African Ancestry in Bainet and 23andme

A very close Haitian relative born in Bainet recently received their 23andme DNA results. In some ways, it's a confirmation of our likely Igbo ancestry. Indeed, the Igbo people were the only specific African ethnic group detected as a very close match in our relative's results. This was not a surprise since our closest African DNA match on Ancestry DNA was with an Igbo Nigerian. Furthermore, the "Ibo" were a consistent and major part of the enslaved African population in Bainet and other areas of Haiti during the colonial period. 

An attempt to show how our relative's African ancestry is broken down in Ancestry's 2024 Update.

Thus, the genetic evidence as well as the historical records (notarial records mentioning slaves by nation, the patterns of the French slave trade, and the smuggling of captives from Jamaica to Haiti's southern coast) point to ancestry among Igbo and/or closely related peoples in southeastern Nigeria. However, just as on Ancestry DNA, our relative also had Yoruba Nigerian DNA matches with various customers. We likely descend from a plethora of individuals from various ethnolinguistic backgrounds across what is Benin, Togo, and Nigeria.

Sadly, the lack of a Benin/Togo category on 23andme leads to a more inflated Ghanaian score for our close relative. The 2024 Update for Ancestry DNA pointed to very strong "Benin & Togo" as well as "Nigeria" scores. Indeed, Ancestry DNA's problematic update even suggested or pointed to ancestry in the East-Central and northern Nigeria for our relative. But 23andme, however, only detected a close match with the Igbo. 23andme's algorithm also gave our relative a higher Senegambian/Upper Guinea score, which we suspect may be due to possible "Bambara" or "Mandingue" ancestry that may be registering as Sierra Leone and Liberia. Lastly, the overall 23andme scores suggest ancestry in West Central Africa is a rather small part of our African origins. And this is in spite of the ubiquitous presence of captives from West Central Africa in Saint Domingue. I guess people with roots in the South really do, on average, harbor less Central African ancestry.

An attempt at showing the regional breakdown of sub-Saharan African ancestry. The general patterns are similar to those observed via Ancestry's results.

One of the benefits of 23andme for understanding African ancestry is seeing assigned mtDNA haplogroups. Our relative's haplogroup, L1b1a, is common in sub-Saharan Africa. This is no surprise and seems consistent with the African ancestry of Haitians. The maternal ancestry of our people, after all, is undoubtedly an African affair. One only wishes 23andme could have indicated some possible distant matches for West and Central Africa to shed more light on our African ancestry. Perhaps a better idea of the distribution of L1b1a would have also helped here. Ultimately, we find some broad commonalities between Ancestry DNA and 23andme here, and both companies estimated our close relative at about 89-90% sub-Saharan African ancestry, overwhelmingly West African.