They were adamant about going all out. People who sing the village's songs--melodies and rhythms that tie them to this inaccessible chiefdom -- are considered family. "Our grandparents who told us the stories about our people going as slaves, we know now that they didn't lie," says Joe Allie, an elder of the village and Pokawa's uncle.

"These must be our people," says Solomon Musa, a young man who works as a teacher in the village, "when we saw the people who practice the same things we used to do, we were so happy, we are full of joy."

There is a pervasive idea that Africans are generally unmoved by the fate of the descendants of slaves throughout the Americas. That belief is born largely of the tragedy that the vast majority of Africa's diaspora have little left of the specific languages, cultures, or beliefs that would tie them to a particular place of origin. The utter callousness of slavery, the endless destruction of families, and the sheer weight of the decades since have all attenuated much that originally crossed the ocean with their forebears. In the absence of those ties, some African-Americans have gone to central sites of commemoration, such as Gorée Island or Cape Coast Castle, looking for all that has been lost. Those who hoped for an individual connection to the motherland have sometimes reported these places rather disappointing. They are tourist sites, after all. What's more, dark skin is here the norm, so it does little by itself to symbolize kinship or affinity if not bolstered by shared language, culture or experience.

Pokawa and his people have, by contrast, found some of their lost kin in the Americas. This tiny group of people in Cuba -- a country they had scarcely heard of--singing and dancing their songs, was a gift from God. Or, more accurately, from God and Allah, both of whom are worshipped here side by side. Cut off from the media and from almost all Western education, to them the people taken as slaves into the transatlantic slave trade are still called by their ancient names, invoked as the lost. There was Gboyangi. Bomboai. There was the young girl just about to be married.

They live on in the village elders' collective memory, but the idea that any had survived, lived long enough to have families in their new countries, and then had taught their children the songs and dances of this chiefdom -- that was unimaginable. The fact that none had returned could only mean, they assumed, that none had survived. That there are untold numbers of people of African origin in the Americas who would dearly love to know the exact origins of their ancestors was utterly unknown. "Those poor children," said Pokawa when I tried to explain why none had visited before.

Even the Afro-Cubans who kept alive the songs and dances of this specific chiefdom had lost all knowledge of where they originated. Only by a long and arduous search, and with a great amount of luck, did my thousands of informants lead me here, where on my first visit the people looked at my screen in utter astonishment, said "they are we," and then joined in with the songs.

But I, with my academic skepticism, doubted it could be true. I returned to Cuba and the archives and records, searching for written evidence of how this might have happened. The entire, exact story will likely never be recovered, but one determined woman and her descendants preserved a whole swath of songs and dances closely enough to be clearly identified.