Intuitively African
Originally written in 2017
Laid out on a hard wooden bench, three black women were fawning over me with fans. I opened my eyes slowly, reluctantly, calculatingly. Where was I?
One woman just smiled, as if reading my thoughts, she whispered, “looks like you found out you’re Ghanian today.”
2009
Rewind. As a nineteen year old sophomore at Maryland, I had embarked on one of those quintessential life changing sojourns that is SAS, although it’s actually Semester at Sea. In the year following the onset of recession, we had the smallest cohort in years (something around 1K students from around the world, but mainly the States), and I was the second youngest on the ship. Our itinerary included eleven countries (mine was twelve as I did a hop over) and four were African: Morocco, Ghana, South Africa & Mauritius.
Ghana was my first sub-saharan destination, so I did my best to get as involved as possible. Rotary Club, volunteering in an orphanage, canopy walking in Kakum National Park, and significant slave trade locations. It was at Elmina Castle where things got interesting.
The fifteenth century Portuguese slave castle that is Elmina has been preserved over time by the government of Ghana and is now a UNESCO site (shocker). With that designation, you know the tourists started to really flock; and if that didn’t do it, President Obama’s visit for sure did. Thus, it was a hot & clammy morning when a group of us took a bus from our ship to visit both Elmina and Cape Coast castles.
We passed long stretches of road where women were carrying massive buckets of all-the-things on their well-balanced heads, kids running wild, men outfitting their fishing boats, men hanging out, men laughing, men everywhere basically. The driver parked and roughly twenty of us disembarked to grab our entrance tickets to this second castle in the hottest part of the afternoon. Seeing Cape Coast castle was fascinating from a nerdy perspective of history & anthropology. I’ve always been interested in the diasporas of people, whether forced or otherwise. Cape Coast was simply that for me — a historical perspective.
However, something in me stirred while I was walking about Elmina. I lazily ended up at the back of the group, slow and groggy. Dizzy and slightly short of breath. We entered rooms (not bigger than my closet in the house I grew up in) that housed 20+ people in the 1400s, chained to the cement ground, suffering the slime of the heat & smell of the human wastes that simply created new levels of ground over time. We saw the door of no return, where slaves would step out from and onto a slave-trade ship, never to see their home or families again. For some reason, this time, I couldn’t quite take it.
And then I woke up to women fanning my sweat bulleted head.
2014
Somewhere in the middle of 2014, my Mom became low key yet medium key, but actually high key obsessed with ancestral lineages. She was able to get damn near back to the year 900 and trace some well known historical figures in time to her surname. Super wavy. She too tried to get some lineage from my father’s side, but it was difficult. The record keeping of the British is excellent and almost anything can be traced as far back as you take it; if one is white. If your family is black and slavery was in their past, it’s likely that the record keeping was more along these lines:
Boy, black, 12
Female, black, 32
Essentially, the first census to list black people by name was in 1870. Not very far back when you consider the USA was established forreal forreal in 1776.
Enter the good old DNA test from ancestry.com. The parental unit both took the swab tests and Mom waited impatiently for their results. Lightly shocking was Mom’s 51% English heritage and not her 100% Irish heritage that she’d been raised to believe (big deal to any Irish joint)! More shocking, for me more than my Dad, was that we were finally able to view his roots. Beyond Brooklyn, beyond Virginia, beyond Barbados. But we, mainly I, could actually see where an entire half of my bloodline emanated from in Africa. A place and name I had never truly considered my own because so many generations were in between the departure from Africa to the inevitable USA, that I’ve simply always thought of myself as my parents’ biracial American child. Not much more to it than that. Then I saw his percentages of Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, & Cote d’Voire. A nomadic African diasporic lineage, as I’d been surreptitiously foretold.
Ghana remains one of those few countries that made a genuine impact on me, on my identity, which I’d thought of as solidified up to that naive point. I’m so proud to carry the strength, openness, stoicism, & resourcefulness of both the druidic Celts & Yorubic West Africans. #blezzed.
