In the past forty years, African Americans have increasingly traveled to Africa in order to stand on the grounds that their ancestors were stolen from – actively passing through a door that slave traders vowed they would never return. On Friday and Saturday in Accra, throngs of Ghanaians enthusiastically received President Obama and his family to their country as they followed in the footsteps of so many African American families before them in returning to their perceived homeland. And while swarming crowds have followed Obama at almost every stop on his international travels, it was his reception in Ghana that speaks to the ways in which Obama’s “Yes We Can” optimism may usher in a sea change in U.S.-African relations.
Over the past forty years, the relationship between Black Americans and the people of Africa has decreased in its political significance. While the cultural ties to Africa are surely in place, as evidenced in the popularity of Afrocentric traditions such as Kwanzaa and the uptick in cultural heritage tourism to Africa’s slave castles, the Pan-African call for global black unity so popular in the 1960s has fallen out of favor. Once a continent that served to empower black leaders in the United States with models for their own civil rights campaigns, Africa today is far less politically relevant in African American communities. When African Americans managed to roll back segregation, advocate for affirmative action, and carve out spaces in the American political landscape, black citizens struggling in nations ravaged by centuries of colonialism found their success stalled. For blacks in America who advanced so rapidly at home, the notion that true success could only be measured in terms of global black liberation undermined their own advances.
As a result, African American politics turned inward. Success in Africa was no longer part in parcel with success at home. Whereas black leaders once prioritized the black struggle in the Third World, America’s new black politics has been far more focused on stamping out vestiges of discrimination in the United States. Africa, rather than imagined as a place full of black brothers and sisters in arms, has slowly transformed into a place in black history only revisited in order to remind African Americans of their strength and mettle in the face of brutal slave conditions and historic oppression.
Standing on the grounds of their imagined homeland, African Americans who visit Ghana frequently evoke their blackness as the source of strength that has enabled them to survive the Middle Passage, contend with a shipwrecked identity in America, overcome discrimination, and
ultimately return to Africa. The itineraries sold to black church groups, sororities, and other travelers who wish to see the land of their ancestors, however, prioritize histories of traditional African greatness, slavery, and African intellectuals at the expense of contemporary narratives of everyday Ghanaian struggle. Because of this avoidance of political engagement, a distance has grown between Ghanaians and black tourists. Today, black tourists are greeted with the term “obruni” or “white man”. Those who were once brothers and sisters are now black people scattered throughout the diaspora living vastly different lives, their historic alliances dissipated.
On Friday, however, President Obama and his family made a crucial step in restoring the kinship bonds of blackness throughout the world by engaging not only with historic Africa, but with contemporary Africa and the people struggling to survive there. Though Obama delivered a relatively predictable, policy-focused call for self-reliance and democracy in Africa, the mere presence of a black U.S. president on Ghanaian soil, speaking to Ghanaian people about Ghanaian problems, marks a welcome rekindling of discourse between blacks throughout the diaspora. As Obama declared, “I do not see the countries and peoples of Africa as a world apart; I see Africa as a fundamental part of our interconnected world … as partners with America on behalf of the future we want for all of our children. That partnership must be grounded in mutual responsibility and mutual respect.”
In coming to Africa, the Obama family likely grappled with their own identities as black Americans. But beyond those moments of inward reflection at the slave castles, President Obama took the crucial step of explaining to Ghana, and all of Africa, that he believes that success in Africa is an essential part of ensuring the success of blacks around the world. Yes, the Obamas spent time at a slave castle, mourned their history of oppression, and gained strength from their return, but they also engaged with the people of Ghana in a way that assured Africans of their visibility in American communities, both black and white.
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