23andme African Matches

Our Haitian relative's African matches are quite similar to their results on Ancestry DNA. One conspicuous difference is that she now has fewer (obvious) Yoruba matches. She also had fewer Upper Guinean matches, the only example here being someone with a Fulani surname (common in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Gambia) who she shares 0.17% of her DNA. That person's results were 53.6% Senegambian & Guinean, 29.6% Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone and 7.6% Nigeria, so we cannot say with greater certainty where exactly in West Africa they hail from. The few matches from Central Africa (Congo) were also consistent with her matching patterns on the other site, too. Intriguingly, there were a few "exotic" matches, including one with a North African or Egyptian who harbored significant sub-Saharan African ancestry (including 12.5% Nigerian). The other match was with a half-white Kenyan Kikuyu, but we did not include them in the results since the match could be due to shared European ancestry. For similar reasons, a half-Yoruba British person was excluded, since the shared DNA could also be partly due to European ancestry.

What was a surprise to see here was matches with people from Calabar and other parts of southern Nigeria outside majority Igbo areas. Nonetheless, they were mainly clustered in southeastern Nigeria, which seems to match the Ancestry Composition report identifying Igbo as a "Very Close" genetic group (including various Nigerian ethnic groups, however).  As for the one obvious Yoruba match, it was with someone bearing a Muslim name. We suspect one of the unspecified Nigerian matches was also Yoruba. As for her Ghanaian match, it was with someone likely hailing from the Ga-Adangme group. The Congolese matches were with people whose exact ethnic background we could not determine based on surnames alone. 

As one might expect for a Haitian looking at distant genetic matches with modern African individuals, the amount of shared DNA is usually low. Surprisingly, the closest match was with someone at 0.54% shared DNA, with roots in Akwa Ibom, Nigeria. It does seem rather likely that captives imported into Saint Domingue's southern coast (many likely smuggled by the British) included a large number from the Bight of Biafra and today's southeastern Nigeria.