Zendaya’s Ethnicity and Family Roots

Father’s side

Kazembe Ajamu Coleman was born Samuel Coleman in 1960. According to Blavity, his parents came from Arkansas and married young, and the family descends from sharecroppers in the American South.^[1] As an adult he took a DNA test and adopted the name Kazembe Ajamu to honor his African roots, as Zendaya told Complex in 2015.^[2]

Blavity lists Nigeria among the regions in his test results.^[1] Several outlets go further and call him Nigerian, without naming a source. Zendaya and her father speak of Africa as a whole in the interviews we found, so we do not list a specific African country.

Coleman worked as a teacher until he left his job to manage his daughter’s early career in Los Angeles.

Mother’s side

Claire Stoermer taught for about two decades at an elementary school in Oakland, the same school Zendaya attended. According to Complex, she and her own mother researched the family history and traced it to Scotland and Germany.^[2]

In 2015, Zendaya sat down with both parents for a short film by the nonprofit Welcome.US about family heritage. The Hollywood Reporter described it as a conversation about her parents’ roots in Germany and Africa and how she grew up embracing both.^[3]

Claire’s father, Phillip Stoermer, was born and raised in Los Angeles. He studied at the University of Southern California and Southwestern Law School and married in 1962. In 1972 the family moved to Orinda, east of Oakland. He practiced real estate law until he died of cancer in 2006. His obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle names Zendaya among his three granddaughters.^[4]

The Scottish line runs through Claire’s mother, Daphne, who was born in Vancouver and later came to the United States to study. Her father, Douglas Whitelaw, was born in Dundee in 1896. In 1911, at about 15, he crossed the Atlantic to Halifax and took the train to Vancouver, where his father ran an accounting business. He fought with the Canadian Highlanders in World War I and came home with shrapnel wounds. In Canada he married Thelma Ray Kelly. In 2021 Claire said that Zendaya knows about her Scottish heritage and is proud of it.^[5]