Reconnecting Through Ceremony

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This map represents both the ceremonies we have completed and the cultural journeys still ahead.

Each ceremony is a story and a legacy that brings us closer to remembering what colonization tried to erase.

African Love Before Colonization™ is an ongoing journey across the African continent to respectfully experience, participate in, and document traditional marriage ceremonies within the communities that continue to practice them today.

Each destination represents more than a wedding.

It represents:

  • cultural preservation

  • ancestral remembrance

  • historical reconnection

  • and the documentation of living traditions that survived colonization, slavery, displacement, and globalization.

We seek to preserve the beauty, complexity, and diversity of African marriage traditions while reconnecting the African diaspora to ancestral systems of love, family, spirituality, and community.

Our completed and upcoming ceremonies reflect both cultural exploration and personal ancestral discovery.

Through African Ancestry DNA tracing, we identified:

  • maternal ancestry connected to the Bamileke people of Cameroon (Aku)

  • paternal ancestry connected to the Shai people of Ghana (Aku)

  • and paternal ancestry connected to the Balanta and Fulani people of Guinea-Bissau (Antoine)

These discoveries transformed this project into something even deeper:
a journey of return.

As descendants of enslaved Africans, many of our ancestral traditions surrounding marriage, lineage, identity, and ceremony were interrupted or erased through slavery and colonization. By returning to the continent and participating in these traditions directly within the communities that continue to preserve them, we hope to help document what survived and inspire deeper conversations throughout the diaspora.