Nigeria?

[MaturingCheeseball]

Can this be true? That Harry and Meghan are off on a “royal” trip to Nigeria? What’s the game now? My head is spinning!

Interesting. Thank you.

It’s blowing my mind that we didn’t have access to any of this a decade ago? The accuracy will only improve. It seems like a major wrong could be righted by people having a way to find out, even generally, where in African their ancestors lived.

I am doing my own ancestry research and it means so much to me.

My dcs are mixed ethnicity. When ds1 did an ancestry dna test, he got a significant percentage of 'north African' DNA. He found that rather vague and when he dug into that, he found that they didn't have enough samples from that part of the world on the database to be more specific. However, the white British dna part was very specific eg central Scotland, North west England. Therefore perhaps the DNA test is only returning a general 'Nigeria' for a similar reason.

That's interesting.
It must be sample dependent.

@JSMill That’s what the paper above said. I think the same regional results are being returned for all of the Americas. Which is strange because only 388,000 Africans were brought to US out of 12+ million that were kidnapped from various places in African

Meghan is of presumably entirely European ancestry on the Markle side.

Her mother is obviously African American, but the average ADOS has only about 73% African DNA. Doria does appear to have at least some white admixture. So it's hard to see how Meghan could have 43% 'Nigerian DNA', whatever that actually means.

@smilesy

The Boeing stuff is mainly about how Boeing have been cutting corners in terms of production standards and thus compromising the safety of their aircraft.

Exactly, it’s on going discussion/investigation, much much publicized, much followed by those that follow that sort of thing, much debated, has even caused the odd thread on Mumsnet, but stuff all relevance to this debate..I think the most recent event was introduced into the thread simply to allow another “Ah but Boeing”…

it’s a huge scandal but it’s not really the same in terms of affecting Nigeria as the oil companies and their pollution.

Agreed.

Half of my large family and I got our DNA done by 2 companies about 6 years ago. We periodically have our DNA updated as the companies get more samples. The companies pinpointed the exact city of my paternal grandparents after few years. My brother and I showed general Scandinavian ancestry but last year we had first the country, then the city pinpointed. My sisters don't show any Scandinavian ancestry but our ancestral country of origin was invaded quite often so the DN A results seem accurate when you look at a chronological timeline of invasions.

Happy to explain more about what I find interesting about the Boeing - Invictus - Nigeria connections later. I thought I had done in earlier posts on the thread from a couple of days ago but appreciate that not everyone reads the full thread or follows it in that much detail. And I've learned some more about Boeing in Nigeria.

The DNA stuff is fascinating. I'm from an ethnic minority population where there aren't enough existing samples for, say, Ancestry.com to get close to my not-very-big-relatively-speaking country of birth let alone locale.

That dress is hideous!

It is great that people who have had their heritage and history deliberately destroyed have a way of reconstructing that history.

Also important that the limitations of the reconstruction - under current circumstances - are recognised. Otherwise you create, for understandable reasons, a potentially false alternative history.

It's a real shocker. Must be the look she was after though, what with her attention to detail and all.

Quite. I really don’t get this attention to detail thing. Problems with the bridesmaids dresses not fitting, many frocky horror shows, jam all over the place, incomplete Netflix and Spotify output. Her definition of attention to detail wouldn’t pass muster with most people 🤷‍♀️

edited typos

If you're going to state things, then at least be accurate.

It just makes you look a bit deluded tbh.

She's also forgetting the photos of Meghan in a ball gown, a row of empty seats behind her filled with water bottles, ignored by happy people in shorts munching on popcorn. She obviously wasn't at the VIP party at the Marley movie opening.

@smilesy - I agree - this thing about her having some sort of obsessive attention to detail is constantly being proven to be the opposite

And frankly, obsessive attention to detail is a curse rather than a blessing (recovering perfectionist speaking). It can prevent you getting anything done. MM seems to be exactly the opposite - rushing into projects that seem like a good idea with not even the basics of planning done.

@AutumnCrow that is interesting and shame on me - it takes your own DNA and enough to see where you are from - so I can see that Nigeria ( which is quite large ) would probably ? ) come up as a place with enough to place your relatives rather than particular Nigerian tribes but not enough data to to say Yoruba for example etc is your ancestry.

I should think that as a rule of thumb descendants are from coastal areas. The African continent is vast so trading/buying of people took place from tribes located near to ship docking sites. A tribe from inland would have had to trek people a very long distance and probably would not have even heard that such trading was a possibility.

Think of press gangs in Britain. Only fellows from, say, Portsmouth were bopped over the head and brought onto ship. No one could have been bothered to head inland to do this.

https://dnatestingchoice.com/en-us/ancestry

Good points, but of course the Arabs traded slaves over quite a wide area.
They traded slaves before that with the Vikings of course, during the Medieval Islamic Empire, so there may well be some interesting ancestry there.

Watch the Michael Palin prog on Nigeria. It is very interesting about the slave trading and how it worked.

From what I remember from one of my history degree modules, there was a well established trans-Sahara slave trade, as well as economic systems involving slavery in West Africa, when the trans-Atlantic slavers arrived.

Trans-Atlantic chattel slavery was far more violent and appalling.

But it did build on an existing, pre-European, network of slavery

Is it true that there was a colour theme ( red white blue) at the Commonwealth service?

Which service, the last one?
A colour scheme for who?