Ghana welcomes U.S. blacks
[] 5/21/2006
ACCRA, Ghana // Ever since Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, invited his classmates from Pennsylvania's Lincoln University to come home with him to help build Africa, African-Americans have been coming to Ghana to visit, work, volunteer, invest or live in what has become the quintessential African homeland.
W.E.B. Du Bois lived here. So did Maya Angelou. Today the country, once at the heart of Africa's slave-trading routes, has the largest community of African-Americans in West Africa, most of whom have come looking for their roots and a sense of purpose.
Now Ghana, a poor country eager for more U.S. tourists, donors and investors, is about to make life easier for its black diaspora: It plans to soon offer slave descendants lifetime visas or even dual Ghanaian-U.S. citizenship.
'Who we most want as tourists and investors are our own people who left 200 or 300 years ago,' said Jake Otanka Obetsebi-Lamptey, the country's tourism chief, whose department last month was renamed the Ministry for Tourism and Diasporan Relations. 'It's not just about blood ties. It's good economic sense.'
Lifetime visas should be easy for regular visitors to get. But the new passports - still awaiting approval in Parliament - won't be handed to just anyone, Obetsebi-Lamptey said. African-Americans eager for formal Ghanaian identity will have to commit to invest, help develop or live in Ghana because 'citizenship carries some responsibility,' he said.
Ghana does not offer particular tax breaks for investors from the diaspora. But it is eager for help from its relations abroad, be it regular visits from American tourists, donations to development projects or investment in job-creating enterprises it desperately needs, officials said.
Winning such commitment should not be much of a problem if the existing African-American community, which the U.S. Embassy estimates at fewer than 5,000 people, is an indication.
Valerie Papaya Mann, president of the 100-member African American Association of Ghana, for instance, put together $10,000 in donations from Americans to build toilets and a cafeteria for a school in a rural region she has adopted. Villagers in the area have declared the former Washington AIDS expert, who has lived in Ghana three years, their 'queen mother of development' and given her a traditional Ghanaian royal name: Nana Ama Jygnewa.
Naima Mateen and her husband, Ron Pickings, came to Ghana four years ago, mainly because 'my husband wanted to make a difference,' Mateen said. The couple, formerly a university admissions director and a corporate accountant in Ohio, sell solar ovens in the hills an hour's drive from Accra, the capital.
For them, as for many African-American immigrants, adjusting to Ghana has been tough.
'In the U.S., I was very much aware of my African-ness, of being different. I came here thinking I was really in touch with my African-ness,' said Mateen, who now wears a traditional Ghanaian robe and headdress. Instead, 'I found out how much I was in touch with my American-ness.'
Ghanaians, whom she had hoped would greet her as a lost sister, called her obruni, or 'white foreigner,' the term used for any foreigner with a lighter skin tone. Giving up her 'country club lifestyle' for a house in the sticks wasn't easy either.
Mona Boyd, an Arkansas native who moved to Ghana in 1994, also had a rough time at first.
When the former real estate investor opened a tourism agency in Accra, her employees didn't show up when it rained. Other days they insisted they needed time off to attend the funeral of 'my uncle's cousin's best friend.'
'I'm a typical Type A person, and I was so frustrated I was spitting bullets,' she recalled.
But Boyd has settled in. She's learned a little Ewe, the language of her Ghanaian husband, developed a taste for roasted goat and learned to temper her once 'brutal' frankness.
Obetsebi-Lamptey, the tourism minister, said his agency is working to make life easier for Americans coming to Ghana. Next year, to mark the country's 50th anniversary of independence, it hopes to launch a campaign to educate Ghanaians about the country's slave-trading past and about how to treat visitors.
He wants Ghanaians to stop referring to African-Americans as obruni, for instance, and instead call them awkwaaba anyemi, which roughly means 'welcome brother [or sister].'
'They come here, and the first thing they're called is 'stranger,'' he said. 'It's a real slap in the face. We want them to be called 'kin.''
Laurie Goering writes for the Chicago Tribune.
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