Sarah Culberson didn’t start searching for her biological family until she was 28 and when she found them, it changed her life forever. She was adopted as a baby by a white family in West Virginia and she didn’t know anything about her birth parents and in her quest to find them, she learned that she’s African royalty.
Her biological uncle called with the news that her family is a ruling Mende tribe in Bumpe, Sierra Leone. Sarah is considered a mahaloi, the child of a paramount chief and that makes her the princess of the village. Her mother died when she was 11, but her father and brother are still in the village and she made her first visit to Sierra Leone in 2004 to meet them.
In the years since, she has traveled to the country many times and has embraced her role as a princess, which is not like what we see in the movies. Sarah says, “I realized that my role as a princess is to keep things moving forward in the country.” With her brother Hindo Kposowa, she started a foundation now called Sierra Leone Rising to help rebuild schools and promote education in the war-torn country. The organization has also worked to provide clean drinking water and recently they launched the “Mask On Africa” campaign to help slow the spread of COVID.
She wrote a book about her journey, “A Princess Found,” and it’s being turned into a movie produced by Stephanie Allain, the first Black woman to produce the Academy Awards ceremony. “I see I’m just one of the moving parts in the work being done in Sierra Leone,” Sarah says. “I honor it and I cherish it.”
Source: NBC News
PHOTO: Getty Images