[SAM] It wasn't just people who were brought from Africa during the transatlantic slave trade, it was knowledge.

Knowledge that helped give birth to the world we live in without most of us knowing anything about it.

♪ We brought our ways with us.

It's not in the history books.

We're going to find it in the bottom of the ocean.

[KRAMER] They have an opportunity to rediscover their ties to the past and their connection to the enslaved Africans who were here.

[wave crashing] Woo!

[SIMCHA] You look at this and it's beautiful, but it's also a mathematical.

[RON] Exactly.

[DORRICK] There were 2,500 enslaved Africans that ran away to join the pirates.

[shouting and grunting] [AFUA] Here was a world where they had an equal vote and an equal say alongside their white counterparts.

♪ Your life depends on your skills, your equipment and your attitude.

Why are you the first Black person I ever seen play a banjo?

[RHIANNON] It was known by everybody as a Black instrument.

All those things have been considered for so many years to be slave food, right now, everyone wants to celebrate it.

The memories and talents of the enslaved Africans who arrived here helped to create the culture of the new world in a way we have only just begun to understand.

♪ [chain scraping] ♪ This community was started by the Africans who were on the last illegal slave ship to arrive in America, "The Clotilda."

♪ Five years after they were brought here, the end of the civil war set them free and they started the only African run town in America.

♪ Grammy award, winning musician, Rhiannon Giddens and I are here with Joe'l Lewis Billingsley who brought us here to see the monument honoring her great-great grandfather, Kazoola, one of the founders of Africatown.

Kazoola happens to be the one we know the most about because he lived longer and he shared his story in a way that a lot of us are learning about it now.

Wow.

My grandmother was born in 18 something.

So her mother was a slave.

So she could talk to me about what that was.

That forms us in interesting kinds of ways.

I mean, people always talk about slavery like it's ancient history.

And it's not.

And lasted a long time.

Yeah.

♪ In Africatown, they grew their own food.

They established their own community based on what they did in their homeland, based on their traditions.

And so as you sort of move through the decades, you'll see that, that community at one time, when it was thriving, had everything you needed.

♪ Didn't have to go anywhere, to go to the grocery store, see a doctor to be educated or even have some entertainment.

[children shouting] Everything you needed to live was right here in the community.

And so when you talk to people, they have so much pride in what it used to be.

One time it was 12,000 people, now it's 2000.

♪ Now we're trying to revive Africatown.

♪ We have a place called Kazoola, named after my great, great, great grandfather.

♪ [applause] So why are you the first Black person I ever seen play a banjo?

- That's the question.

- That is the question.

Because it was like, I grew up seeing white people play the banjo and kind of going, oh, that's cool, but it's not part of my culture.

And then I found there are some recordings of the Black players of this music.

And then as I started to dig and, like, this used to be a huge tradition.

It was an enormous tradition all across, not just the south, but all across the country.

So I know the banjo as this, metal strings, metallic instrument often played bluegrass style.

And then I learned that the banjo was an African American instrument.

It looked more like this.

It was known by everybody as a Black instrument.

The emblem of being Black was the banjo.

♪ Then you have a change in the 1820s and 30s and that's when white folk started going.

"That's really cool, I would like to play that."

So you have white entertainers picking up the banjo.

The reason why we don't talk about this shift is because the white folks playing this banjo would have been doing it in blackface.

This entire industry becomes the blackface minstrel show, is the most popular form of entertainment for over 60 years.

Are you saying that what we know as bluegrass today actually began with African Americans?

- 100% - Wow.

That's exactly what we're saying.

Wow.

So are you saying the original do si do was an African American thing?

So, way back when you have nothing but dances as entertainment and you have plantations, the musicians for these balls are African American.

Almost always.

And so they are forced to learn European dances, European music, and then they are themselves mixing it.

The thing that sets apart American square dancing and country dances from Europe is the calling.

You don't have callers.

And that's the thing that you think.

♪ Do si do, and round around, and round you go ♪ ♪ and grab your partner and up and down ♪ ♪ and swing that Sally girl around.

♪ That stuff.

These are the innovations that make this music uniquely American are African American.

♪ ♪ I got a home in Gloryland, outshine the sun ♪ ♪ I got a home in Gloryland, ♪ outshine the sun ♪ I got a home in Gloryland, outshine the sun ♪ ♪ way beyond the blue.

Do it again now, come on!

♪ Nights in the valley, outshine the sun ♪ ♪ Nights in the valley, ♪ outshine the sun ♪ Nights in the valley, outshine the sun ♪ ♪ Way beyond the blue!

Yeah!

♪ [applause] ♪ We're here in Costa Rica, because of a local group of young divers believes that Africans contributed to their history and culture.

This time we're not diving to investigate the deaths of those that never made it.

This time, we're investigating one group that may have survived.

♪ Before we do any diving, Alannah and Kinga and I are traveling through Southern Costa Rica on our way to a remote village, several hours from the ocean into the rainforest of the Highlands.

♪ [KINGA] We're meeting members of an Indigenous group called the Bribri.

They're considered to be descendants of the Mayans, but there might be another side to that story.

♪ Their folklore tells of slave ships that were wrecked on the Costa Rican shoreline, and of Africans who came ashore to make a new life for themselves in the forests.

♪ [Alannah] But their African ancestry has always been considered to be a mere tribal legend.

[people chatting] Maria Suarez Toro has invited us here to a Bribri feast to see if we can help this community reclaim its lost history.

I would like to thank everyone for inviting us here to hear your story.

On some level I'm jealous because my question is always where do you come from?

And the answer to that for me is always, I don't know.

I don't have a connection to my home or my people so to be able to assist in answering those questions is a connection for me.

[applause] I want to hear the local story.

What do locals say about what happened or those shipwrecks?

I can't really imagine.

You've just wrecked up in the middle of nowhere.

You have no idea where you are.

You look to your left and it's just ocean.

And then you look to your right and you see dark forest.

♪ You have to make a choice.

Do you try and go back to the wreck or do you go into the rainforest?

That must've been absolutely terrifying.

- The Bribri adopted them.

- Yeah.

And they went into the rainforest and the Bribri adopted them.

That's an amazing, an amazing story.

♪ From time to time, these teenage divers have seen artifacts off shore.

If we can connect them to slave ships, we'll be able to back up the legends with hard evidence.

♪ ♪ When enslaved Africans were brought to the Americas, it wasn't just their bodies that came here.

♪ They brought their memories and ideas with them.

And there's evidence for this transfer of culture wherever Africans were taken.

♪ In Brazil, tens of thousands of artifacts have been discovered at a site in Rio de Janeiro, that once processed up to 1,000,000 newly enslaved Africans.

♪ Archeologists here have unearthed some of the most intimate objects associated with the slave trade.

This is a cowrie shell.

You see these in the Gulf of Guinea on the coast of West and Central Africa.

So an enslaved African would have brought this with them right up to Brazil?

Yes.

- It's incredible.

- Yeah.

So this is a pipe that an African would have actually brought with them and smoked.

Yeah.

There's something quite intimate about that.

It's a very personal thing that you carry with you that you use for comfort.

Oh wow.

These are the kinds of beads that African women wear- Yes.

Right up till today, you see them in countries in West Africa.

I'm just imagining a woman who was enslaved clinging on to this vestige of her dignity, of her style, of her culture.

Is it a spiritual thing?

Does it bring good luck or protection?

Protection, mostly perfections.

So that culture of wearing these survives till today in areas where there's a lot of African heritage in Brazil?

Yes.

- It is a ring.

- Yep.

As a woman, I know that a ring is a very precious thing.

No matter what it's made out of.

It's a very personal object.

Now looking at all of these things, I feel that when we talk about the Africans involved in the slave trade, they're often these nameless faceless victims, we don't have photos of them.

Their names were changed or forgotten, but these things are so personal and intimate, it really gives them a face.

Really brings them to life as living people who had their own style, their habits and their culture.

♪ Most people in Costa Rica don't take the folklore about the Bribri's ancestry very seriously, but marine archeologist Andreas Bloch does.

He thinks he might even have identified the exact ships the legends are talking about.

He found the clues in the archives back home in Denmark.

♪ I didn't know Denmark was involved in the slave trade.

I didn't know how large scale we were involved in slave trade.

I couldn't believe when I started looking at what had been written.

Scholars suspect that two specific slave ships made it to this coast.

I think they're right.

Looking at the material, it's the first time that Denmark ever sends two ships on the same sort of voyage.

They left Copenhagen and 1708, "Christianus Quintus" and "Fredericus Quartus."

They're going to go to West Africa, get slaves and then transport them to the West Indies.

When they leave West Africa, they are in bad weather conditions, but they're completely lost.

They're in open waters for days and days and days.

And they end up about here.

- Ola.

- Hi guys.

One of the reasons that we know that the two ships could be here is because in the archives, the name Caretto is mentioned.

That was where they ended up, but that doesn't exist.

So Caretto sounds a lot like Cahuita.

And that is one of the reasons that it could be here.

♪ From the historical records, we know that the crew of "The Fredericus" and "The Christianus" anchored the ships close to shore, and then mutinied against their captains.

[all shouting] The conditions on board were horrendous.

There was no food, no water and they were afraid to die.

[loud blast] "The Fredericus" was set on fire and the crew on "The Christianus" cut the anchor and the ship ran aground.

♪ The objects on board sank with the ships and scattered across the ocean floor.

♪ Most of the Africans were set ashore.

♪ So these might be some of the first Africans coming to this area and populating it.

[SALVADOR] So we have seen a lot of artifacts out there.

How can we link all these objects to that time period in which the ship actually shipwrecked here?

Hopefully we'll find these clues that point to these two wrecks being "Christianus Quintus" and "Fredericus Quatus."

This looks like a cargo list.

Is that correct?

Yeah, it is.

We can see there's loads of different stuff here.

These are canvas and there's clothes and there's handguns and there's timbers and there's bottles of wine and brandy.

What key pieces of information and evidence do you have in these records that would connect them to these two wrecks?

There's a lot of artifacts that would survive.

The ceramics would survive, the glass bottles that are very specific in this period would survive.

That's what we focus on.

Sounds like we need to go diving.

♪ Africa's contribution to world culture has been pretty much ignored.

♪ I'm traveling to Lalibela to see one of the wonders of the world.

♪ It's an 800 year old Orthodox church carved into the ground out of a single piece of rock.

- It's quite magical.

- Absolutely.

♪ I'm meeting the world's leading expert on African fractals.

So tell me about fractals.

What are fractals?

Fractals are just the simplest thing in the world.

So it's simply a pattern that repeats itself at different scales.

So when you were looking at a building like this, you're saying the crosses on top big, medium, small.

Right.

You've got the cross within cross within crosses on the roof.

At the very centre there's a sort of X form.

You can think of that as the self reproducing heart of the fractal, where the thing emanates from.

If you look down into the interior here, you can see that the ripples of that cross continue from the base of the church.

This is really a geometric theme that occurs again and again and again in these African structures.

This is a different way of looking at the world than Westerners are used to.

Yes, that's right.

Nature has this fractal geometry.

It has this self similar geometry to it.

A tree for example, you could have a branch and then that branch can have branches, and those branches can have branches.

Clouds, the clouds are puffs of puffs.

You see that mountains, peaks of peaks of peaks.

- Snowflakes.

- Yes, exactly.

So you have this fractal scaling in nature.

But I was looking at these aerial photographs of African villages, thinking to myself, dang, those look like fractals.

And that's when I realized there must be something culturally specific.

Some form of knowledge that's going into these.

♪ Once you understand fractals, and you can sort of read them, that whole African Indigenous knowledge system opens up.

It's all over Africa.

You see them in Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso.

I've seen them in Ghana and Cameroon, South Africa, East Tanzania, just beautiful arrays of these fractal algorithms.

In Addis, there's a whole building that's a fractal building.

It breathes.

It has a fractal perforation on the skin.

And so they've massively cut the need for air conditioning.

And it took the West a long time to recognize these patterns.

It wasn't until 1977 that the first book on fractals was published.

Africans have been using it for centuries before then.

[all singing] Did African fractals have an impact on the world?

Yes.

Through a mathematically related fortune telling system.

You're doing these random lines, you're counting them off.

Drawing all these lines in sand.

If there's an even number, you put down two strokes, there's an odd number, you put down one stroke.

And when I went to these folks and asked them if they could tell me more about it and said, nah, this is a secret.

I can't tell.

So I had to go through the initiation ritual to become an Obana divination priest.

So what I found was that back in the 12th century, the system went up into Europe and it was taken up by the Alchemist.

Now, Leibniz, the German mathematician, when he invented the binary code, he was actually studying the system.

And then it goes from Leibniz to George Boole creating Boolean algebra.

Boolean algebra gets turned into hardware by John von Neumann, that's the birth of the digital computer.

So all those little ones and zeroes running around in all of our digital circuits really start with that African origin.

There are two different paths that you can take in mathematics.

One is to think about how to imp from the top down.

One is think how to allow order to emerge from the bottom up.

♪ One of my hopes is that we can now recover that process that was interrupted by the slave trade.

♪ ♪ We're going to a dive site where young Costa Ricans have noticed many different artifacts that might shed light on their history.

Okay.

♪ It's finally time to get in the water and start hunting.

♪ We're going to snorkel around first and do a survey of the area.

♪ I hope that it might help to actually put together all the pieces of the puzzle to give the voice to all those people.

It seems easy, but it's not.

This is a huge area to cover.

And over 300 years, tides and storms would have moved the artifacts around.

♪ We can barely see anything down here.

The visibility is so bad.

♪ Our job is to discover if there are any remains of the two Danish slave ships left behind.

♪ Woo!

I found something.

♪ It's actually kind of hard to see down here, so I really didn't expect to find anything at all.

What we found here could be significant.

It looks like a period bottle.

It's brown in colour.

It seems like it might have some manufacturing defects on it, but it's definitely not a modern bottle.

And one discovery leads to another.

♪ Woo!

- You got something?

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

♪ I've never really seen so many artifacts scattered around in the same place.

Archeologically speaking, this is a treasure trove, right.

There are items all over the place.

So now the time where we need to get back in and start to document and record these things.

Great job guys.

♪ We don't yet know whether these artifacts are from the slave ships we're trying to identify.

But, finding so many so close together is a giant step forward.

♪ ♪ I've got a body, dark and strong.

♪ ♪ ♪ I was young, but not for long.

♪ ♪ ♪ You took me to bed, a little girl.

♪ ♪ ♪ Left me in a woman's world.

♪ ♪ I've done a lot of research about time of slavery.

And I was looking at advertisements where people were putting ads in the paper to sell people.

And I saw one in particular, it was for a young woman who was for sale.

And at the end of the ad, it said that she has with her a nine month old baby who was at the purchaser's option.

And I don't know, those words just really... Stuck with me and thinking about her in particular.

♪ I got a baby, shall I keep him?

♪ ♪ Twill come a day when I'll be weeping ♪ ♪ ♪ But how can I love him any less?

♪ ♪ ♪ This little babe upon my breast ♪ ♪ ♪ You can take my body, you can take my bones, ♪ ♪ you can take my blood, but not my soul.

♪ ♪ You can take my body, take my bones, ♪ ♪ you can take my blood, ♪ but not my soul.

♪ You have this lineage here.

You have this connection historically to that last ship that was sent over here.

You know where you come from.

I don't know necessarily where my family comes from in the same way, but musically, I know my lineage.

There's more than one way to be connected to who we are as a community.

It's not just blood.

♪ In the gathering place right behind Kazoola, the Africatown community has symbols to commemorate their ancestors.

♪ Family and friends, in the presence of God, we come to pour our libation in memory of our faith and blood.

Growing up not far from here, I would never have imagined the traditional African ceremony survived in Alabama.

When we pour libation, we awaken the ancestors.

We talk to them.

We're going to pour forth water to symbolize the richness of our inheritance, to symbolize how nourishing is the earth which has fed our lives and all our previous generations.

In response to each pouring, I would like for you to respond ashei, which means, so be it.

Repeat after me, ashei.

Ashei.

♪ For many years, those Africans from "The Clotilda" held rituals and rites and buried their kin in this sacred space.

If you would, call out the names of those who you have buried.

Kazoola.

Ashei.

- [man shouts name] - Ashei.

- [woman shouts name] - Ashei.

♪ Ashei.

[monkey roars] ♪ We found many different artifacts on our last dive, but only Andreas can tell us if they match the two Danish slave ships that may have brought the enslaved Africans over here.

♪ What do you think?

This plate, I'm quite sure that that is after 1850.

So if it's from after 1710, it's not related to the wrecks.

This is a broken piece of ceramic.

What do you think about that?

Could be from this period?

It could also be 150, 180 years more recent.

Also, this is an interesting bottle.

♪ It's difficult to see in this photo, but it looks like it has the shape of this onion bottle.

That's one of the things that we know from the cargo list is that we have 66 bottles of wine.

And we also know that we have French Brandy.

So this particular piece is quite promising then?

This is definitely an interesting object.

There are artifacts here from so many time periods that we can't fully identify any of them with the Danish ships.

So Andreas wants to focus on a kind of object that could have only come from Denmark.

So we know that there are all these different types of cargo.

Handguns, and there's bottles of wine and brandy.

But one thing that is very specifically Danish is the yellow brick.

The yellow brick?

We know from the archives that they usually carried sort of around 40,000 bricks.

What would make these bricks Danish?

The size of the brick is specifically very, very Danish.

- I did bring one?

- Can we see?

- Can we handle it?

- You can handle it.

This is a brick found in Denmark, and this size is specifically Danish.

And it's very often that they're yellow.

If you were to find bricks of this size, this colour, could be more reddish, then it would definitely be a smoking gun.

So there would be a lot of bricks?

Probably not going to look like a gigantic pile of 40,000 bricks, but it will be sort of a substantial area of bricks.

So this is what we're looking for huh?

This will be our smoking gun.

♪ Jamaica was a plantation economy, completely dependent on hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans.

Remarkably, some of them helped plant the first seeds of democracy in the Americas.

♪ - Dorrick.

- Hey.

So good to meet you.

Yes.

Welcome.

Welcome to Port Royal.

Thank you.

And it all connects to the original Pirates of the Caribbean.

What kind of city was here in the 1600s?

♪ Port Royal was also full of brothels.

It was known as the wickedest city on earth.

But along with all that drinking and debauchery, came freedom and the form of democracy in which Africans would play a part.

[all laugh] I heard there were records showing pirate ships whose crews were made up of as much as 30% escaped Africans.

Yes.

The plantations were complaining that they had 2,500 enslaved Africans that ran away to join the pirates.

[cannon blast] When you're on board these vessels, every man was equal.

It was not question of the colour of your skin, but it was the skills you have.

Pirates actually gave opportunities?

Yes.

Because on board, it was one man, one vote.

It is remarkable that at a time when Africans had been classified as subhuman, here was a world where they had an equal vote and an equal say alongside their white counterparts.

So here is the remains of Port Royal that is now completely submerged.

- Submerged underwater.

- Underwater.

I'm not a diver, but I can snorkel.

So I joined the pros to see what remains of this underwater city.

Woo!

♪ You can still see the foundations of buildings and sometimes 17th century artifacts like this onion bottle.

♪ [all laugh] For about 20 years, this submerged city was a place where Black pirates got to vote at sea and on land, helping to plant democratic ideas in the new world.

♪ After talking with the locals, we learned that there are a few more locations further out that could have what we're looking for.

Evidence of Danish slave ships.

In addition to those yellow bricks, we're also looking for bigger things like cannons, cannon balls, gold, and even ivory.

Things which would have been on the slave ships from Africa.

Since we're headed further out and going into deeper water, snorkeling won't cut it.

We're going to dive.

So we need to talk dive plan and a bit more about safety.

Salvador is going to be the lead youth diver in terms of safety.

I know it's not very deep, we've had instructors drown in 10 feet of water.

So be aware of how much air you got remaining in your tank.

Don't take no dive for granted, okay?

Your life depends on your skills, your equipment and your attitude.

Everybody comprende?

Si.

All right let's do it.

Pool's open, let's go.

♪ Very soon, we start to come across shards of pottery and a broken bottle, little clues that we hope will lead us to something much bigger.

♪ Amazingly, Anderson swims right into a cluster of cannons.

It's exactly the kind of evidence we've been searching for.

The more I saw, the more there were.

So that was amazing.

They're beside each other, they're across each other.

♪ There are some cannons that just looked like coral.

They were so heavily encrusted, the oceans taking it back.

♪ But we know distinctively that they're cannons.

You can see the bore on some of them.

Some of the bores are covered up.

♪ Cannons can give us a lot of information.

We saw about eight, 10, maybe 12.

But if there's more, it could tell us the size of the vessel.

We know the size of "The Fredericus" and "The Christianus" so that would be very insightful.

The cannons were amazing, but there were still more surprises to come.

♪ Even with 300 years of coral growth, there was no mistaking the shape of our next discovery.

A fully intact anchor.

The shape of the anchor, it's about three, four metres.

Come from a very large ship just based on the size of that anchor.

Two floats are there.

Each one is about a foot wide and maybe another foot and a half long.

So in beautiful shape.

There's some incredible stuff.

It's the more evidence that we can put in the mix and try to figure out what's going on at the site.

♪ The first time I saw the anchor, for me is amazing.

I asked my grandfather and my grandmother and they both say yes, I had an African ancestors, and they both had like connecting histories with slaves.

To know that makes me feel that I'm more connected to my history.

♪ It's not in the history books.

It's not in the documents.

And if they find it themselves, they begin asking the right questions.

And the right question is, where do I come from?

What has that meant in the life of me and my community?

♪ Clearly the pieces of the puzzle are falling into place.

But going off of what Andreas has said, we're continuing to follow the yellow brick road.

♪ Jekyll Island, Georgia, like Africatown, is where one of the very last slave ships arrived bringing 409 people here just seven years before the end of the civil war.

♪ Matthew Rayford studied at some of the finest international schools of cuisine, but he's returned here to honor the cuisine and culture that was created by his ancestors.

[MATTHEW] Going to school, I would say things like, "Well, there's another way to do that right there."

And folks would look at me like, what do you mean it's another way?

We're learning French cuisine.

And I was like, "Well, my grandmother would do it like this."

Grandma's food tasted better.

And my grandma food tasted better, right?

Raiford's come back to his family farm as an activist farmer and chef, celebrating African American culture through food.

We live on our own family farm.

We've had that land since 1874 and we've always farmed it.

We're still farming it now.

And we're still using a lot of the old ways to farm.

I'm doing a little quick little cooking demo off of things that we grow on the farm, and then things that comes from the Gullah Geechee culture.

♪ Gullah Geechee culture is an African culture that took root on the sea islands, along the Atlantic coast of Georgia, Florida, North and South Carolina.

See, during the civil war, the white plantation owners fled in fear of former slaves seeking revenge.

I mean the African population left on it's own.

It had to hone it's survival skills.

♪ How do you make a living when A, you don't have an education, you're stuck on a barrier Island?

A lot of them mined what they learned and what they saw here and figured out a way to make it work.

- Did they?

- They did.

I'm living proof that they did, and they did a good job of it too.

So when they were crossing the Atlantic, when they were shipping their cargo, people, human beings, those human beings came with their culture?

Absolutely.

We brought our ways with us.

We brought our foods with us.

We bought our use of spices of salts of cookery.

So when I think about American food, I think about the African influences on what comes to our plate, but also in what we grow.

So a lot of what I thought is Southern cooking is really Gullah cooking.

A cuisine made up of many ingredients that Africans brought here, including rice, sweet peas and okra.

I just threw in a little bit of red pepper in, I want that red pepper to still have a little bit of bite to it.

So that's why I put it in a little bit later.

You've been cooking longer than that.

Well, I'm 76 years old.

I've been cooking since I was eight.

My mother and father, they taught us how to cook everything.

Is that where Matthew gets it?

Well, let me tell you that boy right there, he's a good cook.

I got to give him credit.

He is better than me.

I hate to say it.

Do you remember a favourite dish from your mom?

You ever eat fried chicken gizzards?

Not fried chicken gizzards, no.

People used to throw them away years ago.

My mother used to go to slaughterhouse, they'd give them to her.

She bring them home, clean them up.

- Was it good?

- Oh, yeah.

Put a little pepper and salt in there.

I do it today.

♪ So this is our vegetarian paella right here.

Have a little bit of sweet potato leaves, some of the Cherokee purple tomatoes, some sea island red peas.

Then, for those that aren't completely vegetarian, we have Satlow clams.

Charlie Phillips actually harvests these clams right here.

He's an amazing fisherman.

You can actually name the fisherman who got the clams.

Yes, I can name the fisherman.

I actually can name the fisherman.

Those traditions came with us to bring a piece of home.

We were known to sew, literally braid, and bring seeds in our hair.

It looked like an ornament.

It won't look like a seed.

So when I bring it over, I got seed, I got something from home.

When I get to my new destination, I plant in my new home to bring a piece of home with me.

Every time I eat it, I still remember home.

I still remember when my mama used to make it for me and my mama's mama made it for her.

When I think of your ancestor that was kidnapped, trafficked from Africa, the odds that his great, great, great, great, great grandchild would be here celebrating the culture that came on that ship.

It's a miracle.

It is a miracle.

It's impacted on the world around you.

Definitely.

There's not a city in the United States that is not trying to have the best Southern restaurant ever.

And what did they serve in?

Rice and peas.

They're making biscuits, corn bread, they're frying gizzards, right?

So it was like, think about all of those things have been considered for so many years to be poor people or slave food, right now, everyone wants to celebrate it.

♪ I've come to Kingston, Jamaica's capital city to explore the connection between this island's history of enslavement and one of its greatest exports, reggae.

♪ [singing] I was born here in Jamaica.

I have history, ancestry of a slaved trip, right?

And the ones who survived, came here on this rock and I am a product of their survival.

There is something that's inate in our people.

That when we come together we can defeat any oppression.

♪ It's what left of the culture or the practice, the traditions that they are coming across.

We as a people, we just have to pass it on to our arts.

♪ Reggae has gone to all parts of the world inspiring people, because of the very soul of the music, and soul has to do with an entire history of hardship, of oppression, of rebellion, of enslavement.

♪ Life on the plantation was about this oppression of Black life.

The culture around the plantation life gets translated into what became Jamaica's indigenous musical genres.

♪ By the time we get to the 1930s, people began listening to Marcus Garvey's philosophy.

♪ Please help me, ♪ Marcus Messiah Garvey ♪ Africa awaits her creators ♪ ♪ Bill with me!

♪ How many more need to die before we see the strategy?

♪ ♪ Marcus Garvey with his ideas about returning masses of people to Africa.

That of course gets crystallized in the Rastafarian movement.

And they're the ones that develop reggae?

That's right.

Many of the lyrics in reggae songs still talk about the history of slavery, about returning to Africa, about undoing the chains of mental slavery.

Do you think that this is a music form that's keeping that history alive in the minds of Jamaicans and the world?

The Rasafari people are the memory of the Jamaican people.

They have been the ones to consistently dip into that history to show us who we are, show us where we're coming from and also showing us where we're going.

♪ ♪ We need a shepherd for the sheep, ♪ ♪ we're gonna lead the flock.

♪ ♪ Wolves and leopards get defeat ♪ ♪ with these slingshots.

♪ [singing] ♪ United States of Africa, I like the sound of that.

♪ ♪ Organized and centralized ♪ modern day slavery ♪ [singing] ♪ Modern day slave ♪ ♪ Modern day slave ♪ The cannons and the anchor are important clues.

But to identify those Danish ships once and for all, we need to find yellow bricks, a lot of them.

So we're heading back out to search again.

♪ We have the opportunity to be with these kids and to help them find their roots.

And that is absolutely incredible.

♪ It's a huge search area, but the location of the cannons and the anchor gives us hope that we're on the right track.

Those bricks have got to be hidden out here somewhere.

Through the sea grass and shifting sands, Kevin felt sure he spotted something.

♪ ♪ At first glance, it was hard to notice if there was anything different about the spot at all.

♪ But when we looked closer, there was a strange pattern.

In that moment, you realize that this cold case that has been lying on the bottom of the ocean for hundreds of years is now right in front of you about to be solved and you're there.

To see that, to be in that moment, that's a historical moment.

This huge hill of seabed is actually a huge pile of bricks.

According to the ship's manifest, there should be 40,000 of them down here.

♪ Andreas has been able to get permission to bring up one of the bricks for testing.

♪ I have it.

Got it here.

♪ Oh my God.

So now they have an opportunity to rediscover their ties to their past and rediscover their contact or the connection to the enslaved Africans who were here.

[all cheering] ♪ This is about Cahuita.

This is about the people of Cahuita.

This is about the bravery.

This is about the people who are here to find out the truth about exactly who they are as a people and where they came from and how Africans were very much a part of creating this community.

♪