Whites & Blacks are Settlers in SA; & Whites Never Stole any Land from Africans

'We are all settlers in SA'

August 18 2007 at 03:37pm
By Lynnette Johns, IOL

All South Africans are settlers, regardless of their skin colour, and their DNA carries the proof.

So says Dr Wilmot James, head of the African Genome Project, a distinguished academic, sociologist and, more recently, honorary professor of human genetics at the University of Cape Town.

And he says South Africans will soon have a public genetic database which will show how the country became populated over thousands of years.

The African Genome project is supported by local genealogy website Ancestry24.com

James aims to trace the origins of South Africans "no matter what their language, ethnic origins, or skin colour".

"No one group can lay claim to South Africa. Everyone is a settler, and we will show how people came here in waves of migration."

Next month he and his colleague, associate professor Himla Soodyall, will do mass genetic testing of Capetonians.

Soodyall is the principal medical scientist at the National Health Laboratory Service and is an associate professor in the Division of Human Genetics at the University of the Witwatersrand.

James says he expects about 300 people will come for free testing on September 9. The test simply involves swabbing the inside of a person's cheek.

"Normally it costs R1 000 a time but this is a public exercise in science and a journey through the history of South Africa," said James.

The results will be out early in 2008. The data will be used to map how people migrated here more than 100 000 years ago. They will do similar testing in Johannesburg.

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