From the conference room in a hotel in Dakar, Senegal the windows, offered views of the glittering Atlantic Ocean.
Around the table sat government officials, developers, and an African Leadership Group delegation of six, discussing a multimillion-dollar waterfront development project. Everyone in the room was Black.
Coloradan LaTerrell Bradford, a delegation member, looked around and felt something shift inside her. In three decades navigating corporate America, she had never experienced anything like this moment.
“That was the first time I’ve sat at a table with all Black people in that level of professional setting talking about making a deal,” Bradford said. “The people who were bringing in the coffee and the people who were helping, everybody was Black. As a Black American, I’ve never experienced that. Ever.”
Bradford traveled to Senegal last December with ALG, accompanying to their home country. The trip was smaller than the usual ALG delegation, just six people total, including Founder and Executive Director Papa Dia, his wife Astu, and Papa’s longtime colleague and confidant Jason Gaulden.
The group’s intimate scale allowed for something deeper than the typical business delegation: an immersion in culture, history, and a confrontation with the tangled roots connecting African Americans to the continent of their ancestors.
For Papa, who emigrated from Senegal to Denver in 1998 and founded ALG to serve Colorado’s African immigrant community, these delegations serve multiple purposes. They open doors for American investors and entrepreneurs interested in African markets. They showcase Senegal’s culture and business potential. And increasingly, they have become a vehicle for his Breaking Barriers and Building Bridges initiative, which seeks to repair misunderstandings and build relationships between African immigrants and African Americans.
“They don’t know anything about us,” Bradford said of Africans she has encountered in her travels to Ghana, Togo, Benin, and now Senegal. “They have no idea of the concept of enslavement and how horrific it was. Nothing. And we don’t know anything about them.”
Bradford, who works in the investment industry and is a yoga instructor on the side, was among the ALG members who conceived the Breaking Barriers initiative, She was part of ALG’s first Leadership Africa cohort in 2021, and was in a small subgroup along with Papa. The idea for Breaking Barriers emerged from that group’s conversations.
The program has since become one of ALG’s signature initiatives, bringing together members of Jewish, Native American, Asian, Hispanic, and African American communities with African immigrants for dialogue and shared projects.
A different kind of VIP
Ken Floyd came to ALG through a more conventional path. A private equity professional with experience raising hundreds of millions of dollars for large-scale utility projects, Floyd was invited to speak on a panel at ALG’s Afrik Impact Business Summit last year. He was in the middle of selling his house and relocating from Denver, and nearly canceled because of how busy he was. At the last minute, he decided to honor his commitment.
That decision changed his life.
“The energy in the room at the summit just floored me,” Floyd said. “I don’t know how many people were in that room, just the energy and the feedback and the vibe, it was amazing. It had an emotional impact on me. It just felt like there’s people in this room hungry for information, hungry for knowledge, hungry for opportunities.”
As Floyd stepped down from the podium, people lined up to thank him. By the time he got to his car, he knew he wanted to be more involved. Days later, Papa called to tell him about the upcoming delegation to Senegal.
For Floyd, the timing aligned with a personal interest. Born and raised in a small town outside New Orleans, he had spent years living and working in Europe. His professional life, he said, had made him feel most comfortable in environments dominated by Europeans and white Americans. He had traveled to Morocco but never to Sub-Saharan Africa.
“I’m African American, but my comfort zone is more in a Eurocentric environment,” Floyd said. “Something that I had on my list in terms of my personal journey was to spend more time in Africa.”
He persuaded his adult son, Akil Bektemba, to join him on the ALG delegation.
Bektemba, who runs a workforce development consulting firm in Atlanta, had been to Africa twice before, both times to Cameroon on film assignments. But traveling with Papa was different. The founder’s deep connections in Senegal opened doors that would remain closed to ordinary visitors.
“It’s like going somewhere and being VIP everywhere you go,” Bektemba said. “I know that had a lot to do with how enjoyable the trip was.”
The delegation met with government ministers, mayors, and business leaders. They toured a waterfront development project. They visited with entrepreneurs seeking modest investments to expand their operations: a group of women who make jams and cookies and want to open a shared storefront; a dentist who performs implants but must send X-rays to Turkey to have the replacement teeth manufactured.
Bradford became particularly interested in the dentist’s work, envisioning a mobile dental van that could bring oral hygiene education and basic care to villages where many people lack access to dentistry. She is still pursuing the idea.
The Door of No Return
But the business meetings were only part of the experience. The group visited Papa’s home village and met his family. The delegation also visited museums, attended a ballet performance, toured monuments, and made the sobering journey to Gorée Island, site of one of West Africa’s most notorious slave trading posts.
“To see the doorway that brought people here was pretty intense,” Bektemba said.
For Bradford, who had previously visited slave castles in Ghana, the emotional weight of these sites never diminishes. Her earlier trips to the continent, she said, were focused on yoga and healing.
“When our ancestors were enslaved here everything was taken away, the language, the culture, everything was stripped from them,” Bradford said, “So for me and others like me, where’s our connection to where we came from? Just setting foot on that continent brings a healing component.”
Floyd found the trip stirring connections to his own childhood. Visiting Papa’s home village, meeting his mother, sitting in a house full of extended family while food was passed around, he was transported back to rural Louisiana.
“Going to his hometown, it felt very familiar,” Floyd said. “When I grew up as a little kid, cousins, a house full of people, a lot of fun and games, even though you’re on the low rungs of the economic scale, but the joy, the love that existed. It was very familiar.”
He watched children play soccer on a dirt field with no grass, no fancy equipment, no distractions.
“Young kids and people in the buildings, living in the moment, living in their environment, existing in their environment, in many cases not being distracted by the noise that exists in other parts of the world,” Floyd said.
Building something lasting
All three delegates returned with plans to deepen their engagement. Floyd is exploring social impact investments in Senegal, small-dollar commitments that could help local entrepreneurs expand their businesses. Bektemba is already recruiting colleagues to join the next delegation, including a friend with a PhD in public health who might contribute to ALG’s vision care and health initiatives.
Bradford has been approached by contacts in Senegal seeking sponsorship for various projects, and she appreciates that navigating those relationships requires care.
“I’m not so arrogant to think that I can get in there and maneuver in a way that’s going to be productive on my own,” she said.” I don’t want to build any relationships without Papa’s stamp of approval, because he knows the country, he knows the people.”
For his part, Bektemba sees his participation in these delegations as consistent with who he has always been.
“I’ve pretty much been a pan-Africanist and been in that mind state since I was a teenager,” he said. “So it fit perfectly. That’s who I am fundamentally.”
What moved him most was watching his father connect to a place and a history that Floyd had previously held at arm’s length.
“It was really cool to experience that with my dad and see him connect to it,” Bektemba said.
The trip lasted 10 days. Bektemba thought 12 would have been perfect, with a couple days to simply sit by the ocean and decompress. But Bektemba left wanting to return, a feeling he said doesn’t always follow travel.
“I’ve been places and on trips where I’m like, okay, that’s good, that was my one time, I don’t have any interest in really going back,” he said. “This trip made me want to come back to Senegal again and again.”
He already has plans to join ALG’s 2026 delegation in December.
