of my ancestors were sold to keep the doors of another from closing.

While in Sierra Leone I also spent some time at Tasso Island. Tasso Island is the Island that the enslavers of Bunce Island used for farming and getting pure water. Today it is the home to about 5,000 Temne people, in conditions that 300 years later have not changed and possibly are worse due to climate change and other environmental factors.

Through African Ancestry DNA testing, I learned that I am of Temne Ancestry. Temne blood runs through my veins, and so the Temne people conducted a naming ceremony and welcomed me home as “Ruqor Kargbo”, which means the firstborn. I am in fact my mother’s firstborn, but I am also the first in my family to ever return home, the first in my family to reclaim their African Ancestry, birthright, heritage, and culture. The first in my family to begin healing from post-traumatic slave syndrome. The chains of the body may have come off, but the chains of the mind and spirit will take generations to heal. This healing will begin with me, but I pray that it does not end with me.