Ghana wants once-enslaved diaspora By Lydia Polgreen, The New York Times, December 27, 2005
Ghana For centuries, Africans walked through the infamous "door of no return" at Cape Coast castle directly into slave ships, never to set foot in their homelands again. These days, the portal of this massive and fearsome edifice has a new name, hung for all to see on a sign on the side leading in from the roaring Atlantic Ocean back into the slave fort: "The door of return." Ghana, through whose ports millions of Africans passed on their way to plantations in the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, wants its descendants to come back. Taking Israel as its model, Ghana hopes to persuade the descendants of enslaved Africans to think of Africa as their homeland, to visit, invest, send their children to be educated here and even retire here. "We want Africans everywhere, no matter where they live or how they got there, to see Ghana as their gateway home," explained J. Otanka Obetsebi-Lamptey, Ghana's tourism minister. "We hope we can help bring the African family back together again." In many ways it is a quixotic goal. Ghana is doing well by West African standards - it enjoys steady economic growth, a stable, democratic government and broad support from the West, making it a favored place for wealthy countries to give aid. But it remains a very poor, struggling country where a third of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, life expectancy tops out at 59, and necessities like electricity and water can be scarce. Nevertheless, thousands of African-Americans already live here for at least part of the year, said Valerie Papaya Mann, president of the African-American Association of Ghana. To encourage still more to come, or at least visit, Ghana plans to offer a special lifetime visa for members of the diaspora and will relax citizenship requirements so that descendants of slaves can receive Ghanaian passports. On the home front, Ghana is starting an advertising campaign to persuade Ghanaians to treat African- Americans more like long-lost relatives than rich tourists. That is harder than it sounds. Many African-Americans who visit Africa are shocked to find that Africans treat them - even refer to them - the same as white tourists. In Ghana, the term "obruni," or "white foreigner," is applied to all foreigners regardless of skin color. To African-Americans who come here seeking their roots, the term is a shocking sign of the chasm between Africans and African-Americans. Though they who share a legacy stained slavery, they experience it entirely differently. "It is a shock for any black person to be called white," said Mann, who moved here two years ago. "But it is really tough to hear it when you come with your heart to seek your roots in Africa." The advertising campaign urges Ghanaians to drop "obruni" in favor of "akwaaba anyemi," a slightly awkward phrase fashioned from two tribal languages and meaning "welcome, sister" or "brother." As part of the effort to reconnect with the diaspora, Ghana plans to honor people like Martin Luther King Jr., and W.E.B. Du Bois, people it calls modern-day Josephs, after the biblical character who rose above his chains to lead his people to freedom. The government plans to hold a huge event in 2007 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the end of the trans-Atlantic trade by Britain and the 50th anniversary of Ghana's independence. The ceremonies will include traditional African burial rituals for those who died as a result of slavery. Estimates of the trade vary widely. The most reliable suggest that between 12 million and 25 million people living in the vast lands between present-day Senegal and Angola were caught up, and as many as half died somewhere en route to the Americas. Some perished on the long march from inland villages where they were captured to seaports. Others died in the dungeons of slave castles and forts, where they were kept sometimes for months at a time, until enough were gathered to pack the hold of a ship. Still others died on the journey between Europe, Africa and the Americas. Of the estimated 11 million who crossed the sea, most went to South America and the Caribbean. About 500,000 are believed to have ended up in the United States. The mass deportations and the divisions the slave trade wrought between tribes, ethnic groups and clans are wounds from which Africa still struggles to recover. Ghana was the first sub-Saharan African nation to shake off its colonial rulers, winning its independence from Britain bloodlessly in 1957. Its founding father, Kwame Nkrumah, who had studied at Lincoln University, a historically black college in Chester County, Pennsylvania, saw in African-Americans a key to developing the new nation. "Nkrumah saw the American Negro as the vanguard of the African people," said Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of Harvard's African and African-American studies department, who first traveled to Ghana when he was 20 and fresh out of Harvard, afire with Nkrumah's spirit. "He wanted to be able to utilize the services and skills of African-Americans as Ghana made the transition from colonialism to independence." Many African-Americans, from Maya Angelou to Malcolm X, visited Ghana in the 1950s and 1960s, and a handful stayed. To Nkrumah, who had become a disciple of Du Bois, the father of Pan-Africanism, the struggle for civil rights in the diaspora and the struggles for independence from colonial rule in Africa were inextricably linked, both being expressions of the desire of black people everywhere to regain their freedom. But Nkrumah was ousted in a coup in 1966, and by then Pan-Africanism had already given way to nationalism and Cold War politics. Depending on which side of the Atlantic one's family spent the last half- millennium, each side takes a different view of the tortured history of enslavement that is the shared legacy of black people everywhere. For African-Americans and others in the African diaspora, there is lingering hostility and confusion about the role Africans played in the slave trade. "The myth was our African ancestors were out on a walk one day and some bad white dude threw a net over them," said Gates. "But that wasn't the way it happened. It wouldn't have been possible without the help of Africans." Africans, meanwhile, often fail to see any connection at all between them and African-Americans, or feel African-Americans are better off for having been taken to the United States. Many Africans strive to emigrate; this year the number of Africans moving to the United States surpassed estimates of the number forced there during the height of the slave trade. "So many Africans want to go to America, so they can't understand why Americans would want to come here," said Philip Amoa-Mensah, a guide at Elmina Castle. "Maybe Ghanaians think they are lucky to be from America, even though their ancestors went through so much pain." For all its overtures and promises of easy residency and even passports, many African-Americans living in Ghana say they cannot get work permits without staying for seven years and demonstrating they can support themselves. Meanwhile an African-American visitor to Cape Coast castle last month stepped through the door of no return, only to be greeted by a pair of toddlers playing in a fishing boat on the other side, pointing and shouting, "obruni, obruni!" William Kwaku Moses, a 71-year-old retired security guard who sells shells to tourists on the other side of the door no return, shushed the children. "We are trying," he said, with a shrug. ------------------------ Yahoo! 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