Why we’ve invaded Ghana
By Emmanuel Mayah
Thursday, March 12, 2009


Marcia learning to process papmoil
Photo: Sun News Publishing
More Stories on This Section
Defying gravity was never the lifetime ambition of Marcia Briggs. Becoming a devout devotee of an African religion was nothing she ever thought she was capable of; much more exhibit same in her resume. And if she must have an alter ego, then it must be Black American novelist Toni Morrison, or redoubtable poet Maya Angelou.

So the 19- year-old African American was hard put to explain her obsession with rural African life and her journey across seas to a rustic village in Ghana where she had come to reconnect with a past life she believed she had lived over 400 years ago.

Unwilling to make herself an easy target of cynics or provide her family the slightest excuse to drag her to a shrink, Marcia was determined to exploit any route to communicate an inner truth welling inside her. Like duck to water, she took to village life and proved herself a fast learner in picking up domestic skills like stirring corn meal called tizet, walking to the river to do her laundry and pounding yams in mortar. She has keenly participated in processing of palm oil, again sweating it out at the mortar with huge pots sitting on open fires, and done virtually everything including fetching firewood from a distant farm that no one can confuse any more this young woman from Georgia for a tourist.

Now, after three weeks in Bunbonayili village, Marcia has become something of a legend and might as well become Ghana’s Susan Wenger- the Austrian woman who journeyed to Nigeria and ended up the priestess of a river deity. Curiously, the African American student is not alone in a journey many Blacks often take to find a bit of their own heritage in the history of slavery.

Emotional purity
Very few ideas ever hit the ground running. But then, very few ideas ever come running to you whilst you are in a dream. The Joseph Project- the Black Diaspora homecoming initiative that brought Marcia Briggs to Ghana- bears all the marks of a dreamer, particularly one who understands that in the Pan-African marketplace, you can easily defy gravity if the basic commodity is emotion.

It is the kind of soul-stirring emotion that inspired years ago the hit song, Going Back to my Root. It was the same emotion that got many African Americans so misty-eyed that apparently taking the song by its words, they began to hop on airplanes to destinations across the continent.

Rita Marley, widow of reggae idol Bob Marley, made Nigeria her first pitch. Conned out of her dollars and a coveted home in Badagry, she relocated to Ghana. Dozens of Black diasporans have since come in Rita’s wake, from far-flung places as the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Haiti, United Kingdom, Canada, Trinidad and Tobago, Europe, St Lucia and the largest of them all, the US. Not a few have since adopted Ghanaian names. At such, it is not much of a shock to find that American Joan Brown of ETA Magical Theatre in Chicago now goes by the Ghanaian name, Abena.

Today in Ghana, you can find a group of ‘white’ foreigners everywhere, even in a yam market. But Ghana was not just a happenstance. Like the biblical Israelites, someone has sold to African Americans and Blacks in different Diasporas, the idea of a spiritual homeland and that of all the countries in West Africa, Ghana is the authentic root of slave descendants. Not satisfied with the occasional half-a-dozen diasporan tourists that appear in Ghana’s capital and countryside hoping someone would recognize them as lost relatives, someone has come up with an initiative that gives Ghana a large scale appeal as a spiritual rather than tourist destination. It is called the Joseph Project and it has got off to a flying start.

The Joseph Project
As every Muslim must strive to visit Mecca, at least once in a lifetime, so has the Joseph Project been conceived as a pilgrimage to Ghana, and one that every African in the Diaspora must undertake at least once in a lifetime.

But why Ghana, anyone is wont to ask. The country’s tourism board is quick to point out that beyond the poignant experience of the slave trade, Ghana was the first African colony south of the Sahara to gain its independence, drawing inspiration from the fight for the full emancipation of Africans worldwide, especially the Civil Rights struggle in the US in the 1950s and 60s. It said that even after Nkrumah, Ghana has continued to fight for the full emancipation of all Africans everywhere.

On a recent visit to Ghana, MIDWEEK Magazine gathered that for the visiting Diasporans the Ghanaian government forbid anyone to call them tourists, preferring instead words like ‘pilgrims, brothers or sisters’.
The Joseph Project is part of an elaborate plan to establish Ghana as the homeland for Africans in the diaspora. The project takes its name from the story of the Biblical Joseph who was sold into slavery in Egypt by his brethren but triumphed over all adversity.

The country is reaching out to Diasporan Africans who have yearned for years to return to the motherland but have not been able to do so. According to Ghana’s Ministry of Tourism and Diaspora Relations, the programme is aimed at reaching out to the brothers and sisters who were forcibly uprooted from Africa and have been lost to their homeland for more than 400 years. “The Joseph project is an outreach of the Ghana Government to start the process to see how we can better come together to lift ourselves up. It is the reuniting of the African family so that their positive spirit and strengths are used to emancipate Africa and Africans worldwide.”

Ritual bath
In Ghana, it is common to find a horde of tourists, especially African Americans, wailing before the walls of Elmina Slave Fort. When they are not doing that, be sure to find them scouring other heritage sites in Cape Coast, all well-kept relics of distasteful history and all providing staggering testaments to one of the most harrowing periods in the history of humankind. It is these relics that provide the raw materials for Ghana’s third largest revenue earner popularly known as the Joseph Project.

In the infamous Elmina Slave Castle, there is a door marked “Door of No Return”. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of slaves were led through this door en route to hard labour in Europe and America. The Joseph Project is Ghana’s invitation to the descendants of those slaves to make the return journey, to reconnect with the land of their ancestors.

MIDWEEK Magazine gathered that ritual exercises included the arrival of slave descendants through the Door of No Return. Prayers are held by Christian leaders, Muslim leaders and traditional priests. What is called the African Anthem, Nkosi Sikele Africa, is sung by the Winneba Youth Choir. A healing ritual follows in the form of poignant African songs.

The climax is the shedding of symbolic mourning clothes that sees the returnee enrobed in equally symbolic welcome clothes. At this point, those who wish to take a new African name can so do. Marcia has added Ama to her names. These days, when she is not pursuing a new interest in her adopted village, she is lazing along long stretches of coastal lands with bone-white beaches or climbing the Monkey Hill in the heart of the twin city of Sekondi-Takoradi.

As any visitor would quickly finds out, the Ghanaian hospitality is legendary. Even though the country has not one drop-dead, big-name attraction, the sort of place other tourists or friends will say you have to see once in a lifetime, an equivalent of Kilimanjaro or Pyramids of Egypt, it has many enriching cultural and historical attractions.

Oburonti
Marcia’s spirit is so effervescent it is easy to tell the 19-year-old is very much at peace in her new world. If she has any difficulty, it is getting used to the giggles of the natives who call her Oburonti, Ghanaian word for Oyinbo. Happy as the villagers are to have her live amongst them, they cannot help sometimes to feel the American is merely celebrating the beauty of ugliness. Understandably, their view of village life is standard and scandalous. For them it is hard to reconcile the reality of a young woman working hard to be a villager while the real villagers themselves are daily seeking escape route, sometimes through the Sahara desert, to greener pastures overseas.

Before she came to Ghana, Marcia says she was sold to the country by the influences of Veryl Howard, the Black American woman who coordinates the American end of The Joseph Project. Veryl is also part of the success story of the movie, Diary of a Mad Black Woman.

Marcia also points at her interactions with such Ghanaian women like singer/songwriter Nya Jade and Akosua Busia, a Ghanaian actress based in the United States. The daughter of Kofi Abrefa Busia, the ex-prime minister of Ghana, Akosua’s film roles include a notable performance as Nettie in Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple- a film that also starred Oprah Winfrey- and as Patience in Antoine Fuqua’s Tears of the Sun. Akosua has a novel, The Seasons of Beento Blackbird. In addition, she was one of three writers who co-wrote the screenplay adaptation of Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved. Her sister is the poet and academic Abena Busia. Marcia plays to visit Ghana as often as possible, to learn one or two dialects and to return finally in the next six years.



http://www.sunnewsonline.com/webpages/news/national/2009/mar/12/national-12-03-2009-12.htm

so?

Whats new?

.

tpia:

lol.


A lot of them have resettled in Ghana and more may be thinking of returning to Nigeria since they feel they have roots there.

But true, returning to Africa isnt that unusual. Brazilians did it centuries ago and Liberia/Sierra leone were founded expressly for this purpose.

Bold is a dream.

What happened to Rita Marley probably led many away from Nigeria already

We will be reclaiming Cross River State, Naija, as ours in the not too distant future in honor of our ancestors. The land, oil and gas in the area is our reparations.

lol dream on KB1. by the time you guys get there, the oil is already depleted. if you change your mind and plan on leaving next year, let me know to send you Ghana Must Go Bag to carry ya dollars with you.

KB1:

We will be reclaiming Cross River State, Naija, as ours in the not too distant future in honor of our ancestors. The land, oil and gas in the area is our reparations.

Oh hell nah

so, Black Americans are moving to Ghana. Is it because of the economic crunch?