The first week of being in Ghana has been nothing the wildest ride I could have asked for and I have loved every second of being here. Nothing, and I mean nothing, in America does respect to what life is like in Africa. The beauty of Black faces, the wonderful colors of the Kente cloth, the warm and welcoming people. I’ve felt at home with these people and this place since I arrived, like I would fit right in with the pace, the people, the culture. The way people asked me about Ghana before I came on this trip, you would have thought I was going back in time rather than to another country. Yes there is poverty, yes there is disparity and yes there is corruption, just like every other country and especially in America. It is all going to be there if you point the
camera’s at the things that are starkly different from America like the way people dress, the way some communities live or business is done. But those differences do not make the country.
People do business like anyone else, their clothes are clean and hair beautifully woven, their communities rich in culture. Rolling through Nima Market, bartering with woodcarvers in Aburi, being among a protest in the streets of Accra and playing volleyball on the beaches of Elmina paint such a starkly different image from the picture painted by America that I wondered why
people talked as if I was going to be living in a hut or didn’t know anything at all about Africa. And then I realized why when studying W.E.B. Du Bois and Dr. Kwame Nkrumah with Dr. Michael Williams: if America is the greatest nation on earth, of course you wouldn’t want anywhere in Africa to seem appealing or even near equal. Of course, you wouldn’t want the place you
purchased human beings from to seem appealing, what if the descendants wanted to go back or worse were angry they were forced to leave in the first place?
Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the father of modern Ghana, was a passionate speaker and
advocate of direction action. He was able to secure his country’s independence peacefully from the British in 1957 and lead the people forward into a new world of Pan-Africanism. “We face neither East nor West; but forward,” he once said, and the spirit of that mindset lives on in the people. Despite the hardships they faced through coup’s that put the power in the hands of the
military and hurt the people, despite the outside influences that keep trying to cut away and enslave the people of Ghana and Africans, there is still a belief and hope in a future. When the politicians are corrupt, the people are in the streets. When the country is being mined and drained of its resources, the people push back against the influences. When they realized that the diaspora, the people that have been taken from these lands and flung far and away from
home, were being so woefully mistreated, they opened their doors and have welcomed them back for the year of return. Dr. Nkrumah also said, “Those who would judge us merely by the heights we have achieved would do well to remember the depths from which we started.”
400 years of plundering by the empires of the world, the stripping of resources, economic security, and people from these lands and yet they still thrive in their day to day lives. Is the quality of life the same for all Ghanaians? No, but they keep pushing forward to that day when everyone is free, equal and independent. No wonder America doesn’t paint a favorable picture of Africa.
Africans has more hope in them then any nation can take away.