Birth of a Nation
Nkrumah and Ghana made a huge impression on Martin Luther King, which later inspired one of his famous sermons “Birth of a Nation’ upon his return to the US. Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali also made high profile visits to the country years later. The black star on the national flag is inspired by the Black Star Line shipping company founded by pan-Africanist orator Marcus Garvey, which had the grand ambition of facilitating the return of African Americans to the motherland.
But even before this period, Accra had long been home to the Tabon people, a group of African slaves in Brazil who returned after a popular slave rebellion. The Tabons arrived in Accra in 1820s and 1830s and their descendants have fully assimilated into Ghanaian social and political life.
Black Mecca
Positioning Ghana as the home of global Africa and the place for a spiritual journey of self-discovery has been an idea promoted by governments since Nkrumah. The country has been host to the biennale PANAFEST/Emancipation Day celebration since 1992 and in 2001, the Right of Abode law was passed, giving anybody of African ancestry in the Americas, the right to stay in Ghana indefinitely. On the occasion of Ghana’s 50th independence anniversary in 2007, the Joseph Project was launched to also encourage the descendants of enslaved Africans to return. In December 2016, 34 ‘returnees’ became Ghanaians in a naturalization ceremony attended by then president John Mahama. “I have only restored to you what rightfully belongs to you and was painfully taken away,” president Mahama said after handing out the naturalization certificates.
Dr Ọbádélé Kambon was one of the 34 and has lived in Ghana for 10 years. He first came to Ghana for a visit in 1998 with his mother, Dr Mawiyah Kambon who first came to Ghana in 1972 after adopting the Akan traditional spiritual system. “Back in the 1960s, many of us came to understand that we are not white people so why should we have white names? My parents had that level of consciousness before my birth so they decided to give me the name Ọbádélé which translates from Yoruba as ‘the king arrives [or returns] home,’” he says.
After some years teaching in tertiary institutions in Chicago, Kambon moved to Ghana in 2008 and started his doctoral studies in linguistics in 2009 at the University of Ghana, where he now teaches at its Institute of African Studies. He is a near native speaker of Akan (Ghana and Ivory Coast) and Yoruba (Nigeria, Benin), proficient in Wolof (Senegal, Gambia) and has some level of competency in Kiswahili (East Africa) and Kikôngo (Angola, DR Congo and Congo Republic).
Kambon, 39, puts Ghana’s hegemony as the home of black people, down to better packaging compared to some of its neighbours. Just like the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, Ghana has the infrastructure to back its narrative—by way of the well preserved European slave forts and castles on the coast, where captured women and men were loaded onto ships, never to return home. The visibility of the castles have increased following recent high profile, emotional visits by the Obamas, CNN’s Don Lemon and Colin Kaepernick.
“Freedom from fear”
While this is not the first time Ghana is seeking to encourage a return, the rising popularity of ancestry DNA tests coinciding with police brutality and the reawakening of white nationalism have rekindled a desire with some African Americans to more about their roots now more than ever.Kambon feels there are advantages to moving to Ghana, telling the story of a friend who had also moved to Ghana. “He said, ‘This is what it must feel like to be white in America”. You’re able to walk around freely, nobody is going to do something to you just because you are black because everybody around you is black. In the US, police come around you and your heart skips a beat, here, there is a level of freedom from fear that can’t be purchased.”
The official policy of welcoming returnees has been backed largely by local attitudes. While there is an awareness of the otherness of returnees, Kambon says many ordinary Ghanaians see him as one of them. His ability to speak a local language and his adherence to the Akan traditional spiritual system has particularly endeared him to local chiefs. Kambon (just like famous returnee Rita Marley) has even been enstooled in a chiefdom in eastern Ghana where he bears the title “ruler of the rearguard.”Aside from sentimental reasons, the return of the African diaspora is economically pragmatic for Ghana. The tourism ministry is coordinating activities for The Year of Return along with private agencies and it hopes the pilgrimages will boost tourism in Ghana. Tourism could add $5 billion to Ghana’s economy by 2027, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council [pdf p.5] and this is a prospect the government is looking to explore. The government is also not losing sight of the investment potential and human capital of the highly educated “returnees” like Kambon, who decide to move permanently to Ghana.
For 21 years, he and his mother have been organizing return tours to give people a feel of life in Ghana. Kambon says he has received about 60 consultations on repatriation to Ghana in recent weeks, however he always advises using an Akan proverb that translates as “A person doesn’t use their two feet to measure the depth of the river” to encourage short visits before making the final decision to move.
Khalia Tweneboa Kodua, then a resident of Los Angeles, still remembers the day she left Ghana in 2011 on her first trip there.
"I am not a public emotional person so I got to the airport and asked [myself]: 'what is this? Are those tears?"
"It was clear something had awoken in me and ignited in me and I have to come back. My ancestors are telling me; I have to come back," she told Al Jazeera.
And so in 2017, she left Los Angeles, California and moved permanently to Accra, Ghana's capital with her three young children.
Ghana marks 400 years since American slave trade
On her first visit, she was known as Khalia Bennett. But she says her trip was so transformative, she "dropped her slave name" and legally changed her name "to complete my story."
She took on Afia, the Asante traditional name given to girls born on Fridays, and took her new last name from a descendant of Yaa Asantewaa, a 19th-century queen in the Asante kingdom, who led a revolt against British colonialists.
Tweneboa Kodua now runs Goddess Touch Therapy, a massage therapy business serving a nascent but growing clientele of middle-class Ghanaians and often African American visitors to Ghana.
In 2001, Ghana's parliament passed the Right to Abode law, which grants the descendants of enslaved Africans the right to stay in Ghana.
That law paved the way for people such as Tweneboa Kodua and other African Americans to move back to Ghana with more ease.
Cape Coast
Afia Khalia Tweneboa Kodua, a massage therapist, repatriated to Accra, Ghana in 2017 from Los Angeles
Since independence in 1957, Ghana has explicitly cultivated people of African ancestry born in the Americas to not only visit, but potentially stay and invest their money and knowledge into the country.
Ghana has a dark history of being one of the main exit points, along the West African coast, where hundreds of thousands of African women and men were sold and shipped by European merchants from their towns to the Americas, as part of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the country was home to leading civil rights campaigners, writers and thinkers including W E B Du Bois and Maya Angelou. Malcom X, Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King and his wife, Coretta Scott also made high-profile visits to the country.
'It's like night and day'
In their home, north of Accra, Ọbadele Kambon and his son, Kwaku, are using an interactive computer game to practice counting of numbers in Yoruba language.
Even though Yoruba is not widely spoken in Ghana (except among the large Nigerian immigrant community), Kambon who speaks Yoruba, hopes his three children would learn to speak it along with local languages such as Twi and Ga.
Born and raised in the United States, Kambon permanently moved to Ghana with his wife and daughter in 2008 from Chicago.
He had visited a decade earlier with his mother, who organises spiritual tours for African Americans. He spent his study year abroad at the University of Ghana, where he now teaches at the Institute of African Studies.
As a black family, Kambon says life in Ghana is very different compared with the US.
"One time, I was holding my son in my arms ... and I just thought for a second that I don't have to worry about my son being shot down on the street. This was not too long after the Tamir Rice incident," he told Al Jazeera, referring to the 2014 killing by police of the 12-year old black boy.
Leaving behind the reality of racism and police brutality in the US also rings true for Tweneboa Kodua."I don't have to deal with racism on an everyday basis. I don't have to deal with my cultural identity being challenged and questioned. The level of violence is incomparable - it is like night and day."
In December 2016, Kambon's relationship with Ghana was further strengthened when he became a naturalised citizen along with 33 other "returnees".
"I have only restored to you what rightfully belongs to you and was painfully taken away," Ghana's then-president, John Mahama, said after conducting the naturalisation ceremony. The current government has announced plans to grant more citizenships later this year.
While the reception in Ghana has been anything but hostile, it can be tricky sometimes.
"For some Ghanaians, their approach to me is as an 'other' because the moment they hear me speak they are like: 'Ah, she's not from Ghana.' But once we have a conversation [and] they understand who I am, they are very accepting and welcoming and supportive of me being here," Tweneboa Kodua told Al Jazeera.
'Pilgrimage'
While not all will repatriate to Ghana, the government hopes testimonies such as these would encourage more Americans of African ancestry to visit Ghana in a bid to boost its tourism numbers
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It has dubbed 2019 the Year of Return to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of a group of Africans to Virginia. While that group were not the first Africans to arrive, August 1619 is often commemorated as the start of the slave trade in the US.
"We don't classify them as tourists or visitors. We say they are on a pilgrimage to their ancestral land where their ancestors were taken from. We recognise them as our own," says Robert Morgan Mensah, head of education at the Cape Coast Castle dungeons.
Built with local labour in the 17th century, a little over four million captured Africans are believed to have passed through the Cape Coast dungeons alone, Mensah says. A significant portion of them died on the rough seas and were thrown overboard.
"Anytime [Africans from the diaspora] come, they come with emotions; whatever they have read about, they want to see it in the form of empirical evidence ... When they come and listen to the story, they weep," Mensah told Al Jazeera.
In 1979, the United Nations' cultural agency UNESCO bestowed World Heritage status on the slave castles and forts that dot Ghana's coastline.
Recent high-profile visitors such as the family of former US President Barack Obama and Colin Kaepernick have increased the country's profile as a destination for black people yearning for a spiritual connection to "the motherland'" especially as racial tensions increase in the US.
However, for those thinking about repatriating, Kambon (who teaches the Twi language online) says they have to make a commitment to learning a local language.
"You will have an entirely different experience if you speak the language versus if you don't. Especially when people are coming here saying I am trying to connect with my roots and heritage - then part of that is taking the effort to learn the language."
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