Identity Crisis

[seytala]

Hey maybe we both can give each other her a little insight. I was raised Somali Bantu and around other Bantus in the US. I speak af maay. My mother speaks to me in af maay but whenever she speaks to family back home she speaks in a different dialect. I only know this cause that’s the only time I find it difficult to understand her. My dad doesn’t speak af maay, he speaks in a different dialect as well. It’s super fast and I’ve always found it difficult understanding him my mom would have to translate sometimes or I’d have to clasp on to a word to interpret what he was saying. Growing up ik I was Somali Bantu but I thought, and almost everyone else around me, my mom looked very jileec. Even down to her hair. She has these very loose curls down to her shoulders, while me and my other siblings, aside from my ONE older brother who got my mom’s hair gene, had courser kinkier hair. It was really weird growing up cause my mom would always make these backhanded comments about jileec Somalis, which kind of backed up the idea that I was Bantu, but my older sister, the first born, would distance herself from Bantus and wouldn’t regard herself as one which I found weird. Anyways, they would never answer my question about what we were. Somali or Somali Bantu idk. But a couple of years ago while I was in college I asked my parents again what we were and instead of answering me they told me to ask my older sister who then told me we were Bimaal Afaaf. I knew we were bimaal cause that’s what our parents had told us, I assumed it was a Bantu clan but With some research i discovered that the bimaal clan are one of the oldest clans in Somalia which made no sense to me cause how could that be? She also told me both my grandfathers were both bimaal afaaf, maternal grandmother tunni, and paternal grandmother hawiye. My family is from the kismaayo, i think. They moved around a bit but they’re generally from the South. My family is also very traditional. It could be assimilation but we move like an average Somali household. Anyways, last year I took a DNA test that proved I was only 25% Somali and the other 75% was a conglomerate of eastern, southern, western Bantu peoples. With small traces of Nilotic and Cameroonian descendants. They results are throwing me off and I’m kind of having an identity crisis. What does this mean?

 

[balanbalis]

Qabiil means nothing about dna, it just tells you who your oldest male ancestor was. Honestly if you speak a somali dialect and participate in the culture you are Somali. Ignore the loud majority. You can honour your other ancestry by participating in Somali Bantu cultural activities