A is for Africa, B is for Belonging

I once wondered how it would feel to arrive back in Anomabu (home of Aggrey and Robert Gardiner) and be referred to simply as Kodwo’s wife, rather than as the American, wife of ... For I am black, 12 years married, dress in the traditional Ghanaian ‘cloth’, speak a bit of the Fanto language, as a type, have features indistinguishable from my in-laws, have lived and worked for eight years in West and East Africa. Politically, I am firmly aligned with those working towards a genuine economic and political liberation of Black Africa. Nevertheless, for the likes of me in Africa, ‘Black’ does not yet fully mean ‘belonging’. I’m not sure I understand all the implications of this for the Black or for Africa. During a recent, five-week home-leave in Ghana from Switzerland I thought about it a little in between talking with others of my kind in my kind of dilemma : a being poised between two worlds. Observing trends in Ghana and reflecting on life as I experienced it, I have come to some tentative statements which may interest persons for whom the question of Blacks living in Africa is of any import. The following three conclusions are tentative, as neither Blacks nor Africans claim to have found final answers. They are that: (a) black tourism is a development worthy of consideration for its potential impact on shaping Black/African relationships of the future; (b) for the ‘non-transient’, to discover that the much heralded concept of the African extended family does not yet extend to him is to really begin to make progress in living in Africa; (c) but more positive: because the Black approaches the African not as an inferior, a rival, a subject for exploitation, but as a brother (with all the psychological connotations this presupposes) and he approaches Africa with a sense of belonging, there is the potentiality for working together toward a common good, irrespective of the past.