Ghana

Opening Notes: The Conditions of Arrival for a Black Traveler¹

As a young Black American traveler I found that not only could I not escape whiteness in Ghana, whiteness would prove to be a central facet of my experience.

The whiteness that surrounded me was heterogeneous—ranging from a daughter of American diplomats to a German gap year student. Yet despite that heterogeneity there was a certain viscosity to whiteness, which geographer Arun Saldanha explains as when similar bodies become sticky, collect together, and acquire surface tension to become relatively impenetrable by other bodies. In a way, my being the “sole-brother” in the volunteer house, not white and not Ghanaian, made the group visible and coherent but left my sense of being, at times, incoherent and fluid as I lacked a definable niche beyond myself. This narrative is a chronicle of frustrations, ambivalences, and struggles.

I ran into two Black young women, students at the University of Pennsylvania, at a waterfall in the Volta region. We were all in all-white groups and exchanged pleasantries, not politics, and went back to our separate groups. Perhaps, those pleasantries were political, or perhaps we were afraid of our potential of viscosity, of stickiness, and were focused on finding a place within a whiteness that seemed to revel in how visibly cohesive it seemed in a mainly Black country. Integration isn’t about dismantling whiteness, it is about dismantling any coherent notion of Blackness—and I say Black specifically because Black collectivity was once criminal and remains seen as a threat—leaving it fragmented and estranged from itself. Standing shirtless, drenched, and blurry eyed in that Hohoe forest, I felt ridiculous and reminded of every Black (middle-class) experience of glancing at each other at some New York City pub, or as the only two in an otherwise all white university class, and choosing not to speak, to remain the “sole-brother” or “sole-sister.”

This narrative does not avoid the conversation about whiteness. It, truly, cannot avoid that conversation. It is hoped that in this rumination comes a further consideration of the materiality of race and of the contemporary unevenness of Black travel across national borders.

There is humidity, a slight sweatiness when I step off the climate controlled plane directly onto the pavement of the terminal and load into a bus full of strangers to be transported to the main airport. A current of electricity runs through the core of my stomach.

The Airport

I was arriving back on the continent after two years. In Amsterdam I tried to act cool and collected about my impending adventure of solitude but up in the skies as we make our way across the ocean, I cannot stop the incessant self-questioning over the finances required for the trip, how quickly I seemed to finish the spring semester and depart with barely enough time to get all of the required vaccinations. I received my Ghanaian visa the day of my flight, and prior to that I was nervously awaiting making the seemingly inevitable call to the airline to reschedule my flight after calling the Ghanaian embassy back to back to no avail. My mother must have known something because she kept me focused on packing my clothes, despite my lack of a visa. I grudgingly followed her instructions. When she called me downstairs to check the mail I caught a glimpse of her knowing smile, and of course there was my visa. Up in the sky, as the plane slowly descends to the earth beneath the clouds, I keep waiting to see the bright city lights that are typical of arriving in a big city. Arriving in Accra, I only catch glimpses of the city below, shadows of buildings, then brushes of dark water swiftly passing under us before turning back to land. As we edge closer to the earth the window beside my seat begins to fog up, a sign of good things to come, I think, excited for the warm weather. After awakening from a brief nap, I spark up a conversation with my seatmate, a...