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Emmanuel Akyeampong is Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

He was appointed Loeb Harvard College Professor in July 2005. Akyeampong is a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Council Member of the International African Institute, and a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (UK). He served as chair of the Committee on African Studies at Harvard from July 2002 to June 2006. He is the author of several books and articles including Drink, Power, and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c.1800 to Recent Times (1996); Between the Sea and the Lagoon: An Eco-Social History of the Anlo of Southeastern Ghana, c.1850 to Recent Times (2001); and editor of Themes in West Africas History (2006). His research interests are social history, comparative slavery and the African diaspora, environmental history, and the history of disease and medicine. Akyeampong is an editor of the Journal of African History, and has served on the editorial advisory boards of African Affairs, the International Journal of African Historical Studies, Ghana Studies, the Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, and Research Review.

SLAVE ROUTES, SLAVE ROOTS AND NATION-BUILDING:


Ghana, Ghanaians Abroad and the African Diaspora in the 21st Century

EMMANUEL AKYEAMPONG, FGA


HARVARD COLLEGE PROFESSOR AND SENIOR FELLOW, IIAS

SLAVE ROUTES, SLAVE ROOTS AND NATION-BUILDING:


Ghana, Ghanaians Abroad and the African Diaspora in the 21st Century
Cat. No. JF/Vol1/EA/2007/P ISBN 0-XXX-XXXXX-XXXXXX

Launch Lecture for the International Institute for the Advanced Study of Cultures, Institutions and Economic Enterprise (IIAS), Accra, August 21, 2007.

INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDIES 99 BALANSA STREET, OYARIFA, ACCRA. GHANA.

Book Layout and Design: Dhr. S. L. dSouza

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For additional copies of this publication, please contact: Publishing and Archiving Services International Institute for Advanced Studies Post Office Box Ct5734,Cantonments. Accra. Ghana. Tel: +233-21-501521 Fax: +233-21-70120560 / -232927 Email: administration@interias.com Website: www.interias.com This publication is available upon request in accessible formats. Contact: New Media Services Section International Institute for Advanced Studies 99 Balansa Street, Adenta. Accra. Ghana. Tel: +233-21-501521 Fax: +233-21-70120560 / -232927 Email: sdsouza@interias.com Website: www.interias.com This publication is also available electronically on the World Wide Web at the following address: www.interias.com Permission to Reproduce Except as otherwise specifically noted, the information in this publication may not be reproduced, in part or in whole and by any means, without due permission from International Institute for Advanced Studies of Cultures, Institutions and Economic Enterprise, Accra, Ghana. Educational and Not-for-profit organizations MAY use part or whole of this publication under the terms of COMMON KNOWLEDGE; provided that due diligence is exercised in ensuring the accuracy of the information reproduced; that the AUTHOR and the PUBLISHER are identified as the source; and that the reproduction is not represented as an official version of the information reproduced, nor as having been made in affiliation with, or with the endorsement of, IIAS, Ghana. For permission to reproduce the information in this publication for commercial redistribution, please email: akyeamp@interias.com Cat. No. P-EA/06/0001A

4 This lecture notes how the export slave trade from Africa resulted in the global

Introduction This year marks 200 years of the British abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and fifty years of Ghanas independence. Though coincidental, the meeting of these two events is not insignificant. Indeed, the histories of slavery, emancipation and nationalism are connected in integral ways, as demonstrated in the 18 century revolutions in America, France, and Haiti. The American Revolution (1776) witnessed the overthrow of British rule by its North American colony. Paradoxically, the founding fathers of the American nation affirmed the inalienable right of man to liberty as the basis to selfdetermination, while denying their slaves the same right. They declared their slaves of African-descent or Afro-Americans to be of another race, and as a separate race excluded from the privileges of American nationhood. The French Revolution from 1789 trumpeted the virtues of universal liberty, equality, and fraternity. The French revolutionaries logically abolished slavery and declared French citizenship open irrespective of color. The dictates of political economy and colonial politics later compelled the French revolutionaries to re-impose slavery in their Caribbean colonies and to narrow the eligibility for French citizenship. In the end, people of color and eventually slaves in Saint Domingue lost patience with the Parisians and took their destiny into their hands. They fought a brutal war from 1791 to 1803 to forge the new nation they called Haiti, making it the only successful slave revolution in history.2 In all three revolutions that forged new nation-states, the question of slavery was central. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), a founding father of the American nation and author of the 1776 Declaration of Independence, understood these connections well, and he cautioned his fellow Americans to be on the alert once news of the Haitian revolution reached North America, as freedom could be infectious.3
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dispersion of Africans, though it focuses on the American experience. It probes the affective bonds that have tied people of African descent to the African continent, and analyzes examples of back-to-Africa movements in the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Ghana has been at the center of African relations with African Americans, put in the limelight by the numerous European forts and castles that dot its coastline, the major role Kwame Nkrumah played in the pan-Africanist movement, and the enthusiastic response of African Americans to Nkrumahs call to relocate to Ghana and assist in the building of the new African nation. Presently, Ghana is at the forefront again with her passage of dual citizenship and the right of abode Act, which gives people of African descent the right of permanent residence in Ghana. The Joseph Project, launched earlier this year, highlights the Kufuor governments interest in African American tourism and its commitment to African American relocation. This lecture situates these important developments within a deeper historical context, interrogating the changing nature of African American relations with Africa, and emphasizing valuable insights and lessons that are critical for a successful Ghanaian partnership with African Americans. The lecture is divided into five main parts. The next section shares how recent historical scholarship has shaped current understandings of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas. The nature of links between Africa and the Americas during the era of the Atlantic slave trade has undergone major re-interpretation. I will then turn to the nineteenth century in the second section of the lecture, when we have the first major return of significant numbers of people of African descent from the Americas to Africa, and consider the implications for the 21st century. I will focus on the return of AfroBrazilians to West Africa. The third section will shift the focus to Ghana and will attempt to excavate what Ghana and Nkrumah represented in the African American mind, and why so many responded to his call to come and help build the new nation of Ghana. We will extend our examination into the present in the fourth section and discuss briefly the

Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America, New Left Review, I/181 (May-June 1990), 4. 2 For a good short history of the Haitian revolution, see David P. Geggus, The Haitian Revolution, in Franklin Knight and Colin Palmer, eds., The Modern Caribbean (Chapel Hill, 1989), 21-51. The classic study on the Haitian revolution remains C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (London, 2001), first published in 1938. 3 Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus, Slave Revolutions in the Caribbean 1789-1804: A Brief History with Documents (Boston, 2006), 159-62.

current endeavors to attract African Americans to Ghana, which have privileged tourism. In the conclusion I will offer some thoughts on the growing appreciation of the links between diaspora, transnationalism and development. I review the overlap between diaspora and transnationalism as many Ghanaians immigrate outside Ghana, and how we

5 can best position the country in our common agenda to incorporate the African diaspora and Ghanaians abroad in Ghanas developmental efforts.4 Africa, the Atlantic Slave Trade, and Slavery in the Americas Peter Wood in his book Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America opined that it was the complete lack of feedback between the Americas and Africa that enabled slave masters to mistreat their slaves and not worry about this impacting on the supply of slaves from Africa. Implicit is Woods assumption that African slave traders would have refrained from participating in the Atlantic slave trade if they were aware of the brutalities of New World Slavery. Folklore in the Americas support this contention, and Michael Gomezs study of American slavery in the colonial and antebellum South recount several African American folk stories of how European slave traders had attacked African coastal societies and seized captives or tricked Africans into slavery, sometimes with the complicity of African chiefs.
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6 interesting scholarly debate between the historians Ivor Wilks and A. Norman Klein as to why the Akans were importing servile people in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and if these could be technically termed slaves.9 Ray Kea has demonstrated how Gold Coast communities in the seventeenth century remained very much in control of their political economies, benefiting from European presence on the coast but not subordinated to European economic and political dictates.10 But it was the publication of John Thorntons Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World that moved this discussion into the more public realm, and this highly readable text created awareness among Americans of how Africans had been agents in the Atlantic slave trade, and how within Africa slaves were, perhaps, the most important form of moveable property.11 Ironically, this was not necessarily the argument Thornton set out to make. In the contemporary period when African voice and agency have diminished in world affairs, Thornton wanted to underscore African agency and autonomy in the first two centuries of Atlantic trade. But the discovery of African involvement in the slave trade made the most impact on African Americans. This shattered the African American consolation that Africans in Africa were as much victims of the Atlantic slave trade as the unfortunate ones removed to the Americas. The presumed disconnection between developments in Africa and the Americas during the era of Atlantic trade also fell away. More recent studies have underscored how some western Africans were conversant with conditions and events in the New World colonies. While many slaves were removed forcibly from western Africa to the New World and had no hope of a return to the homeland, some African sailors, traders, diplomats, government officials and aristocrats traveled freely within the Atlantic world. These social groups knew of developments in the New World, a privileged minority in what was even then a global world.12 Let us use three examples to demonstrate this.
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African historians have known for a long time that Europeans seldom seized slaves themselves from the African coast with the exception of areas of early European colonization such as Angola, where European wars from the late sixteenth century secured a steady flow of African slaves to the Americas. Indeed, it has now been established that the first twenty or so African slaves that arrived in Virginia in 1619 were not trans-shipped from the Caribbean as formerly believed, but came directly on a Portuguese slaver from Angola, products of a military conflict between the Portuguese colony of Angola and the African kingdom of Ndongo to the south.7 When the Portuguese arrived on the Gold Coast in the 1470s, there was already an Akan demand for slaves, which the Portuguese met by going to the Bight of Biafara and Angola to buy slaves to exchange for gold from the Gold Coast.8 The mid-1990s witnessed an
4 I use diaspora in this paper to refer to the global dispersion of Africans brought about by the export slave trade, and transnationalism to refer to recent Ghanaian emigration from the 1970s and the ability of these Ghanaians to maintain simultaneous social relations in Ghana and their host countries. 5 Peter H. Wood, Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America (New York, 2003 [1996]), 31. 6 Michael Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, 1998). 7 John Thornton, Notes and Documents: The African Experience of the 20 and odd Negroes arriving in Virginia in 1619, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 55:3 (1998), 421-34. 8 A. Adu Boahen, Ghana before the coming of the Europeans, Ghana Social Science Journal, 4:2 (1977), 93-106.

A. Norman Klein, Slavery and Akan Origins, Ethnohistory, 41:4 (1994), 627-56; and Ivor Wilks, Slavery and Akan Origins? A Reply, Ethnohistory, 4:4 (1994), 657-65. Ray Kea, Settlements, Trade and Polities in the Seventeenth Century Gold Coast (Baltimore, 1982). 11 John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic World 1400-1680 (Cambridge, 1992). 12 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA, 1993), drew the several African communities around the Atlantic into an analytical framework, the black Atlantic. This concept has been given heuristic value where Africa and the African diaspora is concerned by works such as Judith Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, MA, 2001); Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks; James Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1551-1770 (Chapel Hill, 2003); J. Lorand Matory, The
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7 We learn from Thornton of the example of a prominent indigenous priest in Matamba, Angola, sentenced around 1660 to be conveyed to Brazil as a slave by the Portuguese priest Cavazzi for witchcraft or consulting with the devil. The governor of Rio de Janeiro, Salvador de S, recognized the priest from his time as governor of Angola and liberated the priest and had him returned to Angola. For pre-colonial Dahomey, Edna Bay has argued that exile in the trans-Atlantic slave trade was often the penalty for political factions or groups that fell from power or lost their bid for the royal court. Wellplaced Dahomeans kept track of these exiled royals in case they needed to be brought back when political fortunes changed. Bay gives the example of Agontime, a high-born woman implicated in the succession dispute that ensued with the assassination of King Agonglo in 1797. The opposing party under Adandozan won and Agontime with 600 others were exiled to the New World, some say to Brazil or Cuba. When Gezo came to power in Dahomey in a successful coup in 1818, he sent several emissaries to the New World, two of which are remembered to have been tasked explicitly with finding Agontime. And James Sweet cites the extraordinary instance of the Angolan slave in Brazil, Lucrtia de Andr, whose brother in Angola, Manuel da Costa Perico, raised 110 mil-ris and had the money sent through a relay of hands to buy the freedom of his sister from the Catholic religious order that owned her in 1751.15 It is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the illusion of a complete information blackout between western Africa and the Americas in the era of Atlantic trade. However, these exchanges around the Atlantic world were minor, and the traffic from western Africa to the Americas far outweighed the reverse trickle. It is in the nineteenth century that we see the first significant numbers of Afro-Americans returning to Africa.
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8 Return of Afro-Americans to West Africa in the Nineteenth Century The abolition of the export slave trade, first by Denmark in 1792 with implementation from 1803, and by the British in 1807, marked the first serious European governmental attempts to end the Atlantic slave trade. British efforts to interdict slave ships along the coast of West Africa fed into the growth of Freetown and Sierra Leone, the first British colony in West Africa. The end of the export slave trade led to slave masters encouraging the natural reproduction of their slaves in the Americas so as to sustain slave production regimes. The unease created by the Haitian Revolution, and the contradiction in holding creole-born African Americans as slaves interacted with Abolitionist sentiment in America to birth the settlement of Monrovia in the 1820s. Liberia would become an independent nation in 1847, again demonstrating the links connecting slavery, emancipation and nation-building. From the 1820s, freed Africans in Brazil also began to immigrate voluntarily to West Africa. This gained momentum in the 1830s when the Revolt of the Mals failed in Bahia, Brazil, in 1835, and the Brazilian authorities deported free Africans and slaves involved in this rebellion. An estimated 3,000 left Brazil for West Africa, settling in Accra, Ouidah, Badagry and Lagos.16 In the repressive atmosphere in Bahia after the failed rebellion, many free Africans voluntarily immigrated to West Africa. Shaken by the seriousness of the 1835 revolt, the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Bahia even came out against the continuation of the Atlantic slave trade.17 The small numbers of the Afro-Brazilians who repatriated to West Africa belie the enormous impact they had on the communities they settled in. The Afro-Brazilians included those versed in commercial agriculture, craftsmen and traders. In Dahomey, Afro-Brazilian knowledge of plantation agriculture has been credited with Dahomeys successful switch from slave exports to palm oil exports from 1840.18 In Accra, the Afro-

English Professors of Brazil: On the Diaspora Roots of the Yoruba Nation, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 41:1 (1999), 72-103; idem, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candombl (Princeton, 2005); and Kristin Mann and Edna G. Bay, eds., Rethinking the African Diaspora: the Making of a Black Atlantic in the Bight of Benin and Brazil (London, 2001). Earlier works had been important in carving out the field of African diaspora studies and the Atlantic history, and Melville Herskovits, Philip Curtin and Joseph Harris are important pioneers. But it is to the latter works I cite that we must credit the idea of a black Atlantic and historic overlap of both diaspora and transnationalism in the Atlantic world. 13 Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 264. 14 Edna Bay, Protection, Political Exile, and the Atlantic Slave-Trade: History and Collective Memory in Dahomey, in Mann and Bay, eds., Rethinking the African Diaspora, 42-60. 15 Sweet, Recreating Africa, 31-2.

16 Pierre Verger, Trade Relations between the Bight of Benin and Bahia from the 17th to the 19th Century (Ibadan, 1976); Joo J. Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (Baltimore, 1993); S. Y. Boadi-Siaw, Brazilian Returnees of West Africa, in Joseph Harris, ed., Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora (Washington, DC, 1982), 291-308; and Lisa Lindsay, `To Return to the Bosom of their Fatherland: Brazilian Immigrants in Nineenth-Century Lagos, Slavery and Abolition, 15:1 (1994), 22-50.. 17 Verger, Trade Relations between the Bight of Benin and Bahia, 314-15. 18 Edna G. Bay, Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey (Charlottesville, 1998), 188.

9 Brazilians, known locally as Tabon, would again enter commercial agriculture in Accra, were noted for their artisan skills as tailors and goldsmiths, and built several of the first modern houses in the Otublohum quarter in what was then Dutch Accra. Afro-Brazilian families such as the Azumah Nelson and Peregrino families are remembered for their tailoring skills, and the Aruna and Nassu families for their knowledge of agriculture. The da Costa, da Rocha and Ribeiro families have produced several professionals and politicians in Ghana.19 The impact of Afro-Brazilians on Lagos, where many settled and were known locally as Aguda, was even more profound. Lorand Matory has argued convincingly that they together with Yoruba-speaking returnees from Sierra Leone -were central in the creation of the very idea of a Yoruba nation in the second half of the 19th century.20 Again, the links between slavery, emancipation and nation-building are made explicit. British colonial governments in Lagos came to value these African diasporic links and sought to profit from them. For Lagos governors from the mid-nineteenth century, the skilled Afro-Brazilians returnees held the key to transforming Lagos into a productive, profitable economy. In 1865, Afro-Brazilians numbered 1,000 in Lagoss population of 25,000.21 For Governor Alfred Moloney in the 1880s, the Afro-Brazilians represented an orderly, industrious and respectable portion of this community and set generally a good example as citizens.22 Moloney sought to redirect the Afro-Brazilians into commercial agriculture in Lagos, though the experience of plantation slavery in Brazil made many Afro-Brazilians shun commercial agriculture. British attempts to persuade Afro-Brazilians to enter commercial farming in the Lagos neighborhood date back to the 1850s, when the British annexed Lagos as a colony. Governor Moloney eloquently stated his vision in a speech he gave on cotton cultivation in Manchester in 1890. The repatriation of educated and industrious Negroes from the New World is the grand problem of future Africa, and a promising opening for such on an assisted scale offers both in the United States and in Brazil. Such Negroes are required for
Alcione M. Amos and Ebenezer Ayesu, I am a Brazilian: History of the Tabon, Afro-Brazilians in Accra, Ghana, Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, New Series, No. 6 (2002), 35-58. 20 Matory, English Professors of Brazil. On Sierra Leoneans in Yorubaland, see Jean Herskovits Kopytoff, A Preface to Modern Nigeria: The Sierra Leoneans in Yoruba, 1830-1890 (Madison, 1965). 21 Lindsay, Brazilian Immigrants in 19th-Century Lagos, 27. 22 Ibid., 39.
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10 the establishment of civilizing centers, for the spread of the industries they have learnt in the western hemisphere; they are to be the educators of their less enlightened fellow-countrymen; they should be the free and effective crusaders in and amongst their own fellow countrymen against slavery.23 When Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, the last nation in the western hemisphere to do so, the British at Lagos anticipated and hoped for a massive immigration of AfroBrazilians to Lagos. As many as a million migrs were hoped for, and Moloney dreamt of a revolution in agriculture in Lagos. In 1890 and 1891 the British colonial government would subsidize steamship service between Lagos and cities along the Brazilian coast in the hope that this would encourage immigration and trade between the British colony and Afro-Brazilians with relatives in Yoruba-land or who practiced Yoruba-inspired religions.24 But the number of Afro-Brazilians who immigrated to Lagos was disappointingly low. Only 200 Brazilians came to Lagos on the two trial voyages.25 The scheme was scrapped. There have thus been important precursors to the current endeavor of African governments to reach out to the African diaspora in their developmental agendas. The lessons from history would be useful in this encounter. The Lagos-Brazilian scheme failed from the perspective of the British colonial government because Brazilians did not immigrate en masse to Lagos as the British government wanted. But the British government in Lagos was blinded to the needs and aspirations of Afro-Brazilians, expecting them to go heavily into commercial agriculture, when the history of emancipation has shown that ex-slaves seldom continued in plantation agriculture, particularly of crops such as sugar cane and cotton that had characterized their bondage. Though the two trial ships between Lagos and the Brazilian coast returned with few immigrants, it was laden with cargo, and Afro-Brazilians preferred to trade with Lagos, not immigrate. The diasporan perspective should never be ignored in the calculations of African governments as they court African American participation in African development. Ghana and African Americans in the Era of Independence

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Ibid., 41. Matory, English Professors of Brazil, 87. Lindsay, Brazilian Immigrants in 19th-Century Lagos, 43.

11 Many African Americans flocked to Ghana in the 1950s and 1960s to assist the Nkrumah government in the new experiment at nation-building in black Africa. In 1951 Nkrumah formed the first African government in Ghana, when his party, the Convention Peoples Party, won the February 1951 elections in convincing fashion. In June 1951 Nkrumah was invited to give the commencement speech at his alma mater, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. He used the occasion to invite African Americans to return to Ghana and aid in the development of the nation.26 Many responded to his call. The American civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr., later attended Ghanas independence celebrations in March 1957 and was profoundly touched by his experience. He returned to the United States to preach a sermon on his visit and the lessons he had drawn entitled The Birth of a New Nation. In this sermon, King added his voice to Nkrumahs invitation, and encouraged African Americans to go and assist Nkrumah in this novel and important experiment of building a modern African nation in sub-Saharan Africa.
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12 who would influence Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, African Americans who identified with African struggles were considered traitors by the US government.29 These historic circumstances need to be remembered for a better appreciation of this period. The pan-Africanist movement had forged important ties between African Americans and educated Africans from the 1920s. Its congresses had been held in various European capitals and in American cities, and Ghanas independence meant that panAfricanism finally had a home in black Africa. Nkrumah became the embodiment of this vision. The 1950s and 1960s witnessed an intensification of the civil rights struggle in America. For many African Americans disillusioned by the absence of political space in America for African Americans and the persistence of institutionalized racism, joining hands in building the new African nation called Ghana was a worthy cause. African American longing for a sense of belonging also oriented them towards Ghana. In an American melting pot made of various ethnicities, African Americans have had an ambivalent relationship to Africa; the land of their origins, but the land that also expelled their ancestors. The inability to trace their origins back to a particular place in this huge continent has been frustrating. As the first independent black African nation, Ghana lay at the core of African American identity and sense of worth in the 1950s and 1960s. In the decade after independence, scores of African Americans immigrated to Ghana, while several prominent African Americans such as Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X came to visit. Ghana had a glittering intellectual life, and its literary and academic residents and visitors included Frantz Fanon, novelist Maryse Cond, the distinguished economist William Arthur Lewis, St. Clair Drake, David Levering Lewis, and Eric Williams, who wrote Capitalism and Slavery (1944) and later became the prime minister of Trinidad. It should be seen as a victory of official America that public memory of what Nkrumah represented in the African American mind has been expunged effectively in the present. Kevin Gaines in his important book, American Africans in Ghana, reflects that: If Nkrumah is remembered at all, it is primarily as an icon of anti-imperialist resistance by those of the global South and their allies engaged in contemporary struggles against Western hegemony and militarism. He, his times, and the struggle over African American consciousness that he in part inspired have been largely airbrushed from public memory. Who remembers Nkrumah and the African personality or recalls the images of African diplomats holding forth at
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Ghanas independence in 1957 was celebrated throughout the African diaspora. Lord Kitchener, the Trinidadian-born calypso singer composed a song in honor of Ghanas independence. African Americans who attended Ghanas independence celebrations in 1957 included George Padmore, who lived and died in Ghana and after whom the George Padmore Library is named, Norman Manley, who later became Prime Minister of Jamaica, UN official and Nobel laureate Ralph Bunche, Martin Luther King Jr., Lucille Amstrong, representing her husband Louis Armstrong, labor leaders, and educators from historically black universities such as Howard University and Lincoln University, Nkrumahs alma mater. Du Bois, Nkrumahs mentor could not attend as his U.S. passport had been allegedly withdrawn because of his leftist views. In this era of the Cold War, African Americans with leftist leanings suffered persecution, and several like the novelist Julian Mayfield fled to Ghana. As the US and the USSR struggled over
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Yvette Marie Alex-Assensoh, Ghana: The Diaspora Presence that made such a difference, New African, March 2007, 46-49. Martin Luther King, Jr., The Birth of a New Nation, sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Church. Montgomery Alabama, April 7, 1957. In The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Senior Editor, Clayborne Carson (Berkeley, 2000), 160-1. 28 Kevin K. Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill, 2006), 4-5.

Ibid., 9.

13 the United Nations when African Americans were still violently barred from voting throughout the south? Perhaps such memories still stir within a few Americans of a certain age. It is as if the appearance of new African nations on the world stage never happened.30 It is as one speaks to elderly African Americans like Drs. Robert and Sarah Lee, who set up a dentistry practice in Ghana and have remained here since independence, or my retired senior colleague at Harvard, Martin Kilson, who lived and taught in Ghana with his wife Marion, or the poet Maya Angelou, who was sharply transported to Ghana in her minds eye in the summer of 1989, when he saw me ascending the stairs to the History Department in Wake Forest University in my Joromi shirt, that one gains a sense of the enormous significance of Nkrumahs Ghana for older African Americans. African Americans were eager to support Nkrumahs assertion in his independence speech that there is a new African in the world and that this new African was determined to show that after all the black man is capable of managing his own affairs. Direct references to the legacies of Toussaint LOuverture, father of the Haitian nation-state, and Marcus Garvey in his independence speech emphasized Nkrumahs understanding that the Ghanaian experiment at nation-building was also a diasporan one. African American technicians in Ghana worked feverishly to assist Nkrumah in having Job 600 ready for the summit of the Organization of African Unity in Accra in 1965. Strong but critical supporters of Nkrumah, the African American community would petition Nkrumah to release J. B. Danquah from prison as news of his failing health reached them.32 Several agonized over some of Nkrumahs political and economic decisions, and the writer Richard Wright cautioned Nkrumah that American funding of the Akosombo Dam would be a poisoned chalice. He encouraged Nkrumah to find resources internally for building the dam and other development projects, and to eschew dependence on foreign aid. This sentiment was shared by Basil Davidson, who wrote Black Star, a sympathetic biography of Nkrumah.34 For African Americans and Europeans, Nkrumah was a major icon: his non-racialism attracted not only African
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14 Americans to Ghana, but also talented Europeans such Geoffrey Bing, who became Ghanas attorney general, and the educators Thomas and Dorothy Hodgkin. This entire community was traumatized and brutalized with the coup that overthrew Nkrumah in February 1966. Many returned to the U.S. to rejoin the fight for African American rights, and the political scientist Martin Kilson argued then that the US had become the site of battle, not Ghana. Others like Julian Mayfield relocated to Guyana rather than return to the US. Nkrumah pointed to CIA complicity in his overthrow and castigated his former friend and African American colleague from Lincoln University, Ambassador Franklin Williams, for channeling American financial support to the coup plotters in Ghana.35 Ambassador Williams strongly denied Nkrumahs accusation. Many African Americans were hurt by this accusation, which seemed to have overshadowed the loyal support African Americans had offered Nkrumah for years. Yvette Alex-Assensoh opines that this allegation undermined the cordial relations between Nkrumah and many diaspora-based black leaders.36 Stokely Carmichael, an African American then married to Miriam Makeba, had even relocated to Guinea in 1967 to join Nkrumah, and changed his name to Kwame Ture, honoring both Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Toure.37 So, what was the legacy of the Nkrumah era for African Americans? As pointed out earlier, Nkrumahs prominent place in the African American political imagination in the 1950s and 1960s has been erased. As African Americans walk Ghanaian soil in the present, perhaps what would most strike a chord with them was the sentiment Wright expressed at the end of his visit to Ghana in 1954 on what Ghana and Africa had come to mean for him. In his farewell letter to Nkrumah, his official host, he observed that: While roaming at random through the compounds, market places, villages, and cities of your country, I felt an odd kind of at-homeness, a solidarity that stemmed not from ties of blood or race, or from my being of African descent, but from the quality of deep hope and suffering embedded in the lives of your people, from the hard facts of oppression that cut across time, space, and culture. I must confess that I, an American Negro, was filled with consternation at what Europe had done to this Africa 38
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Gaines, American Africans in Ghana, 20. Ibid., 210. Ibid., 212. 33 Richard Wright, Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos with an Introduction by Amritjit Singh (New York, 1995 [1954]), 387-92. 34 Basil Davidson, Black Star: A View of the Life and Times of Kwame Nkrumah (Plymouth, 1973).

Kwame Nkrumah, Dark Days in Ghana (London, 1968), 49. Alex-Assensoh, Ghana, 49. Ibid. 38 Ibid., 385.

15 African Americans and Slave Roots Tourism in Ghana Current Ghanaian relations with African Americans center on tourism, as tourism has risen significantly as a source of foreign exchange. African American resettlement in Ghana has also returned to the governments agenda and the passing of the right of abode Act has enabled African Americans to live and work permanently in Ghana if they so choose. In 2006 the Ministry of Tourism was renamed as the Ministry of Tourism and Diasporan Relations to effectively coordinate Ghanaian interest in sponsoring tourism and African American relations. From the early 1990s, the annual celebration of PANAFEST, the pan-African cultural festival, has attracted many people of African descent to Ghana. Cape Coast and Elmina Castles, declared World Heritage Monuments by UNESCO, stand at the center of PANAFEST. For most African Americans, travel to the motherland has become a reality only in the last two decades. Alex Haleys book Roots (1976), and the film and television series based on the book were instrumental in creating a conviction that African Americans could trace their roots back to West Africa. Today, DNA testing has reinforced that hope of locating a specific place of origin, and two major film documentaries Motherland: a Genetic Journey for Caribbean Africans and African American Lives in the United States -- have publicized this possibility. These Africans Americans read some of the more accessible histories of slavery and the slave trade before they head out to West Africa, and they show up with questions concerning African agency in the export slave trade, the history of domestic slavery, and accounts of modern-day slavery in parts of Africa. [Play video segment] As the Ghanaian state via the Ministry of Tourism positioned itself to benefit from the African American interest in slave roots/routes, it encountered a major obstacle in the disconnect between African American and Ghanaian understandings of the histories and legacies of slavery and slave trade in the Atlantic world. This misunderstanding became an important impediment to cultural dialogue. Continued conversations between African Americans and Ghanaians gradually aligned understandings of how differently slave systems had operated on either side of the Atlantic, and the terrors African collaboration with Europeans in the slave trade had
39 See, for example, Anne C. Bailey, African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame (Boston, 2005); and William St. Clair, The Door of No Return: The History of Cape Coast Castle and the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York, 2007).

16 unleashed on African slaves in the Americas and their progeny. The Ghanaian government decided in 1994 to celebrate annually an Emancipation Day for people of African descent, commemorating the advent of emancipation in the Americas and the Caribbean. But this still did not tackle questions African Americans had about slavery within Africa and African complicity in the Atlantic slave trade. Partial resolution and restitution were found in a ritual of atonement in 1998 that involved burial rites of immense significance around the Atlantic.40 The remains of Samuel Carson and Crystal, two slave ancestors who had died in the United States and Jamaica, were flown to Ghana, taken by road to Cape Coast, where the bodies were placed on a boat and brought into Cape Coast Castle through the proverbial Door of No Return, which was subsequently renamed the Door of Return. The remains were interred at Assin Manso, site of a river (Nnonko Nsuo) where slaves were ritually and physically washed before proceeding to Cape Coast Castle and the outward journey across the Atlantic to the Americas. This has become a mausoleum and tourist site today. Earlier this year, Ministry of Tourism and Diasporan Relations launched its Joseph Project, after the Biblical Joseph, to encourage African Americans to return to Africa in this case Ghana. The project is funded by the government of Ghana, the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), and UNESCO. The Joseph Project builds on the pan-African foundations of Nkrumah and his very successful outreach to Africans in the diaspora to return to Ghana and assist in nation-building. Tourism in itself might entice African Americans for a single visit to Ghana. How many times would an African American wish to visit the traumatic sites of Cape Coast and Elmina? Any appeal to African Americans in the diaspora to relocate to Ghana needs to take cognizance of African American needs and aspirations, so as not to repeat the failed British experiment with Afro-Brazilians in Lagos, which was blind to Afro-Brazilian aspirations. Historical circumstances have changed, and the African American condition today is very different from that of the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, Africans are now beneficiaries of affirmative action and other positive policies that the civil rights struggle won for African Americans. Ghanaians abroad represent an important avenue for

39

40

See the forthcoming work of Vincent Brown, The Reapers Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Duke University Press, 2007).

17 attracting African Americans to Ghana for short- and long-term development projects. Recent scholarship has pointed to the immigration of highly qualified Ghanaians to the United States and Canada. Many have furthered their education in North America and pursue careers that situate them in networks with African American professionals. In 1989 the average household income of Ghanaian families in the United States was much higher than those of other immigrant groups and even those of the native population.
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18 America, and another million within Africa, especially in ECOWAS countries.44 Going by the recent population census of 2004, which gave Ghanas population as about twenty million, this would give a figure of 7.5% of Ghanas population living abroad. Data from balance of payments show that Ghanaians abroad transferred home about US$400 million in 1990, $900 million in 2002 with private transfers increasing to about $1 billion at the end of 2003.45 These amounts do not include cash remittances sent through friends and relatives. Though these remittances have proved invaluable to economic planning and the survival of families in Africa, equally important and less discussed is how to attract skilled Africans back to Africa for short or long periods. Richard Joseph has outlined succinctly the position Ghana must take. Ghanas great loss of trained personnel must be turned into gains for development by making use of the same global transformations that encouraged their emigration. A globalizing world makes it possible for more citizens to think, live, and act as transnationals, for whom home and abroad are no longer fixed destinations. Moreoever, individuals deeply concerned about global inequities can be encouraged to make transnational commitments in their professional careers.46 Paradoxically, living and working abroad has kindled the spirit of patriotism in many Ghanaians, as their awareness of the great strides other nations have made has fostered an awareness of how their talents are more needed in their home countries. Racial discrimination and the difficulty of integration in the West have sharpened these sentiments. In a migration research study in Ghana in 1991, a significant number of Ghanaians expressed regret at having immigrated to other ECOWAS countries to help develop other countries when their own country needed their contribution to the development effort.47 Several scholars have advocated a rethinking of brain drain, and they encourage us to re-conceptualize Ghanaians living abroad as brain gain. A recent edited volume on Diaspora and Development that highlights the relevance of remittances, diaspora

Friendships and marriages have developed between Ghanaians and African Americans, and today it is more likely that the African American investor or technocrat ended up in Ghana because of a relationship with a Ghanaian in North America. In the conclusion to this paper, I will reflect briefly on the overlap between diaspora and transnationalism, and how Ghanaians abroad and African Americans could come together in nation-building in Ghana. Conclusion: Diaspora, Transnationalism and Development Ghanaian emigration took place increasingly from the 1970s, as Ghanas economy went into steep decline, and dictatorial rule forced political dissenters out. When Nigeria expelled illegal aliens in early 1983, between 900,000 and 1.2 million Ghanaians returned from Nigeria.42 This represented a tenth of Ghanas total population at the time, and the returnees included unskilled laborers, domestic servants, prostitutes, artisans, university lecturers and secondary school teachers. Emil Rado estimated that by 1985 Ghana had lost between half and two-thirds of its experienced, top level professional manpower. At the beginning of the 21 century, one study estimated that there are about 110,000 Ghanaians in the United Kingdom, about 46,000 Ghanaians in Germany, another 44,000 in Italy, roughly 35,000 in the Netherlands, about 14,000 in Switzerland, and about 86,000 first generation Ghanaian immigrants in Canada and the United States. The North American figure does not include Ghanaian-Americans who were born in the US or Canada, or assumed citizenship by naturalization. According to this study, there were about 500,000 Ghanaians in the European Union and North
Baffour K. Takyi, The African Diaspora: A Socio-Demographic Portrait of the Ghanaian Migrant Community in the United States of America, Ghana Studies, 2 (2000), 35-56. Lynne Brydon, Ghanaian Responses to the Nigerian Expulsions of 1983, African Affairs, 84 (1985), 570. 43 Emil Rado, Notes Towards a Political Economy of Ghana Today, African Affairs, 85 (1986), 563.
42 41

43

st

44

K. A. Twum Baah, Volume and Characteristics of International Ghanaian Migration, in Takyiwaa Manuh, ed., At Home in the World? International Migration and Development in Contemporary Ghana and West Africa (Accra, 2005), 55-77. 45 E. K. Y. Addison, The Macroeconomic Impact of Remittances, in Manuh, ed., At Home in the World, 125. 46 Richard Joseph, At Home Abroad: Human Capital and Ghanas Development, in Manuh, ed., At Home in the World, 290. 47 Twum Baah, Volume and Characteristics of International Ghanaian Migration, 64.

19 philanthropy, and the transfer of knowledge, skills and values in the developmental agendas of developing countries posits the possibility that global equity could be an inevitable consequence of diasporic transfers. It is important, however, that we do not turn the diaspora into the magic wand for Africas developmental hopes, especially giving the deep structural barriers to Africas economic growth. I would like to add my support to the policy recommendations made by John Anarfi, Stephen Kwankye and Clement Ahiadeke in their recent study of migration, return and impact in Ghana. They stressed the need for a special governmental effort to attract investors from among Ghanaian emigrants abroad, noting that the Ghanaian-born migr is more likely to be patriotic. They also opine that though the emigration of Ghanaian professionals poses human resource problems in the short term, it should be seen as a positive development and not as a negative phenomenon. What government should do is put in place specific programs and policies that would turn this phenomenon to Ghanas advantage in the long run.49 Foreign investors would become more interested in Ghana as they see propertied and skilled Ghanaians invest in the Ghanaian economy. And African Americans are more likely to be captivated by the vision of their Ghanaian acquaintances abroad on how Ghanaian and African American collaboration can transform Ghanas political economy and build an African success story. Ghanaian-African American relations have undergone important qualitative shifts over time. During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, underpinned by the economic forces of nascent capitalism, few well-placed Africans had some knowledge of life in the Americas. European colonialism and African study and sojourn in the West nurtured the first ties between ordinary Africans and people of African descent. This blossomed into pan-Africanism. Nkrumah as one of the icons of the movement was able to tap into this in his call to people of African descent in the 1950s and 1960s to relocate to Ghana and assist in the building of a new African nation. Nkrumahs overthrow ended this important experiment. Tourism and homeland repatriation have taken the forefront in the official Ghanaian position where African Americans are concerned. But today African American
Barbara J. Merz, Lincoln C. Chen, and Peter F. Geithner, eds., Diasporas and Development (Cambridge, MA, 2007). John K. Anarfi, Stephen O. Kwankye and Clement Ahiadeke, Migration, Return and Impact in Ghana: A Comparative Study of Skilled and Unskilled Transnational Migrants, in Manuh, ed, At Home in the World, 225.
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20 links to Ghana are more organic, more personal. Ties of friendship and marriage are what have encouraged many African Americans to settle in Ghana. This is where diaspora and Ghanaian transnationalism have meshed in important ways. As an historian, I have sought to illuminate an important dimension of a shared past which has profound relevance to Ghanaian and African American relations today. Ghanaian transnationals have learned about the history and legacy of slavery in the Americas. Indeed, I teach a core course on slavery and slave trade in Africa and the Americas at Harvard University. The sense of empathy that has developed from this learning experience has opened up dialogue about this painful past. Slavery and slave trade have gained increasing importance as subjects of discussion in Ghana today. This openness and reflexiveness will go a long way in facilitating any Ghanaian vision of a Ghanaian-African American partnership.

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