May 31, 2024 • 15 mins
Vanessa Tyler has a conversation with Barbara May about how her journey to discover her roots led her to Central Africa's island of Bioko, and the indigenous Bubi people.
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
It is popular to dig up your ancestral roots and
see what's there under that family tree. Thanks to all
the DNA sides, black Americans are starting to paint a
picture of where they came from. For Barbara May, finding
who she is has changed her life and connected her
to a people far far away.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Okay, I wanted to find out where I came from
in Africa. That was something I wanted to know before
I die. I said, I really just I need to
know who I am.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
She found that and more. We're headed to the island
of Bioko now on black Land.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
And now as a brown person, you just feels so
invisible and where we're from.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Brothers and sisters.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
I welcome you to this joyful and day freedom. Where
we are.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Oh you crowd, I know someone heard something and where
we're going.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
We the people means all the people.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
The Black Information Network presents Blackland with your host Vanessa Tyler.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Barbara, an African American single mother living in New Jersey,
decided to get one of those DNA tests most of
us have likely taken by now, this one specifically for Africa.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
So what I did was in November of twenty twenty,
I got I took my test in August. It takes
like about three months to get the results, and I
got the results in November and I found out I
was from the Booby tribe from Biocle Island, which is
(01:51):
off the coast of Cameroon and it's part of the
country Equatorial Guinea.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
Bioco the island, like you mentioned, to the mainland of
Equatorial Guinea, which is the only African country with Spanish
as the official language.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
That's right, that's right, but the indigenous language is called Echo.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Here's an example of the Echo language. The man asks
what the woman is cooking. She tells him she's frying eggs.
He says, you're frying eggs. She says, yes, Gola la bay.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Not checheva oh la chicira behave Wow.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
The DNA test told her she's Booby ninety nine percent
from her mother's side, part of the largest tribe on
Biogo Island.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
After I found out about that a Booby, I got
connected with some other Booby people America online and I
ended up taking a class to learn the language, which
was actually put together by another woman, Sheila, who started
(03:15):
this business called Respondence Language Arts, and she put together
the class for edgo and I was able to start learning.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
Have you ever heard of Bioko before? I know you
went to your parents. Have they ever heard of it?
Speaker 2 (03:30):
No? It was like a complete total surprise. I was
just shocked. Never heard of that before ever.
Speaker 4 (03:39):
But you wanted to go deeper.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Why when you find out it's like just the beginning,
you know, and then you're like, well, what does this mean?
Who are these people? What were they about? You know?
And you offer someone to connect with, who you know
you are, some of your traits and you want to
figure out, well, where did that stuff come from? And
(04:03):
so you want to know. You just want to know
more and more and more.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
So Barbara, who now goes by her Bioco name Buhula,
started to research more. It was like a string she
pulled and it kept unraveling. She met friends from that
Facebook group, people like Bosu Bopley, He's from Bioco. He
became like family. But then when you're from the same
people in a way, family is what you are.
Speaker 4 (04:29):
Please welcome, join.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
Us, Thank you, thank you very much. It's a pleasure
to be here.
Speaker 4 (04:34):
Now tell me about your story.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
Did you too take a test or were you part
of the Bobi people?
Speaker 3 (04:42):
No, I am part of the Bubi people from diaspora.
I was born in Spain, but my parents came from
Bioco Island and because it was a former Spanish colony,
there's been a traditional migration from Bioco to Spain traditionally,
so in Spend there is a big Bubby community.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Bosu Bobla says, although he was living in Spain, the
culture was dying back on the island. So Barbara aka Bhola,
who just found her people in no way wanted to
lose them.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Is that people that are trying to regain, trying to
regain the culture that was lost through the colonialism because
there's been a year. There were years where people were
not allowed to speak their own language because of the
Spanish colonization. They wanted to impose only Spanish language and
(05:37):
so children were punished for speaking their own language. So
now it's a movement around the island that is trying
to reconnect with the culture, especially through the language, to
ensure that the language prevails in the future.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
One more thing Barbara aka Bhola found researching her roots,
she found love her precious husband Tomas. She met him
while visiting Spain, where there are more Booby people than
anywhere in the world. He's also a musician. His artistic
name is Masto Rabocho. He speaks Echo and Spanish, but
(06:14):
it is the Edgo he and now Bohula and Boso
Boble are trying to save. In fact, he sings about
saving the language in one of his most popular songs.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
Koko.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Kokoo.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Although Bohula and now her husband Tomas live in the
United States, Bohula is using her communications skills to educate
everyone about the beautiful island, which boasts a rainforest, even
a species of monkeys, the Bioco drill monkey, indigenous to
the island, which is located close to Cameroon on the
west coast of Africa.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
When I started learning the language, I really wanted to
make sure that it was still there for other people
who were going to come after me. And so the
first thing that I knew I could do, like you said,
I'm in communication. So I said, all right, I'll just
start making some videos, and I started making some language videos.
(07:26):
But now we have started a project called it Sho TV,
and it Sho TV is a Booby language content. We
have Booby language content on there that we make and
every show that we make is in the Booby language,
(07:49):
which is et Sho, because we want a place for
people to be able to go hear the language. We
wanted to bring it just into the modern media world,
so it has a place to live and breathe. It's free.
Anybody who wants to learn can go on there and learn.
(08:11):
So these are like really important projects. And we also
have a magazine that we do called a Koto Magazine,
and that's an art and culture magazine. It's done in
English and Spanish, and we focus primarily on one person
in the magazine, and we've focused on many of the
(08:33):
members of our community and also other people who are
outside the community. But it's a culture and an art magazine,
and we also talk about whatever current events are going
on in the community as well. Many people on the
island they don't speak the language anymore at show, but
(08:55):
now they're trying to learn it on the island as well,
So we have people there that are trying to teach
the children there. There's I hope I say this right,
the La Cassa the culture the value of pocon and
that's a place where they actually teach the children.
Speaker 4 (09:20):
Gae Hello, yeah what above.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
That they can't emphasize enough how they want people to
learn and no matter what colonialism and slavery took away,
Bosuboble wants to bring it back.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
I have two groups. One of them is focused on
many people from the island and Spain as well, where
they people people learn the language speak on a daily basis.
We have greetings, we have conversations about certain words that
we don't know, we might have confusion about those works.
(10:01):
And the other group is mainly focused on African Americans
the diaspora though who wanted to land.
Speaker 4 (10:08):
Would you say you've almost started a movement with this
or were people's before you became involved trying to really
recapture the language, because it seems like this has really
taken off well.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
I think the African American influence of US coming back
home has has influenced the movement. There was already a
movement going on on Bioko Islands. There's an organization called
ebob Evauva and every year they do a Mother Tongue Festival.
(10:45):
It's in February and that's a week long festival where
they focus on the language and they actually will honor
someone as well who's been pivotal in promo the language.
So they have they have performances, they have food, they
(11:07):
it's a big festival. So they've been doing that for
about ten years. And I think with our influence coming in,
we kind of injected like a new perspective because our
perspective as African Americans is different, you know, because we
(11:28):
didn't know where we came from. And so when you
find out, you scratch and claw to get every piece
of information that you can about your culture. That it's
it's like so important to us. And people are really
surprised too when they hear us speak in this language.
(11:50):
And I have to mention our professor, Justo Ballechia. Okay,
he is the one who taught us, taught us Echo.
He's the one who taught us the class, and he
just he didn't just teach us the class, like he
(12:12):
totally embraced us as Booby family, and he talked about
how he was just really so happy to know us
and that we had come back home, we were trying
to come back home, and he taught us cultural things
(12:32):
as well as the language. So he's very important part
of our journey.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
How ironic those who may have left by force reaching
back across the continents from America to Africa.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
So I made a documentary called the Lost Children of
Bioco Island, and it talks about about eight of us
who went into this class and we started learning and run,
learning our language and learning the culture. That documentary premiered
(13:07):
in Madrid at the Mother Tongue Festival, the beginning of
the Mother Tongue Festival in twenty twenty two. When they
played the When they played the documentary, people Americans in
the documentary were speaking at show. When they spoke at show,
(13:28):
the crowd applauded for every person that spoke. So that's
how much this means to people. It means a lot.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
I think it's very very important to connect to your
roots because by connecting to your roots, you can find
out who you really are. And the best way of
connecting to the roots is through the language. So when
people see us, see us bully people, people need to
know that we have more than the colonial past. So
(14:06):
it's high history goes way before the colonial past. Because
sometimes when people see Africa and see the places in Africa,
they tend to think slavery colonialism only, but we have
as well history before that, colonialism, before that, slavery that
that's that chapter of history that people might discover through
(14:29):
the language, and I think it's it is very important
to see the side of us. And I think the
work that XO TV is doing is amazing because through
the language is where we reconnect to or true identity.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
So connect join them and preserving a culture, honoring a people,
even if it is on black Land a world away.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Probably the easiest one for them to connect with because
we have three websites, but the easiest one is hotvy Dark.
I'll spell that it's e T y O t v
dot com and if you go there, you can definitely
connect with us.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
I'm Vanessa Tyler. Join me next time on black Land.
Make sure you check out all the episodes you've missed.
A new one drops every Friday.
It is popular to dig up your ancestral roots and
see what's there under that family tree. Thanks to all
the DNA sides, black Americans are starting to paint a
picture of where they came from. For Barbara May, finding
who she is has changed her life and connected her
to a people far far away.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Okay, I wanted to find out where I came from
in Africa. That was something I wanted to know before
I die. I said, I really just I need to
know who I am.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
She found that and more. We're headed to the island
of Bioko now on black Land.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
And now as a brown person, you just feels so
invisible and where we're from.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Brothers and sisters.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
I welcome you to this joyful and day freedom. Where
we are.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Oh you crowd, I know someone heard something and where
we're going.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
We the people means all the people.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
The Black Information Network presents Blackland with your host Vanessa Tyler.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Barbara, an African American single mother living in New Jersey,
decided to get one of those DNA tests most of
us have likely taken by now, this one specifically for Africa.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
So what I did was in November of twenty twenty,
I got I took my test in August. It takes
like about three months to get the results, and I
got the results in November and I found out I
was from the Booby tribe from Biocle Island, which is
(01:51):
off the coast of Cameroon and it's part of the
country Equatorial Guinea.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
Bioco the island, like you mentioned, to the mainland of
Equatorial Guinea, which is the only African country with Spanish
as the official language.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
That's right, that's right, but the indigenous language is called Echo.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Here's an example of the Echo language. The man asks
what the woman is cooking. She tells him she's frying eggs.
He says, you're frying eggs. She says, yes, Gola la bay.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Not checheva oh la chicira behave Wow.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
The DNA test told her she's Booby ninety nine percent
from her mother's side, part of the largest tribe on
Biogo Island.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
After I found out about that a Booby, I got
connected with some other Booby people America online and I
ended up taking a class to learn the language, which
was actually put together by another woman, Sheila, who started
(03:15):
this business called Respondence Language Arts, and she put together
the class for edgo and I was able to start learning.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
Have you ever heard of Bioko before? I know you
went to your parents. Have they ever heard of it?
Speaker 2 (03:30):
No? It was like a complete total surprise. I was
just shocked. Never heard of that before ever.
Speaker 4 (03:39):
But you wanted to go deeper.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Why when you find out it's like just the beginning,
you know, and then you're like, well, what does this mean?
Who are these people? What were they about? You know?
And you offer someone to connect with, who you know
you are, some of your traits and you want to
figure out, well, where did that stuff come from? And
(04:03):
so you want to know. You just want to know
more and more and more.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
So Barbara, who now goes by her Bioco name Buhula,
started to research more. It was like a string she
pulled and it kept unraveling. She met friends from that
Facebook group, people like Bosu Bopley, He's from Bioco. He
became like family. But then when you're from the same
people in a way, family is what you are.
Speaker 4 (04:29):
Please welcome, join.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
Us, Thank you, thank you very much. It's a pleasure
to be here.
Speaker 4 (04:34):
Now tell me about your story.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
Did you too take a test or were you part
of the Bobi people?
Speaker 3 (04:42):
No, I am part of the Bubi people from diaspora.
I was born in Spain, but my parents came from
Bioco Island and because it was a former Spanish colony,
there's been a traditional migration from Bioco to Spain traditionally,
so in Spend there is a big Bubby community.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Bosu Bobla says, although he was living in Spain, the
culture was dying back on the island. So Barbara aka Bhola,
who just found her people in no way wanted to
lose them.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Is that people that are trying to regain, trying to
regain the culture that was lost through the colonialism because
there's been a year. There were years where people were
not allowed to speak their own language because of the
Spanish colonization. They wanted to impose only Spanish language and
(05:37):
so children were punished for speaking their own language. So
now it's a movement around the island that is trying
to reconnect with the culture, especially through the language, to
ensure that the language prevails in the future.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
One more thing Barbara aka Bhola found researching her roots,
she found love her precious husband Tomas. She met him
while visiting Spain, where there are more Booby people than
anywhere in the world. He's also a musician. His artistic
name is Masto Rabocho. He speaks Echo and Spanish, but
(06:14):
it is the Edgo he and now Bohula and Boso
Boble are trying to save. In fact, he sings about
saving the language in one of his most popular songs.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
Koko.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Kokoo.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Although Bohula and now her husband Tomas live in the
United States, Bohula is using her communications skills to educate
everyone about the beautiful island, which boasts a rainforest, even
a species of monkeys, the Bioco drill monkey, indigenous to
the island, which is located close to Cameroon on the
west coast of Africa.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
When I started learning the language, I really wanted to
make sure that it was still there for other people
who were going to come after me. And so the
first thing that I knew I could do, like you said,
I'm in communication. So I said, all right, I'll just
start making some videos, and I started making some language videos.
(07:26):
But now we have started a project called it Sho TV,
and it Sho TV is a Booby language content. We
have Booby language content on there that we make and
every show that we make is in the Booby language,
(07:49):
which is et Sho, because we want a place for
people to be able to go hear the language. We
wanted to bring it just into the modern media world,
so it has a place to live and breathe. It's free.
Anybody who wants to learn can go on there and learn.
(08:11):
So these are like really important projects. And we also
have a magazine that we do called a Koto Magazine,
and that's an art and culture magazine. It's done in
English and Spanish, and we focus primarily on one person
in the magazine, and we've focused on many of the
(08:33):
members of our community and also other people who are
outside the community. But it's a culture and an art magazine,
and we also talk about whatever current events are going
on in the community as well. Many people on the
island they don't speak the language anymore at show, but
(08:55):
now they're trying to learn it on the island as well,
So we have people there that are trying to teach
the children there. There's I hope I say this right,
the La Cassa the culture the value of pocon and
that's a place where they actually teach the children.
Speaker 4 (09:20):
Gae Hello, yeah what above.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
That they can't emphasize enough how they want people to
learn and no matter what colonialism and slavery took away,
Bosuboble wants to bring it back.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
I have two groups. One of them is focused on
many people from the island and Spain as well, where
they people people learn the language speak on a daily basis.
We have greetings, we have conversations about certain words that
we don't know, we might have confusion about those works.
(10:01):
And the other group is mainly focused on African Americans
the diaspora though who wanted to land.
Speaker 4 (10:08):
Would you say you've almost started a movement with this
or were people's before you became involved trying to really
recapture the language, because it seems like this has really
taken off well.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
I think the African American influence of US coming back
home has has influenced the movement. There was already a
movement going on on Bioko Islands. There's an organization called
ebob Evauva and every year they do a Mother Tongue Festival.
(10:45):
It's in February and that's a week long festival where
they focus on the language and they actually will honor
someone as well who's been pivotal in promo the language.
So they have they have performances, they have food, they
(11:07):
it's a big festival. So they've been doing that for
about ten years. And I think with our influence coming in,
we kind of injected like a new perspective because our
perspective as African Americans is different, you know, because we
(11:28):
didn't know where we came from. And so when you
find out, you scratch and claw to get every piece
of information that you can about your culture. That it's
it's like so important to us. And people are really
surprised too when they hear us speak in this language.
(11:50):
And I have to mention our professor, Justo Ballechia. Okay,
he is the one who taught us, taught us Echo.
He's the one who taught us the class, and he
just he didn't just teach us the class, like he
(12:12):
totally embraced us as Booby family, and he talked about
how he was just really so happy to know us
and that we had come back home, we were trying
to come back home, and he taught us cultural things
(12:32):
as well as the language. So he's very important part
of our journey.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
How ironic those who may have left by force reaching
back across the continents from America to Africa.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
So I made a documentary called the Lost Children of
Bioco Island, and it talks about about eight of us
who went into this class and we started learning and run,
learning our language and learning the culture. That documentary premiered
(13:07):
in Madrid at the Mother Tongue Festival, the beginning of
the Mother Tongue Festival in twenty twenty two. When they
played the When they played the documentary, people Americans in
the documentary were speaking at show. When they spoke at show,
(13:28):
the crowd applauded for every person that spoke. So that's
how much this means to people. It means a lot.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
I think it's very very important to connect to your
roots because by connecting to your roots, you can find
out who you really are. And the best way of
connecting to the roots is through the language. So when
people see us, see us bully people, people need to
know that we have more than the colonial past. So
(14:06):
it's high history goes way before the colonial past. Because
sometimes when people see Africa and see the places in Africa,
they tend to think slavery colonialism only, but we have
as well history before that, colonialism, before that, slavery that
that's that chapter of history that people might discover through
(14:29):
the language, and I think it's it is very important
to see the side of us. And I think the
work that XO TV is doing is amazing because through
the language is where we reconnect to or true identity.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
So connect join them and preserving a culture, honoring a people,
even if it is on black Land a world away.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Probably the easiest one for them to connect with because
we have three websites, but the easiest one is hotvy Dark.
I'll spell that it's e T y O t v
dot com and if you go there, you can definitely
connect with us.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
I'm Vanessa Tyler. Join me next time on black Land.
Make sure you check out all the episodes you've missed.
A new one drops every Friday.
Host
Vanessa Tyler
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