Called back to Africa by DNA: LA Times

Quoted via LATimes:

As a child growing up in Houston, Isaiah Washington said, his first impressions of Africans were discomfiting TV images of "natives running around in raffia with bones in their noses . . . trying to put Tarzan in a pot."

The 45-year-old African American actor, formerly of "Grey's Anatomy," said his mother never talked of Africa. School never taught him much about his ancestral continent and news stories, he said, projected a place of poverty and pestilence, corruption and war.

Today, however, Washington stands so proud of Africa that he recently became a citizen of Sierra Leone, making him a dual national of that West African country and his native United States. He was inducted as a chieftain in a Sierra Leonean village. He's started a foundation to aid Sierra Leone, contributing nearly $1 million to build a school, restore a hospital and preserve a historic British slave castle on nearby Bunce Island. more