Our Early Migrations
They say that we have been stationed pretty much in the west coast of Africa. It confirms that we were indeed the first people to occupy the Senegambia area and was pushed by colonist over time to where we reside today. However our haplogroup L2b’s migration pattern says much more about our history. If you see the black and white map below it shows you where we have been. Now I wont say that this means that we moved to these places voluntarily. We may have been pushed or captives of the Dutch and or Sub Saharan slave trades as well. Our language and beliefs leads me to do further research of the peoples of Qatar near the UAE because their are some connections to them and the Assyrians who took over there land. Also our clothing and the way we cut our hair is very Hindus and Buddhist and it mimics Vishnar and his companions see picture on the right. Look up the word Arame= Baiote…and tell me what do you think?
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We were living in Bolor when the Portuguese arrived and we were amongst the first of the peoples they encountered. our neighbors where Fulup, Banuns, Cassangas, although we had other nearby neighbors, these seem to be our most immediate neighbors consistently . We fought together to against the Mandi and the Portuguese. Due to village raids we had to fight which brought our male numbers down and left the women and children more vulnerable to be kidnappings and enslavement.
We were assimilated by the Fulup and Mandi mostly this is the cause for most of the confusion about our name we been grouped into other groups. However Mandi still believes to this day that Djola are slaves and slaves has no lineage other than enslavement so we aren’t even a people in their eyes. In certain regions of Guinea Bissau it is tabu for us to practice our animist rituals.
Women and children were made into wives, domestic servants and slaves by the Mandi the Portuguese the French the english and the Jesuits. So we were literally spread throughout the four corners of the world. Some of us were in Cape Verde first and then Brazil, Peru, Cuba, West Indies, Central America and North America. Some only house a residue of our DNA but that is because we were there a lot earlier than most enslaved people from Africa.
Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroup L2 originated in Western Africa but is nowadays spread across the entire continent. L2 movements were previously postulated to be related to the Bantu expansion, but L2 expansions eastwards probably occurred much earlier. By reconstructing the phylogeny of L2 (44 new complete sequences) we provide insights on the complex net of within-African migrations in the last 60 thousand years (ka). Results show that lineages in Southern Africa cluster with Western/Central African lineages at a recent time scale, whereas, eastern lineages seem to be substantially more ancient. Three moments of expansion from a Central African source are associated to L2: (1) one migration at 70–50 ka into Eastern or Southern Africa, (2) postglacial movements (15–10 ka) into Eastern Africa; and (3) the southward Bantu Expansion in the last 5 ka. The complementary population and L0a phylogeography analyses indicate no strong evidence of mtDNA gene flow between eastern and southern populations during the later movement, suggesting low admixture between Eastern African populations and the Bantu migrants. This implies that, at least in the early stages, the Bantu expansion was mainly a demic diffusion with little incorporation of local populations.
