Sixteen-Nineteen and the Myth of Return

A child does not laugh at the ugliness of his mother.

—Asante Proverb

Almost a century ago, Countee Cullen asked, "What is Africa to me?" I have my own partial answers and continuing questions. I first went to Africa as a student and I brought no hyped expectations. I expected no "homecoming" from people who had their own homes, languages, loves and feuds. But, as the weeks wore on in my three-month stay in Ghana, the warmth of the people overwhelmed me. My white classmates smirked when villagers called me obruni (white and/or foreigner) and looked away when villagers touched my hair and said it was like theirs. One white colleague caustically remarked, "You know we really have more in common—face it, you're American." I smiled—I had had to travel almost six-thousand miles to become his "fellow American." One day towards the end of my sojourn, we visited an ex-slave fort on the coast—the future tourist mecca of Cape Coast. Back then no profusely weeping Black heritage pilgrims shuffled through its chambers; it was a police training school. I was moved by the desolation. How could my classmates ever experience what I was feeling?

Many years later, I returned to attend a conference at the University of Ghana at Legon. Joining a band of academics (Ghanaian, Spanish, Equatorial Guinean, American, Brazilian, and Finnish), I visited the Elmina slave fort. The guide asked where we were from, and we gave him our diverse answers. He smiled and then led us through the structure. The courtly Ghanaian told us that he did not want to be "sensationalistic" at such a solemn site; this was not the time to "open old wounds." We made our way into cells, chapels, and storerooms. The sight of the horrible closeness in which hundreds had been confined could not help but evoke an awed sense of pain. At the end of the tour, our guide remarked that his mother had taught him to "forgive but never forget." We thanked him and left; swarms of adolescents surrounded us asking for help in coming to America. As our van departed, I spied a local Fante fishing boat unknowingly flying the Confederate flag.

Who gets to tell the story; who controls the narrative? In 2017 the New York Times published a piece, "With Conrad on the Congo River," that was widely accused of racial insensitivity. Maya Jasanoff, a professor at Harvard, wrote a travelogue retracing Joseph Conrad's 1899 journey. She concluded that little had changed in the last century, the "Horror" was still there: "When I saw the monkey impaled on stakes, skulls picked clean of brains and teeth thrusting out," she mused; "I looked otherness in the face—and saw myself mirrored back." Karen Attiah, an African American writer at the Washington Post, retorted that "the New York Times shows how to fail miserably while writing about Africa." She chided, "… long story short, it's time to leave the whole colonial gaze on Africa in the past where it belongs." Fast forward to 2019: in December Nikole Hannah-Jones, the journalist behind the New York Times' 1619 Project appeared on CBS's The View. The Project is a reframing of American history around the African American experience, beginning with the landing of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia. Appearing with her was actor Boris Kodjoe. His focus was on Ghana, his father's country of origin. He had gone there with a host of African American celebrities and dignitaries with the aim of dispelling old stereotypes. Ghana seemed to be the perfect place for a prideful origin story—it is English-speaking and a past master at attracting the "Yankee Dollar."

In 1957, in his maiden independence address, Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah framed Africa's liberation around the pan-African concept of black people everywhere uniting in defense of Mother Africa. In the first flush of independence many pan-African activists flocked to the country, many only to drift away again. One, Shelby Steele, wrote:

Finally, we made it to Nkrumah's Ghana...