"Black people don't have a sense of history," my mother says. Other Americans travel to Europe, Asia or Latin America in order to visit the countries where their ancestors lived. Those places represent part of their history. "They have a family connection" to those places, my father says. What black people don't realize is, so do we.

Africans traveled the world long before trains, planes and 'tane made it easy. You know that it's possible to walk from the southern-most tip of Africa all the way up to the northern-most tip of Russia, and over through the Middle East to India and China.

CHINA
Africans have been recorded in China as far back as the Tang Dynasty, around 600-900 AD. Back in those days, the Chinese called the Africans the Kunlun people. Africans are portrayed in Chinese artifacts more than 1,000 years old.

INDIA
In "The South Asian," an online magazine, Zachariah Cherian Mampilly has an article titled "The African Diaspora of the Sub-Indian Continent." The article states that commercial contracts between India and what is now the African nation of Ethiopia were found in a commercial manual written back around the time of Christ.

"More than 250,000 descendants of Africans still live amongst the Indian people," Mampilly writes. "Although Africans have been crossing the Indian Ocean into India for over a millennium, most of those who make up the Indo-African population came in the past five hundred years. Most were mercenaries or prisoners of war of the Muslim rulers. Africans also came as midwives and herbalists, and as musicians, sailors and merchants."

Mampilly adds that in the 1520s, a European traveler noted that Africans had achieved a high status in India; "These men are looked upon as knights; they are greatly esteemed . . ."

MEDITERRANEAN
Much of western civilization has its origins in the ancient Greco-Roman cultures. According to Frank M. Snowden's book "Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience," many Africans enjoyed positions of respect and influence in ancient Greece, and were generals, scholars and artists in the Roman Empire.

SOUTH AMERICA
Other researchers have found West Africans portrayed in ancient Olmec art. How did Africans get all the way across the Atlantic Ocean and across South America to Peru?

Here's how: Sailors have known for centuries that there are two currents with origins off the west coast of Africa. These currents have been described as rivers in the middle of the ocean that flow west across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas.

Once inside these currents, it would have been almost impossible for ancient ships to break free of them. Researchers believe that this is how West African merchants established a trade route to South America long before Christopher Columbus.

Columbus and other explorers actually spotted Africans in the New World, and heard reports from Native Americans about their encounters with Africans.

There are also ancient African relics that have been found in what is now Mexico. The Africans represented in these carvings were not the ones brought over by the European slave trade, because the carvings date back to 1100 BC.

Many Africans who freely made the journey from what is now Ghana or Guinea over to the New World eventually intermarried with the Native Americans they traded with -- as equals.

EUROPE
Did you know that African slaves were brought from America to Germany by soldiers who had helped fight in the Revolutionary War?

About 30,000 Germans had fought on the side of the British during the war, and according to the German History Institute in Washington DC, "after the war many former slaves accompanied the German troops back to Europe, so that by the late 1780s the number of Africans in these two German states [Hesse and Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel] increased considerably."

Vera Lind, writing for the German History Institute, says, "research on the black population in early modern Europe is still in its infancy, with most work concentrating on France, England, and the Netherlands. This is surprising not only because blacks were so numerous, but also because they in many ways had an important cultural impact, as their presence in German art, literature, public debate, and daily life suggests.

"There are hundreds of paintings from this era portraying black and white people together. Black Africans in exotic dress were favorite motifs on porcelain, clocks, and in paintings, silhouettes of Africans appear in the coats of arms of several German cities and families, and blacks were popular characters in novels, poems, and plays."

What about Spain or Portugal? Back in the 8th century, North African Muslims invaded the body of land that has since been divided into Spain and Portugal. Historians called them "Moors." Moors have been described as looking like Europeans to looking like very dark Africans (the same range of diversity in American blacks today).

A MURKY PAST
Most American blacks have no idea where our ancestors came from, or where they moved to, or about the heritage our ancestors who weren't African -- the majority of American blacks have Native American or European ancestors, in addition to African.

Our ancestry is mysterious and complicated. But the good news is, we have strong ties to almost any place we can visit today.

For tips on cheap ways to travel from my book "Traveling While Black," e-mail LK1RKP at gmail.