We don't have African Ancestry from One Place - Example of Dominicans

For those of you who have watched genetic/genealogy TV shows like Finding your Roots by Henry Louis Gates JR, or perhaps NatGEO documentaries on the "Roots" of people you may be thinking that we have one ancestral homeland, this is not the case for pretty much anybody in the Caribbean or the Americas for that matter. In all the studies done, and if you take a personal dna test or have the luck of finding these distant ancestors via genealogy you will quickly note your roots are all over Africa, all over the Americas and all over Europe. 

Ancestry.com provides one of the most comprehensive but not perfect African regional analyses which I am using in these examples, the names of the categories are NOT meant to be countries, they encompass large regions, so "Senegal" is not confined to Senegal but goes all the way to parts of Ghana and even Nigeria in the case of Fulani and Hausa folks. This is not specific to one ethnicity as many African ethnicities may share a certain region. For a deeper comparison to what African ethnicities match which regions see here

Dominicans:

Here is a map illustrating these percentages, except taking out Pygmy/San because they appear in many unrelated African regions, also does not include North Africa. These regions are combination of what Ancestry.com has in their whitepaper on admixture as well as observations from the results of 100% African Individuals from the aforementioned countries compiled by my friend Fonte Felipe @ Tracing African roots. 

As you can see Dominicans don't have a single African origin, in fact when averaging these 142 Dominicans on Ancestry.com's African regions we notice that there is no real predominance but it is rather diverse. It is a misconception that Dominicans are mostly "Congo" which is used to refer to Central-African, as we can see Dominicans have a diverse influence and we should also take into account that these are averages and treat them as so. In other words individual results will vary wildly, there will be individuals who's African ancestry may come mostly from Upper Guinea, or Perhaps Central Africa, or perhaps Lower Guinea. 

Here are examples of a few individual results again zooming in only on the African regions. 

The complex history of Free, Legal, Illegal enslaved Africans, along with Afro-descendants coming in from other colonies is what shapes the African ancestry of the modern Dominican and because all of these processes are unpredictable and virtually immeasurable because for example illegal or non-taxed enslaved Africans where never recorded and these where in fact the majority of Africans brought to Quisqueya. So by virtue of that alone, it is impossible to quantify without DNA and some genealogy. Also there where many natural and unnatural events that shaped and re-shaped the fate of African-descendants in the Dominican republic, such as small pox, yellow fever, emigration, immigration, the Haitian revolution, etc.