For many, when tracing the fragile links of their lineage, being confronted by the cruelty of the blood-smeared chapters of the evil slave trade, is hard enough to stomach.
More chilling is the discovery that for more than two and a half centuries creaking wooden hulks under sail cluttered the high seas with human cargoes condemned to a life in chains and deprivation as they were shipped off to the New World.
Conrad Hunte, a former great West Indies opening batsman once deprived of the test captaincy of his beloved Caribbean islands when passed over for Sir Garfield (Garry) Sobers, is all too aware of the agonies of Africa; ancient and modern.
After all, he had visited South Africa during the dark days of the apartheid era; arriving for the first time shortly after the 1976 Soweto uprising over yet another unwanted imposition. Yet, here is a man, strong in Christian beliefs and Moral Rearmament values, who when he first played for Barbados and later the West Indies was still disenfranhised. Under an archaic British colonial ruling, to have the vote meant you needed to own property; only after independence in 1960 was adult sufferage conferred on the former colonies in the Caribbean community.
Yet Hunte is as much a missionary in Africa as he is a pioneer in the field of cricket development and spreading God's gospel. Now a month before his 66th birthday, his role in Africa is that of missionary as well as an explorer. As the representative of two important bodies, the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and International Cricket Council (ICC) it has been his job to ``oversee the coaching and develop the game on their behalf'' in what was originally 10 countries south of the Sahara.
Throw in the four west African English-speaking countries - Nigeria, The Gambia, Ghana and Sierra Leone - along with the Seychelles and Mauritius, it is easy to see how his job has grown beyond its original job description of February 1992.
From his base at the United Cricket Board office at the Wanderers, in Johannesburg, since November 1991, he has overseen the revival since arriving with his wife and family.
But overseeing the rebirth of the game in areas where there had been war, famine, detrimental tribal influences and revolution, Hunte was treated with suspicion and his work with polemic paranoia. To some it is still an eilist sport; yet his humility and humbleness won over even the most truculant politicians. He had to first act as midwife then foster father of a game severely malnourished through years of neglect.
Even the tyrranies in Uganda during the despotic excesses of the Idi Amin era failed to diminish an interest in the sport of flannelled fools. Through a programme of careful husbandry and involvement since 1994, Hunte has, with the aid of Hoosain Ayob, the UCB's national director of coaching, given a new direction to the game in that oft-troubled country.
Mini cricket clinics have had success with surprisingly good results in Uganda; similarly Tanzania and Malawi, where cricket had hobbled along. The infusion at school level of a development programme has created an important grassroots structure. Although in Lesotho sport has generally suffered from the apartheid era, there are encouraging signs of regrowth and redevlopment.
The Namibia Cricket Board has received the country's sports council award for presenting the best sports development programme. Now other challenges face them: working towards building a competitive side for the ICC Trophy tournament.
In 1996 and 1997 Hunte was senior co-ordinator of the all-Africa Zone VI tournament: the first was held at the Pretoria University's LC de Villiers Stadium, in Hatfield (and won by Zimbabwe); the second was in Harare (won by South Africa). Here Hunte has pursued the dream of advancing more than just a sport; he is helping those in Africa to overcome inherent prejudices of race, colour and creed.
Zone VI ... ? Well may you ask. Africa is divided into seven sport zones and the week gives an opportunity for a gathering of most of the cricket nations in Africa.
On September 5, 1996 came the formation of the Africa Cricket Association ... in Pretoria, the former capital of the apartheid state. It was a remarkable event with Hunte appointed secretary and Krish Mackerdhuj president of the steering committee.
However, it needed more than a loosely woven west African slave link to attract the nimble, yet piously urbane mind of a man of Hunte'a calibre, to a country such as South Africa in the years of demeaning oppression. Pictures that still haunt him are those weeks after the 1976 Soweto uprising.
In a matter of a few days during during that bloody and traumatic era he experienced the harsh ghetto-style surroundings of Soweto and then the luxury and comfort of a white friend's home in the smart Johannersburg suburb of Westcliff. What he discovered was a terrifying indictment: relationships among people and their Maker had become perpendicular.
``People had a working faith in God and themselves, but notbetween themselves and their neighbours and God.'' Which he readily admitted created a dilemma.
Moving on next to Stellenbosch he discovered leafy suburbs and a strong sense of history and culture - all that Soweto lacked. It was then an inner voice explained what he was experiencing was an extreme situation ``of the human condition''.
``For me it explained that the white man needed the black man and the black man needed the white man, that Soweto needed Stellenbosch,'' he confided. From this South Africa, he feels, will become a pattern of unity for all mankind.
However, what changed his attitude that South Africa could, and would, one day survive and overcome the trauma of the apartheid laws, their obstacles and divisions was an incident during his second visit in 1977.
He was travelling with a party of 14 to Cape Town, when they were forced to take a break at Colesberg and stay a night in a hotel. While the 12 whites in the party had comfortable warm rooms in the front of the building, Hunte, an overseas visitor, along with a South African black, was thrust into the spartan aaccommodation of a dank, damp room at the back. The toilets were filthy and there was no bathwater to speak of for washing.
Again the inner voice spoke calmly, rationally.
``What you have to realise is that this is not about black and white, as there are poor people everywhere in the world. What we have here is a terrible chasm that no human goodwill can solve - that only the crucified Christ can solve. From this He can build a path of reconciliation and freedom from bondage.''
It was early in his life when Hunte realised that he had ``three strikes'' against him: he was born poor, black and disenfranchised, which he did not either merit or create.
They were obstacles which he had to overcome, giving him inner strength, and resolve, to teach others similarly disadvantaged how to climb over the hurdles of injustice and repression.
Hunte feels he has, within the cricket development programme, the ideal platform, to help the youth of Africa create a system that is just and fair for all people on the continent: a continent from which his ancestors were shipped to the New World, facing a lifetime of suffering and bondage.