Slave Trade: Africa’s Enduring Legacy and Ghana’s Year of Return.
Every 12 months effectively sees the end of a timeline and the beginning of another, and 2019 began like those before it. Same actors, privileged to make it through, most of them with an adjusted set of new year resolutions. Can you still remember yours? I hope you have kept them all... or at least some.
Personally, I don’t do resolutions. I prefer a theme. Why? Because I think resolutions are not stainable goals.
A theme might be a single word — a verb, a noun, or an adjective. Like “Commit,” “growth,” “healthy” “invest,” “help,” “kindness,” and “gratitude.”
Mine this year? “Resilience.”
So, in January, Inspired by President Nana Akufo-Addo, Ghana kicked off with a purpose, a cause, and a theme – Return.
Ghana tagged 2019, “Year of Return.”
This initiative is to commemorate 400 years since the first enslaved Africans arrived the United States.
The government has been running a massive marketing campaign targeting African Americans and the diaspora, and various events have been arranged. The focus has been on memorializing the liberation from slavery. But it has also served as a marketing exercise to popularize Ghana as a tourism destination with Trans-Atlantic trade appeal.
As a Nigerian, Ghana is like, that not-so-distant single lady, a neighbor of mine I have never visited after many failed promises. We only get cordial when we meet ‘abroad’, just like that one time I visited Ethiopia for the Africa Trade Forum in 2011 and made friends with a few Ghanaian journalists and can’t remember the last time we said “hi” to each other via email or Facebook.
The number of African countries I have visited are quite few and disappointingly, so. I almost visited Rwanda in 2018 and nearly traveled to Botswana for the Africa Public Relations conference this year.
Let’s me also add that I have been to Benin Republic at the Seme border. One leg in Nigeria and the other in foreign land, trying to buy roasted corn from a vendor.
And if 2019 is indeed is the year, just the way Ghana has themed it, then I need to really return to Benin Republic, a place I have slightly visited.
A visit that changed everything
To put it all in perspective, Slavery didn’t actually start as a visit. It was already present in Africa before the slave trades and in fact continues, in some parts of the continent, to the present day.
Europe experienced slavery as well. The Roman Empire was in fact a slave society. However, by 1400 slavery had long disappeared from Europe, which motivated the European search for a supply of forced labor in the African continent and this led to a visit that changed everything.
African slaves were collected by kidnapping by other 3 Africans or as the result of local wars among Africans.
The slave trades out of Africa represent one of the most significant forced migration experiences in history. Over the five centuries running from 1400 to 1900, it encompassed four distinct waves: the trans-Saharan, Indian Ocean, Red Sea, and transatlantic slave trades.
During the period between the late 1600s and early 1800s, millions of Africans were enslaved and placed on slave ships headed to the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean. This treacherous voyage from Africa to America could take from three weeks to three months. Many died at sea before reaching the distant land.
The last one was by far the most significant in terms of volume and duration: over the 1529-1850 period over 12 million Africans were embarked, mostly along the coasts of West Africa, and forced to undertake the Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean.
The peak was reached between 1780 and 1790, with 80,000 slaves per year being transported, but the traffic remained very intense during the nineteenth century, when between 3 and 4 million people were embarked.
You would be hard pressed to find any positive outcomes concerning the slave trade in Africa. The western portion of the continent was ravaged by Europeans eager to find a labor force that would assist them in acquiring more wealth and resources. The effects were far-reaching and devastating.
The male population of Africa was hit the hardest. Statistics claim that two-thirds of the slaves brought to the New World were male. This forced removal of such a large number of males created a demographic disaster and recovery starts with discovery and return.
•The Return – Made in Ghana for Africa.
Ghana – known then as Gold Coast – was a major hub in the transatlantic slave trade. It saw an estimated 77 million African people shipped off to the Caribbean and the Americas.
As part of a year-long campaign, 200 African-American and African-Caribbean people who live in Ghana will be granted citizenship.
One big-name recent returnee is wrestling champion Kofi Kingston, the first African-born wrestler to win the World Wrestling Entertainment’s (WWE) top prize. Kingston was born in Kumasi, in Ghana’s Ashanti region and moved to the US at age two. He came home in May 2019, accompanied by his mother.
In 2007, in its 50th year of independence, the government initiated the Joseph Project to commemorate 200 years since the abolition of slavery and to encourage Africans abroad to return.
Similar to Israel’s policy of reaching out to Jews across Europe and beyond following the Holocaust, the Joseph Project is named for the Biblical Joseph who was sold into slavery in Egypt but would later reunite with his family and rule Egypt.
African Americans, in particular, have been tracing their ancestries for decades. In recent years, increasing numbers have used DNA testing to trace their ancestry and have made spiritual pilgrimages to the countries of origin. Some have even taken up citizenship of these countries.
Ghana saw a steady inflow of visiting international stars with Ghanaian heritage in December 2018. Hollywood actors Boris Kodjoe, Michael Jai White, Djimon Hounsou, Anthony Anderson, Jidenna and German national team and Bayern Munich defender Jerome Boateng were among them.
A Pan-African Festival of arts and culture took place countrywide in July 2019 as part of the 'Year of Return' campaign. It explored the journey the slave ancestors took from Ghana to the plantations abroad and culminated in a ceremony of 'healing and atonement' on August 1st 2019, the day descendants of slaves commemorate as Emancipation Day.
Authorities say the campaign is expected to attract 500,000 visitors as Ghana remains one of many homes to the global African family.
The Year of Return campaign hopes to capitalize on these links to boost Ghana’s tourism industry. The sector contributed 5.5% to GDP in 2018, coming fourth after gold, cocoa and oil in terms of foreign exchange generation for the country.
But there’s a great deal of room for growth. The industry saw significant growth starting in the 1980s. This was as a result of a structural adjustment programme, agreed to with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which made tourism a priority industry. As a result, a regulatory framework and private sector involvement was developed.
In its latest tourism drive as part of the Year of Return Ghana has put in place a programme that incentivizes diaspora returnees. It has waived some visa requirements and passed amendments to a 2002 law that permits people of African origin to apply for a right to stay indefinitely in Ghana.
For centuries, like elsewhere in parts of the continent, Africans walked through the infamous 'Door of No Return’ at the Cape Coast Castle directly into slave ships to the US, Latin America and the Caribbean.
In 1957, Ghana’s first president, invited Civil Rights leaders, Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr. to Ghana’s Independence Day celebration as a gesture of our collective fate in the continent’s liberation and liberation of all Black people around the world.
Today, more than ever, it is important to reflect on the extraordinary achievements and contributions Africans in the diaspora made to the lives of the Americans.
In fact, the U.S. had made efforts of recognition in this regard.
In 2017, Congress passed the 400 Years of African-American History Commission Act which set up a provision history commission to carry out and provide funding for activities marking the 400th anniversary of the “arrival of Africans in the English colonies at Point Comfort, Virginia, in 1619.”
400 years gone and the homecoming revolution made in Ghana is gaining momentum.
•Welcome Home.
East or West... Home is Best and with money in your pocket, Africa is home (actually, with money in your pocket, anywhere is home).
In spite of ‘what’s left’ of Africa, amidst boundless potential is the option to ‘runaway’ knowing that present day life is a cliché with images of “the grass looking greener on the other side” even though more often than not, it is actually greener (topic for another day).
For African Americans in the U.S. who have grown accustomed to the infrastructure, my worry is that Ghana is unlikely to match it.
Those who want to return will need to prepare. It is very frustrating to get used to a certain system and certain structures being in place and to come home and not have the same thing in place for you to function.
Visitor should return without preconceptions and hope to be pleasantly surprised by the country she has heard so much about.
Already, the organizers of the 'Year of Return, Ghana 2019' didn’t have to search hard for the ideal campaign song. The track by muscian Osibisa is on the playlist of every Ghanaian who has ever ventured away from home. "Come on back when you are ready to know. You are always welcome home. Welcome home."
There certainly are positive aspects to the “Year of Return” and the marketing activities that are being used to draw the world’s attention to Ghana as the home for the African diaspora.
Firstly, it is likely to put the country in better position on the world tourism ladder in terms of popularity. The “Year of Return” as a brand is likely to have a positive impact on the country’s image and its marketability. Ghana holds a special place in the dark history of the slave trade. It was one of the key departure points in Africa at the height of the trade.
The year-long event is being marked by various marketing activities both locally and internationally. Various platforms are being used including social media, traditional media as well as trade fairs and shows.
Efforts include co-opting traditional authorities as well as local and international celebrities as part of the campaign. These include Idris Elba, Boris Kodjoe, Naomi Campbell, and over 30 Ghanaian celebrities.
The hope is that the campaign will increase tourism numbers, and that the “Year of Return” will have longer term consequences too. This could be in the form of investments as the government is encouraging African Americans to invest in various sectors of the economy, particularly the service industry.
But some school of thought feel there could also be possible negative ramifications if foreign firms move in and invest aggressively, crowding out small and medium scale businesses, meaning it’s important that domestic firms are supported while the entry and operations of foreign firms in Ghana is controlled.
The bigger lesson is than leader must tackle the root causes of poverty, instability and double up on sustainable development in such a way that the people can return home, stay at home and feel at home.
As for those of us (both the leaders and the led) who have been home all our lives, I salute our collective resilience and shared optimism but we also need to return ‘home’ more often.
Africa’s return to innocence is a return to inner sense.
