African Americans and Congolese DNA
I’ve always read that Bakongo people were the most numerous captives taken to the Americas during the slave trade. However, all of the African American results that I’ve seen (including my own) have scored very low for Congolese and Angolan. There’s so many research papers out there that talk about the influence of Congolese on African American culture, especially in Louisiana but it seems like the majority of African Americans never score higher than 10%. Does anyone have any insight into this?
My family is French Creole from Louisiana and we’ve all scored higher for Senegambia and Benin/Togo on both ancestry and 23andMe. My grandfather descends from Adaëseños and our African lineage is pretty well documented by the Spaniards and even he scored 1%.
Posted Dec 3, 2025, 1:36 AM UTC