Let me ask you a question, not as President, but as a student of history. Have you ever wondered why the story of Ghana never included the story of the Diaspora? When telling the story of Ghana, many are inclined to begin in 1821, with the formation of the British-ruled Gold Coast Colony.
But that’s inaccurate, because the collective story of our people, the many ethnic groups that populate this country, Ghana, predates the existence of any colony on this African continent. Similarly, when speaking of the transatlantic slave trade, specifically the atrocities that took place on this soil, many are inclined to end our story on the shores of this nation, where our ancestors, and I do mean that word literally, because they were our blood and bone that were forced onto ships and transported across the Atlantic.
But why do these events that follow cease to be part of Ghana’s story also? Between the 16th and 19th centuries, nearly 13 million African men, women, and children were captured and transported on ships through the Middle Passage.
Over two million of them died, some because of the harsh conditions, and others because of disease. But there were also those who chose to end it all by jumping overboard. And there were also the ships that sank in storms on the Atlantic, taking with them our forebears, who were shackled and chained, limb to limb, turning the Gulf of Guinea and the waters of the Atlantic beyond it into a graveyard of our ancestors.
Ghana contains more slave forts and castles than any other nation on the African continent. Indeed, over 70 of them, with many still intact, but there are others that lie in ruins today. People who were captured in other areas of the sub-region were marched on foot to one of the forts or castles on Ghana’s coast where they were kept, usually in dungeons, until it was time for them to be loaded as cargo onto ships.
Given all this, it would be safe to assume that a significant percentage of the enslaved people, even if they did not originate from the area that is now called Ghana, passed through it on their way to the slave destinations. What followed for each and every one of those individuals is as much a part of Ghana’s story as what followed for us who remain firmly rooted here on our soil, but were subjugated and rendered second-class citizens nonetheless through colonization. As Kendrick says, bear with me for a second and let me put you on the game.
The Portuguese were the first Europeans to land on our shores. They began the practice of extraction of gold, copper, ivory, chili peppers, and then eventually they moved on to the extraction of human beings. It was the Portuguese who gave the river Volta its name.
Volta in Portuguese means to return. They used the river Volta as a kind of boundary. It was the farthest they could travel.
Once there, they had to turn around and begin their return. The Portuguese, who were superb shipwrights and navigators, therefore called “Volta do Mar,” which literally translates as return from the sea, but can also be taken as a turn of the sea. With “Volta do Mar”, they reversed the course of their ships, using the winds from the currents created by the North Atlantic to carry them faster without encountering rough waters.
The point at which the river Volta empties into the Gulf of Guinea is part of the Atlantic Ocean. It is called the estuary of the Volta at Addao Front. For those of you who have not yet had the pleasure of visiting Ada, it is a small coastal town a little over 100 kilometers away from Accra.
I’ve spent some of my most peaceful moments there. I’ve enjoyed the tranquil river until where it meets the choppy, aggressive waters of the Atlantic Ocean. For years, I did not know the history of these two bodies of water.
When I found out, I was stunned. And every time I think about it, I’m still shaken by the cruel irony that even as our people who were enslaved were being forced to walk through the door of no return, their captors had already ensured their own safe return and even memorialized their method of achieving it by lending its name to a river. A Guinean-American author, Yaa Gyasi, wrote in her novel, Homegoing, We believe the one who has power is the one who gets to write the story.
So when you study history, you must ask yourself, whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice can come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too as part of the narrative. By finding and owning the stories of our past, the ones that have been suppressed, we’re able to truly know ourselves. And with that knowledge of self comes the power to write ourselves truthfully, respectfully into not only our future, but the future of all humanity.
And that is why we are gathered here today at this diaspora summit. To begin the process of reclamation in earnest. To begin the process of writing our own story and moving full steam ahead.
That’s right, we’re reclaiming everything that was ours. Your Excellency Faure Gnassingbé, Chairman of the Council of the Republic of Togo. Your Royal Majesties, our traditional leaders, Chairman of the Council of State.
Our senior government officials, members of the diplomatic corps. Our brothers and sisters from our 17th region, the African diaspora. I say a very warm welcome to you.
Welcome home. This is your home. The reason I believe it is important that we begin to consciously carry the story of the diaspora as part and parcel of Ghana’s story.
Is because what divides us ultimately, what denies us the ability to be whole, is that division. And that’s precisely why it’s the perfect way to conquer. We have to stop drawing those lines of demarcation that say, I end here and you begin there.
I look into the audience and I can see myself in so many of your faces. And I’m sure that I’ll be able to see my children in the faces of your children. And so how can I turn my back on the fact that we are undeniably, inextricably part of each other.
And yet, we have been divided with artificial borders of colonialism that split ethnic homelands right down the middle. With half of our communities being ruled by one European country and the other half being ruled by another. And with the labeling of our ethnicity in a colony as intellectual and worthy of education, while another ethnicity was said to be inherently martial and thus intellectually inferior.
We’ve been divided by the manufacturing of coups, armed conflicts, anti-poverty programs that somehow never eradicate poverty. By the selective broadcast of stereotypes, the systemic war of images waged against us. Images meant to foster fear and engender self-hatred and portrayal of Africans as primitive savages.
Whose low cognitive ability makes them incapable of self-determination. And black people in the Americas as lazy, drunk adults and criminally inclined. And their tool is the insular institutionalization of colorism.
They believe that anything black is negative or inferior. And the proximity to whiteness is more desirable. It is reflected in every aspect of our lives.
And I say us because colonization did not leave us unscathed to fight the opposite. In English, everything negative and evil is black. In Spanish, “la negra” means black woman.
“Tener la negra” means to have bad luck. Or to be jinxed. A once popular French expression that went out of vogue but has recently been making a comeback.
“Es trabajar con un negro. Trabajar con un negro.” Which means to work like a slave.
And it’s often also translated with the word slave being replaced by a more offensive racial slur. But anything in this life once stripped of its power will no longer work. And that is true of slurs. It is true of stories. Especially ones that are complete fabrications. Let’s take the narrative of those who oppressed us and work it.
In fact, let’s take their entire modus operandi and flip it and reverse it. So I urge you, my brothers and sisters, let’s be more intentional about our unity than they were about our division. Your Excellencies, distinguished guests, our brothers and sisters from the 17th region of Ghana.
It will not be a difficult goal to achieve. No matter how we’ve been divided, we’ve always tried to find our way back to one another. Africans in the diaspora whose forebears were enslaved have kept us in their rhythms.
The music they play, the dances, the cadence of their speech, and even the language. The Gulla Geechee people of the United States still count using Fulani words instead of numerals. Yoruba language is spoken in Venezuela, in Cuba, in Brazil, Haiti, and Trinidad and Tobago.
Likewise, a Creole offspring of Akan is spoken by the Africans, the Maroons, in Jamaica and in Suriname. And Africa remains in our food. American gumbo and Brazilian karuru bear a strong resemblance to Ghanaian okro stew.
All three use okro, also known as okra, which is native to the African continent and was transported to the New World on slave ships. As were cow peas. We call it gobe here in Ghana for those of you try and eat gobe before you go back.
Another food item that is native to Africa, which would explain why some variations of Hopping John, a dish from the Gula Geechee people, are so reminiscent of the Ghanaian waakye. Try to eat waakye too before you go. The ways in which Africa has remained at the heart of its diaspora are far-reaching, well beyond food and music.
Perhaps the most important way is in the cultural elements that are taught to our children. Ensuring the cord that has tethered these diasporan communities to the African continent all these centuries remains unbroken. There are the Kweku Anase folktales that so many of us in this room grew up hearing and reading, and that have spread all over the world to places too numerous to mention.
Just like the popular children’s call and response folk song that I’m sure most of you are familiar with. “Kyekye kule. Kyekye kofi sa”.
“Kofi sa langa. Kakati langa. Kum adede. Kum adede. Kyekye kule. Kyekye kule.”
“Kofi sa langa. Kofi sa langa. Lalati langa.”
Kum adede. Kum adede. Thank you.
Ghana’s first president, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, said, and that quote has been shown here, “I’m not African because I was born in Africa, but because Africa was born in me”. Though I have no proof, I suspect that this sentiment was heavily influenced by his time in America, where he completed his undergraduate studies at Lincoln University and his graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He was also a frequent visitor to Harlem, and this was in the late 1930s and 1940s, at a time when most Ghanaian intellectuals were completing their higher education in European universities.
During his eight years in the United States, Nkrumah was able to experience at first hand racism and the Jim Crow laws. Nkrumah was already a believer in Pan-Africanism before he went to the United States. He was a huge fan of Marcus Garvey, whose Black Star Line was an attempt to facilitate movement between North America and Africa, particularly Liberia, where free blacks had been emigrating since the 1820s.
The Black Star, which is featured prominently on Ghana’s flag, has come to be a defining part of our national identity. It underscored his rallying cry, which was the unity of all African peoples. He wanted the story of the diaspora and the stories of all the other indigenous people who had been colonized on the African continent to be a part of our national story.
So much so that at the hour of Ghana’s independence, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah famously proclaimed that the “independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent.” It was a heady and ambitious statement, and the years that followed were equally as heady and ambitious, full of growth, infrastructural development, and the building of alliances between other newly independent African nations. There was a sense of hope.
No, it was more than that. It was an intoxicating feeling of endless possibilities. It was a pure, perhaps naive, belief that we could attain our own modern-day version of the glory that our forebears, like Shaka de Zulu and Mansa Musa, had, and that we could build our nation-states to be as exemplary as the Mweni Mutepa Empire, Songhai, Mali, and the Ghana Empires that had existed before.
And then came the Coup d’ etats , many inspired by the imperial nations, not just in Ghana but in most of the other nations that had newly gained independence. And then came even more Coup d’ etats one after the other, following by the imprisonment and exile of our religious leaders. We now know as Ghanaians, as author Ama Ataa Aidoo wrote, that there are powerful forces undermining our progress in Africa.
We suffered decades of brain drain that emptied our sizable portion of the continent’s population, adding scores of exiles to the diaspora. And our nations themselves were surviving but barely on the remittances that those individuals sent home. It will surprise you to know, in 1990, the total number of Africans who had migrated voluntarily to the United States eclipsed the total number who had been brought as enslaved people to an utterly, living on an utterly devastated continent.
When it comes to reparative justice, we ask what is just. We are at a very pivotal place in our journey. There are those who will have us go backward, not just one or two steps, as if that would not be bad enough.
They want us to go all the way back. They want us to develop some sort of amnesia about the blood that was spilled, the lives that were lost, and the years that were sacrificed in order to fight for our freedom. We are at a place in our journey where we do not have the luxury of forgetting.
When government officials can so easily use the words like garbage and filth to describe our kith and kin. When they can refer to our countries as shitholes, when they can indiscriminately strip people who look like us of citizenship that they have earned, we do not have the luxury of forgetting or of either excusing the racist dog whistles or explaining the overtly discriminatory and divisive statements that are made daily to our hearing.
This is precisely the time when we must advance and begin the process of reclamation. This is precisely the time when we must speak loudly and clearly, naming what it is we have lost as well as what it is we hope to gain.
Excellency Mian Amor-Motley, Prime Minister of Barbados, a great African sister, said in a lecture at the London School of Economics, “The conspiracy of silence has diminished the horror of what our people faced”. This year at the UN General Assembly, I self-noticed that Ghana will move a motion next year to recognize the transatlantic slave trade as the greatest crime against humanity. I know this motion will enjoy the utmost support from the entire African continent and the diaspora.
Africa has suffered slavery, colonialism, genocide and apartheid. We demand acknowledgement of these crimes against humanity. We demand the establishment of legal, institutional and international mechanisms to advance reparative justice.
Reparations must include tangible measures such as debt cancellation, monetary compensation, return of stolen artifacts, institutional reform and transformative economic redress in the global economic system. Beyond the material loss that Africa suffered are also the emotional costs to assess. According to the Oxford Dictionary, epigenetics is the study of changes in organisms that are caused by the modification of gene expression rather than the alteration of the genetic code itself.
And studies have shown that trauma can be passed down transgenerationally through epigenetics. And so imagine then the various traumas that the people of African descent have faced. Traumas that are being passed down from one generation onto the other.
Traumas from yesteryears coupled with traumas of today and the injustices that we are currently facing. What impact does that have on our health? What impact does that have on the health of our children? And most importantly, how do we heal from that trauma? Ghanaian-British actress-writer Michaela Coel wrote, “We can put fear of the future in front of us to block us or put it behind us to drive us forward.” As we debate all these questions and ideas, bear in mind that the future is upon us and that the future is African.
And like I said at the UN, let me say it louder one more time for those in the back. The future is African. We hold in our hands the power to change the circumstances of our past.
But we must be more intentional about our unity than those who oppressed us were about our division. And from the looks of this gathering, I can feel it, that we are more united than ever. And with a united Africa and diaspora, there is nothing we cannot achieve.
And thank you. I wish you fruitful deliberations. And it’s my honor and privilege to declare the Diaspora Summit 2025 duly opened.
Thank you.
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