Photo caption: A fisherman pulls a rope tied to a fishing canoe as dozens of other local fishermen in the Lake Volta region of Ghana hoist the
boat ashore.
I love Ghana and Ghana almost loved me. But I love America and America hates me. This is the great conundrum as my spirit angels beckon me home from Africa back to America as I sit aboard this Boeing 757.
I return to my Homeland from the Motherland with this much clear: A modern day back-to-Africa movement is not the antidote to American racism. And the pain and angst that ails the Black body and soul has its roots here in Africa, which holds deep truths about the enslavement and deportation of Black bodies to a cruelly racist world beyond this continent that is the birthplace of civilization.
I return with truths about slavery and the hate we hold brother against brother, which creates the chasm upon which outsiders still seize and prey in order to conquer, sift and separate us, and upon which we cannibalize and slay ourselves. Still.
I return from my time as a 2021-22 Fulbright scholar with the truth that the white man, though unexcused or unabsolved of his menacing diabolical pathologies, fueled by his insatiable love of money and by his encompassing greed, did not accomplish nearly 350 years of exporting Black bodies as slaves from this continent without Africans who were consensual, co-conspirators, and major cast members in the historic catastrophic script of the world’s largest forced migration, which subsequently created the African Diaspora.
I return with the piercing truth as a Black man that even if I could prove by DNA ancestral lineage to Ghana or change the status of my citizenship from American to Ghanaian, I would still never be truly accepted here as “brother.”
For I have the blood of slaves in my veins. I am inarguably the descendant of Africans chained naked and sardined in the bottom of colonizers’ suffocating slave ships that set sail for diseased-infested voyages through the Middle Passage to America’s shores, where they were unloaded into anguishing American slavery and transported to merciless sunbaked plantations, where their blood, sweat and tears poured into the soil of America and built a nation.
I had to come to Africa to learn that being a descendant of slaves is a “bad” thing. Something to despise, if not hate. Something—when coupled with misinformation and stereotypes fueled by the mass media and by those who hate me and my kind—that makes me an “other” in this land of my ancestors, rather than a brother.
That causes me to feel uneasy and unsettled by the stares and side-eye of people Black like me but who often appear more at ease, tolerant, accepting, and even celebratory of those foreigners who are not Black like either me or them. In some ways, I was not prepared for the revelations of the journey.
JOHN FOUNTAIN CAPTURES the faces of children at an orphanage in Ghana, where he was a 2021-22 Fulbright scholar. (Photo: Monica Fountain)
In The Beginning
On Thanksgiving Day in November 2021, I arrived in Ghana with arms open wide and a love and deep admiration for a land and a people that when I first visited in 2007 stole my heart. But upon my return 14 years later, I discovered that I didn’t really know her. That the experience of breathing free in a land populated by Africans—where, for the first time in my life, I was not a Black man, only a man—perhaps caused me to see through rose-colored glasses. As a tourist, not as an inhabitant.
My return and temporary residential status, which led me beyond Ghana’s slave castles and other tourist fare—beyond a YouTube romanticized Ghana of festive nightlife and inviting restaurants, of tempting tales of the so-called abundant free land that exists for returnees upon the asking, of brimming economic opportunity and open pathways to Ghanaian citizenship—all led me closer to the truth.
The truth.
Truth is, I have in the past eight months been deeply moved and also, at times, deeply troubled on this journey. I have been extremely high and extremely low. At my most deeply spiritual moment, I stood in Assin Manso slave river, where I was suddenly flooded with a strange and palpable sense of connectedness to my ancestors and also by a deeply disturbing portrait that suddenly unveiled like a curtain opening before my eyes. In that vision of grotesque horror, I saw no white colonizers leading chained, bloodied and brutalized African slaves. Only Africans.
I stood in the river, stinging salted tears falling from my eyes as I realized in a way I had not before that moment that my ancestors were sold into slavery by their own brothers. And that very much alive in the descendants of those who had sold my ancestors—whether now ignorant, or knowledgeable of this past transgression—was a fairly consistent detectable disdain for me and African American returnees who had come home after slavery’s time, back to the scene of the historic crime.
And I realized in that moment that there might never be any love for me or my “tribe” here, except for the love of our resources—our money and our time spent here as tourists, seeking to reconnect with ancestral family and a land severed and, in some ways, forever lost in time.
And yet, my heart holds no animus because of this wounding rejection. Even if my heart is broken over that eternal forced disconnection at the hands of none other than my brother and by the truth that here in the land of my ancestral fathers, I am seen as an alien from another planet landed on the streets of a foreign land. I am decipherable to locals by my accent, by my walk, my build, my clothes and my aura, even before I open my mouth to speak.
The truth, however, is that even if I spoke perfect Twi or Ga and wore traditional West African clothes, I have come to believe that they would never accept me fully as brother. I used to state this as a question to Ghanaians and African Americans who now live here in Ghana. Their nearly unanimous chuckle of affirmation made me change the question to a statement of fact. Fact is: They are African. I am American Black. And all the invitations in the world alone for African Americans to come home won’t change that.
But I needed to take the journey.
A WOMAN AT a church in the Greater Accra region of Ghana clasps her hands with her eyes shut tight in prayer during a Sunday praise and worship service.
Voices
My journey to record the stories of African Americans who now call Ghana home carried me across Accra and beyond, to places like Prampram, Sakumono and Tema, to neighborhoods like Chorkor, Abossey Okai and Mamprobi and Ashaiman. To gloriously intoxicating Cape Coast and Elmina, for sure. To Kumasi. I interviewed men and women, young and old, retirees and entrepreneurs, newcomers and those who uprooted from America decades ago to replant their lives in Ghanaian red clay dirt. African American-born men and women who married Ghanaians and whose children were born and raised in Ghana.
From these interviews, which I will detail in a forthcoming project, emerges a tale of the good, the bad and the ugly of the experience of living in Ghana as a Black American. Inasmuch as my immersion into Ghanaian life had exposed my soul to the joys of the culture and to the way of life there—tasting the bitter fruit of being a foreigner, an outsider and a tribal outcast—the revelations and stories I uncovered in my research further painted for me a less than rosy portrait of life for Black Americans who heeded their own personal “call” to move to Ghana.
There is the story of the Nigerian girl who met an American boy who wanted to marry her. But her parents would not allow it. There was one big problem. Not the color of his skin. It had absolutely nothing to do with his character as an individual. The problem: He was African American. The story, as told to me by an elderly African American woman, is that the young man, unwilling to relent, went to the girl’s parents to explain. He was not really African American, even if born Black in America. He had grown up in Ghana, raised by his grandmother. Still, the girl’s parents needed verification. So, they got on a plane and flew to Ghana to meet with the young man’s grandmother to verify that he was not purely African American. The young man’s grandmother confirmed his story. And the parents allowed him to marry their daughter.
There is the story of the young African American man who traced his roots to his native tribe in Ghana and moved here with his family to begin a new life in his native land. Only to be asked by the authorities who, upon reviewing his documents, inquired: “What is your family’s name?” the woman in immigration asked.
He could not answer. The family’s name had been taken—suppressed, forbidden and forgotten somewhere along the journey of slaves from Africa to America—lost in the land where slaves’ names, tribes and history could not be spoken, and were washed away during hundreds of years of enslavement. “I don’t know,” he answered, explaining that he had the DNA test to prove where he was from. That he was indeed Ghanaian. He protested to no avail.
“What is your family’s name?” she asked again. He could not answer. “You are not Ghanaian.” No name? No land? No recognition as being a descendant of Ghana. Period.
There is the narrative among Ghanaians and other Africans that African Americans are miscreants, drug dealers, lazy no-good-for-nothings, criminal- and homicidally-minded. That Africans are therefore better than Black Americans, work harder, are of higher moral standards, less prone to violence.
It is, however, a cruelly false narrative largely created by the media’s portrayal of African American life, by misinformation and false perceptions. A stereotypical portrayal that bears no more validity than the prevailing perception among some African Americans of Africans as poor hut-dwelling “booty scratchers” who live in the bush with wild animals, and are chronically stricken by AIDS and Monkey Pox.
There is the story of African Americans being seen as “fat pockets” and the targets of opportunity to gouge them for everything—from daily produce at the markets to trinkets and souvenirs on the street, to taxi and Uber rides and other goods and services—often being charged double or far above the usual cost. There is the Ghanaian price and the American price, which depends on the American customer’s ability to discern the difference.
There is the insult of “obroni”—the name some Ghanaians hurl at African Americans and that means white foreigner. The color or shade of the skin of African Americans does not trump their detectable foreign descent. “Obroni,” they tease. Laughter. Shock. Sting.
There is the story during my time in Ghana of the African American woman traveling with her young son in a taxi. She asked the driver to please turn down the radio. He refused. So, she asked him, short of arrival at their destination, to let them out. She paid him. Irate, he said it was not enough. So he climbed out of the car and beat her with his belt buckle as her son watched and no onlookers intervened.
There is the case of the elderly African American woman during my time who was taken captive in her home by her teenage Nigerian housekeeper and her mother, clubbed unconscious repeatedly in the head, by her own testimony to me, and held for days as they tried to extort her for money. She believed that her captors would kill her and at one point was resigned to dying, comforted by her belief, she told me, that she would see her deceased mother in heaven. Ultimately, she was rescued and survived.
And there is the mostly, out of earshot, if at all spoken, revilement some Ghanaians hold for African Americans because of our unforgiveable sin. That detestable, damnable, irreconcilable offense that is cause enough for the chasm between “us” and “them,” and which stands glaringly as the great divide. That thing, which some African Americans who have lived here for decades admit to having been made aware of by the Ghanaian bold enough to speak it. To make clear why “they” are really “better” than “us”—at least unblemished, pure, and forever not to be linked with “us.”
It is an attitude African Americans sense in Africans, in general, who migrate to the United States, bringing with them an air of arrogance while disassociating themselves from Black folk of the African American persuasion. They often exude a palpable sense of condescension toward us because of our so-called “laziness,” “lack of work ethic,” our “criminality,” and their perception of American Black folk as being in an immoral and unadmirable condition. Even though the truth is: African American slaves built this country, paved the way with their soul’s toil. Without them—us—the plethora of opportunity that exists for those Black bodies that come to America as passengers by plane rather than as cargo by slave ship would not exist. There would be no Giannis Antetokounmpo were it not for Jackie Robinson. No semblance of equality for the Black body—African or American—if my African American ancestors had not marched and died. If we had not as a people endured and overcome slavery, Southern lynching, Jim Crow cruelty, and discrimination, evil and racial hate—against which we still war.
And yet, many of us have felt the blaming stare of our African brothers and sisters. The way they seem to stare down their noses at us when the truth is that there would be no them here were it not for us. When the truth is: That they need to put some respect on our name. Except the most egregious offense to them, we cannot overcome.
That thing? The damnable thing?
That African Americans are descendants of slaves.
And this one thing apparently something to be ashamed of. Even being dirt poor in Ghana makes them at least better than a comparatively rich and educated Black person in America who is descendant from slaves and has slave blood running warm in their veins. Descendants of African slaves sold by Africans.
“But which one of these is more to be ashamed of?” I ask myself. “Which of these African descendants—of slave, or of slave seller, or even of those who escaped either fate—is less than?
“Which of these can throw stones?”
Perhaps only he who is without sin.
A LITTLE BOY in Kumasi helps with the family Adinkra cloth business by cutting tree bark used to create dye.
Lessons
I realize, having taken this journey as scholar, journalist and as great-great-grandson of a Black man born a slave in America, that there is a great divide between us—African and African American. A gulf, a systemic chasm manufactured by misinformation, by centuries of forced separation, by pure ignorance, and by the devices of those who are direct beneficiaries—Black, white or other—of our tribalistic tiffs and wholesale cannibalism that devours us at large.
And what I realized, even more after my sojourn in Africa, is that the tendency toward self-destruction, self-hate and cultural divisiveness is not simply the quandary of Africans and African Americans, but also between African Americans and African Americans.
What I also realize is that if we as a people across the African Diaspora are ever to unite for the good, prosperity and posterity of us all—and we must—then we must first grapple with and face hard truths: That we are our own worst enemy, our most formidable foe. That we always have been. And that we have the ability to heal ourselves. We always have.
I suspect that the more we engage with each other, the more we listen and learn the truth about each other rather than fabricated jaded narratives, the more we will come to see each other as brothers and sisters. The more we will see the humanity and worth in the other’s eyes as a mirror of our own, and our divine destiny and survival, which are irrevocably tied to each other.
Ghana taught me this. Hope and Michael, Hagar and Abena, Mama Loo, Prince Champion, Jerry Johnson, my forever Ghanaian brother Samuel Commodore, and all the beautiful people of Ghana who comprised the intricate tapestry of my journey back to Africa in its totality and that shall forever be emblazoned in my memory like the royal kente cloth of the Ashanti people.
THE SCENE AT Kwame Atoka-Bamfo’s Nkyinkyim installation in Ghana, an exhibit of sculptures that capture and convey the agony and horror of the Transatlantic slave trade.
Epilogue
As the jet plane soars above the earth, bound west, away from Africa, back toward America, I reflect upon my journey. Tears fill my eyes as I am enveloped by thoughts of Ghana and the fact that the time has come for us now to part ways. I already deeply miss Ghana.
I miss her pulse and heartbeat. The bustle and buzz of Accra streets amid the never-ending hustle of merchants and the majestic porters known as kayayei—the young women who tote their wares atop their heads with the elegance of a Paris runway model.
I miss the blare of Afrobeats music at Junction Mall, located in suburban Tema, Ghana, not far from Nungua. I miss the roosters’ crowing, the site of the gangster goats, as I call them, who troll the streets by day. I miss the red clay dirt. Jollof rice. The Ghanaian sun and sipping cool coconut milk from the shell. I miss the shrill of trotro mates, the darting daredevil motorbikes, and the Harmattan dust and sand, billowing over the Spintex Road.
I miss the scent of freedom. Of Africa. Of the wind kissing a tranquil Ghanaian night as foamy rushing waves from the Atlantic wash her shores and the moonlight shimmers above the vast enchanting ocean.
I miss the beautiful Ghanaian people, their majestic aura and beautiful sunbaked skin, the crispness of their spoken proper English. The way they dance within the music rather than upon it or to it—uplifted and transcendent in rhythm and spirit, like the ascending wings of doves.
After about eight months in Ghana, however, I also look forward to returning home.
And yet, my heart is overwhelmed as I leave these shores, drifting upon memories of music, culture and a people I have come to love. Of a place where, for the first time in my life as a Black man, I ever felt free. Of a land where my soul feels rested and where the soil, wind, sun and the elements whisper, “Son, welcome home.”
I miss the laughter, conversations, and the Ghanaian spirit that enraptured me. Here, in this special corner of the African Diaspora where, even if they never see me as “brother,” I will always see them as my brothers and my sisters.
The truth is: I love Ghana and Ghana almost loved me. That is the hurt and also the hope. I will always love Ghana.
A WOMAN AT a fisherman’s wharf in Tema, Ghana, cleans fish from the morning’s fresh catch.
A WOMAN AT a fisherman’s wharf in Tema, Ghana, cleans fish from the morning’s fresh catch.
CAPE COAST CASTLE in Ghana was the site of the British slave dungeons where Africans were held until transported in the Transatlantic slave trade.
THE DOOR OF No Return at Cape Coast Castle memorializes the exodus of millions of Africans who departed slave castles to board slave ships bound for the Middle Passage and who never returned to Africa. Hence the title above the door: “Door of No Return.”
BENEATH A SLAVE castle at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, Ghanaian fishermen are hard at work.
John W. Fountain is a professor of journalism at Roosevelt University and a 2021-22 U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Ghana, where he is a visiting lecturer at the University of Ghana-Legon and researching his project titled, “Hear Africa Calling: Portraits of Black Americans Drawn to The Motherland.”
Tales from the broken relationship of the African Diaspora
Photo caption: A fisherman pulls a rope tied to a fishing canoe as dozens of other local fishermen in the Lake Volta region of Ghana hoist the
boat ashore.
I love Ghana and Ghana almost loved me. But I love America and America hates me. This is the great conundrum as my spirit angels beckon me home from Africa back to America as I sit aboard this Boeing 757.
I return to my Homeland from the Motherland with this much clear: A modern day back-to-Africa movement is not the antidote to American racism. And the pain and angst that ails the Black body and soul has its roots here in Africa, which holds deep truths about the enslavement and deportation of Black bodies to a cruelly racist world beyond this continent that is the birthplace of civilization.
I return with truths about slavery and the hate we hold brother against brother, which creates the chasm upon which outsiders still seize and prey in order to conquer, sift and separate us, and upon which we cannibalize and slay ourselves. Still.
I return from my time as a 2021-22 Fulbright scholar with the truth that the white man, though unexcused or unabsolved of his menacing diabolical pathologies, fueled by his insatiable love of money and by his encompassing greed, did not accomplish nearly 350 years of exporting Black bodies as slaves from this continent without Africans who were consensual, co-conspirators, and major cast members in the historic catastrophic script of the world’s largest forced migration, which subsequently created the African Diaspora.
I return with the piercing truth as a Black man that even if I could prove by DNA ancestral lineage to Ghana or change the status of my citizenship from American to Ghanaian, I would still never be truly accepted here as “brother.”
For I have the blood of slaves in my veins. I am inarguably the descendant of Africans chained naked and sardined in the bottom of colonizers’ suffocating slave ships that set sail for diseased-infested voyages through the Middle Passage to America’s shores, where they were unloaded into anguishing American slavery and transported to merciless sunbaked plantations, where their blood, sweat and tears poured into the soil of America and built a nation.
I had to come to Africa to learn that being a descendant of slaves is a “bad” thing. Something to despise, if not hate. Something—when coupled with misinformation and stereotypes fueled by the mass media and by those who hate me and my kind—that makes me an “other” in this land of my ancestors, rather than a brother.
That causes me to feel uneasy and unsettled by the stares and side-eye of people Black like me but who often appear more at ease, tolerant, accepting, and even celebratory of those foreigners who are not Black like either me or them. In some ways, I was not prepared for the revelations of the journey.
In The Beginning
On Thanksgiving Day in November 2021, I arrived in Ghana with arms open wide and a love and deep admiration for a land and a people that when I first visited in 2007 stole my heart. But upon my return 14 years later, I discovered that I didn’t really know her. That the experience of breathing free in a land populated by Africans—where, for the first time in my life, I was not a Black man, only a man—perhaps caused me to see through rose-colored glasses. As a tourist, not as an inhabitant.
My return and temporary residential status, which led me beyond Ghana’s slave castles and other tourist fare—beyond a YouTube romanticized Ghana of festive nightlife and inviting restaurants, of tempting tales of the so-called abundant free land that exists for returnees upon the asking, of brimming economic opportunity and open pathways to Ghanaian citizenship—all led me closer to the truth.
The truth.
Truth is, I have in the past eight months been deeply moved and also, at times, deeply troubled on this journey. I have been extremely high and extremely low. At my most deeply spiritual moment, I stood in Assin Manso slave river, where I was suddenly flooded with a strange and palpable sense of connectedness to my ancestors and also by a deeply disturbing portrait that suddenly unveiled like a curtain opening before my eyes. In that vision of grotesque horror, I saw no white colonizers leading chained, bloodied and brutalized African slaves. Only Africans.
I stood in the river, stinging salted tears falling from my eyes as I realized in a way I had not before that moment that my ancestors were sold into slavery by their own brothers. And that very much alive in the descendants of those who had sold my ancestors—whether now ignorant, or knowledgeable of this past transgression—was a fairly consistent detectable disdain for me and African American returnees who had come home after slavery’s time, back to the scene of the historic crime.
And I realized in that moment that there might never be any love for me or my “tribe” here, except for the love of our resources—our money and our time spent here as tourists, seeking to reconnect with ancestral family and a land severed and, in some ways, forever lost in time.
And yet, my heart holds no animus because of this wounding rejection. Even if my heart is broken over that eternal forced disconnection at the hands of none other than my brother and by the truth that here in the land of my ancestral fathers, I am seen as an alien from another planet landed on the streets of a foreign land. I am decipherable to locals by my accent, by my walk, my build, my clothes and my aura, even before I open my mouth to speak.
The truth, however, is that even if I spoke perfect Twi or Ga and wore traditional West African clothes, I have come to believe that they would never accept me fully as brother. I used to state this as a question to Ghanaians and African Americans who now live here in Ghana. Their nearly unanimous chuckle of affirmation made me change the question to a statement of fact. Fact is: They are African. I am American Black. And all the invitations in the world alone for African Americans to come home won’t change that.
But I needed to take the journey.
Voices
My journey to record the stories of African Americans who now call Ghana home carried me across Accra and beyond, to places like Prampram, Sakumono and Tema, to neighborhoods like Chorkor, Abossey Okai and Mamprobi and Ashaiman. To gloriously intoxicating Cape Coast and Elmina, for sure. To Kumasi. I interviewed men and women, young and old, retirees and entrepreneurs, newcomers and those who uprooted from America decades ago to replant their lives in Ghanaian red clay dirt. African American-born men and women who married Ghanaians and whose children were born and raised in Ghana.
From these interviews, which I will detail in a forthcoming project, emerges a tale of the good, the bad and the ugly of the experience of living in Ghana as a Black American. Inasmuch as my immersion into Ghanaian life had exposed my soul to the joys of the culture and to the way of life there—tasting the bitter fruit of being a foreigner, an outsider and a tribal outcast—the revelations and stories I uncovered in my research further painted for me a less than rosy portrait of life for Black Americans who heeded their own personal “call” to move to Ghana.
There is the story of the Nigerian girl who met an American boy who wanted to marry her. But her parents would not allow it. There was one big problem. Not the color of his skin. It had absolutely nothing to do with his character as an individual. The problem: He was African American. The story, as told to me by an elderly African American woman, is that the young man, unwilling to relent, went to the girl’s parents to explain. He was not really African American, even if born Black in America. He had grown up in Ghana, raised by his grandmother. Still, the girl’s parents needed verification. So, they got on a plane and flew to Ghana to meet with the young man’s grandmother to verify that he was not purely African American. The young man’s grandmother confirmed his story. And the parents allowed him to marry their daughter.
There is the story of the young African American man who traced his roots to his native tribe in Ghana and moved here with his family to begin a new life in his native land. Only to be asked by the authorities who, upon reviewing his documents, inquired: “What is your family’s name?” the woman in immigration asked.
He could not answer. The family’s name had been taken—suppressed, forbidden and forgotten somewhere along the journey of slaves from Africa to America—lost in the land where slaves’ names, tribes and history could not be spoken, and were washed away during hundreds of years of enslavement. “I don’t know,” he answered, explaining that he had the DNA test to prove where he was from. That he was indeed Ghanaian. He protested to no avail.
“What is your family’s name?” she asked again. He could not answer. “You are not Ghanaian.” No name? No land? No recognition as being a descendant of Ghana. Period.
There is the narrative among Ghanaians and other Africans that African Americans are miscreants, drug dealers, lazy no-good-for-nothings, criminal- and homicidally-minded. That Africans are therefore better than Black Americans, work harder, are of higher moral standards, less prone to violence.
It is, however, a cruelly false narrative largely created by the media’s portrayal of African American life, by misinformation and false perceptions. A stereotypical portrayal that bears no more validity than the prevailing perception among some African Americans of Africans as poor hut-dwelling “booty scratchers” who live in the bush with wild animals, and are chronically stricken by AIDS and Monkey Pox.
There is the story of African Americans being seen as “fat pockets” and the targets of opportunity to gouge them for everything—from daily produce at the markets to trinkets and souvenirs on the street, to taxi and Uber rides and other goods and services—often being charged double or far above the usual cost. There is the Ghanaian price and the American price, which depends on the American customer’s ability to discern the difference.
There is the insult of “obroni”—the name some Ghanaians hurl at African Americans and that means white foreigner. The color or shade of the skin of African Americans does not trump their detectable foreign descent. “Obroni,” they tease. Laughter. Shock. Sting.
There is the story during my time in Ghana of the African American woman traveling with her young son in a taxi. She asked the driver to please turn down the radio. He refused. So, she asked him, short of arrival at their destination, to let them out. She paid him. Irate, he said it was not enough. So he climbed out of the car and beat her with his belt buckle as her son watched and no onlookers intervened.
There is the case of the elderly African American woman during my time who was taken captive in her home by her teenage Nigerian housekeeper and her mother, clubbed unconscious repeatedly in the head, by her own testimony to me, and held for days as they tried to extort her for money. She believed that her captors would kill her and at one point was resigned to dying, comforted by her belief, she told me, that she would see her deceased mother in heaven. Ultimately, she was rescued and survived.
And there is the mostly, out of earshot, if at all spoken, revilement some Ghanaians hold for African Americans because of our unforgiveable sin. That detestable, damnable, irreconcilable offense that is cause enough for the chasm between “us” and “them,” and which stands glaringly as the great divide. That thing, which some African Americans who have lived here for decades admit to having been made aware of by the Ghanaian bold enough to speak it. To make clear why “they” are really “better” than “us”—at least unblemished, pure, and forever not to be linked with “us.”
It is an attitude African Americans sense in Africans, in general, who migrate to the United States, bringing with them an air of arrogance while disassociating themselves from Black folk of the African American persuasion. They often exude a palpable sense of condescension toward us because of our so-called “laziness,” “lack of work ethic,” our “criminality,” and their perception of American Black folk as being in an immoral and unadmirable condition. Even though the truth is: African American slaves built this country, paved the way with their soul’s toil. Without them—us—the plethora of opportunity that exists for those Black bodies that come to America as passengers by plane rather than as cargo by slave ship would not exist. There would be no Giannis Antetokounmpo were it not for Jackie Robinson. No semblance of equality for the Black body—African or American—if my African American ancestors had not marched and died. If we had not as a people endured and overcome slavery, Southern lynching, Jim Crow cruelty, and discrimination, evil and racial hate—against which we still war.
And yet, many of us have felt the blaming stare of our African brothers and sisters. The way they seem to stare down their noses at us when the truth is that there would be no them here were it not for us. When the truth is: That they need to put some respect on our name. Except the most egregious offense to them, we cannot overcome.
That thing? The damnable thing?
That African Americans are descendants of slaves.
And this one thing apparently something to be ashamed of. Even being dirt poor in Ghana makes them at least better than a comparatively rich and educated Black person in America who is descendant from slaves and has slave blood running warm in their veins. Descendants of African slaves sold by Africans.
“But which one of these is more to be ashamed of?” I ask myself. “Which of these African descendants—of slave, or of slave seller, or even of those who escaped either fate—is less than?
“Which of these can throw stones?”
Perhaps only he who is without sin.
Lessons
I realize, having taken this journey as scholar, journalist and as great-great-grandson of a Black man born a slave in America, that there is a great divide between us—African and African American. A gulf, a systemic chasm manufactured by misinformation, by centuries of forced separation, by pure ignorance, and by the devices of those who are direct beneficiaries—Black, white or other—of our tribalistic tiffs and wholesale cannibalism that devours us at large.
And what I realized, even more after my sojourn in Africa, is that the tendency toward self-destruction, self-hate and cultural divisiveness is not simply the quandary of Africans and African Americans, but also between African Americans and African Americans.
What I also realize is that if we as a people across the African Diaspora are ever to unite for the good, prosperity and posterity of us all—and we must—then we must first grapple with and face hard truths: That we are our own worst enemy, our most formidable foe. That we always have been. And that we have the ability to heal ourselves. We always have.
I suspect that the more we engage with each other, the more we listen and learn the truth about each other rather than fabricated jaded narratives, the more we will come to see each other as brothers and sisters. The more we will see the humanity and worth in the other’s eyes as a mirror of our own, and our divine destiny and survival, which are irrevocably tied to each other.
Ghana taught me this. Hope and Michael, Hagar and Abena, Mama Loo, Prince Champion, Jerry Johnson, my forever Ghanaian brother Samuel Commodore, and all the beautiful people of Ghana who comprised the intricate tapestry of my journey back to Africa in its totality and that shall forever be emblazoned in my memory like the royal kente cloth of the Ashanti people.
Epilogue
As the jet plane soars above the earth, bound west, away from Africa, back toward America, I reflect upon my journey. Tears fill my eyes as I am enveloped by thoughts of Ghana and the fact that the time has come for us now to part ways. I already deeply miss Ghana.
I miss her pulse and heartbeat. The bustle and buzz of Accra streets amid the never-ending hustle of merchants and the majestic porters known as kayayei—the young women who tote their wares atop their heads with the elegance of a Paris runway model.
I miss the blare of Afrobeats music at Junction Mall, located in suburban Tema, Ghana, not far from Nungua. I miss the roosters’ crowing, the site of the gangster goats, as I call them, who troll the streets by day. I miss the red clay dirt. Jollof rice. The Ghanaian sun and sipping cool coconut milk from the shell. I miss the shrill of trotro mates, the darting daredevil motorbikes, and the Harmattan dust and sand, billowing over the Spintex Road.
I miss the scent of freedom. Of Africa. Of the wind kissing a tranquil Ghanaian night as foamy rushing waves from the Atlantic wash her shores and the moonlight shimmers above the vast enchanting ocean.
I miss the beautiful Ghanaian people, their majestic aura and beautiful sunbaked skin, the crispness of their spoken proper English. The way they dance within the music rather than upon it or to it—uplifted and transcendent in rhythm and spirit, like the ascending wings of doves.
After about eight months in Ghana, however, I also look forward to returning home.
And yet, my heart is overwhelmed as I leave these shores, drifting upon memories of music, culture and a people I have come to love. Of a place where, for the first time in my life as a Black man, I ever felt free. Of a land where my soul feels rested and where the soil, wind, sun and the elements whisper, “Son, welcome home.”
I miss the laughter, conversations, and the Ghanaian spirit that enraptured me. Here, in this special corner of the African Diaspora where, even if they never see me as “brother,” I will always see them as my brothers and my sisters.
The truth is: I love Ghana and Ghana almost loved me. That is the hurt and also the hope. I will always love Ghana.
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John W. Fountain
John W. Fountain is a professor of journalism at Roosevelt University and a 2021-22 U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Ghana, where he is a visiting lecturer at the University of Ghana-Legon and researching his project titled, “Hear Africa Calling: Portraits of Black Americans Drawn to The Motherland.”
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