The Quest for Cleanliness in Ghana

Osu, Accra’s commercial hub, is often called the “Times Square of Accra.” As a hub of activity and nightlife, it’s an apt label, but it also resonates in a few other ways —as a hub of poor sanitation and noise.  Instead of being pickpocketed, a night on town in Osu brings the more pressing danger of falling in an open gutter. Taking a tumble in one of Accra’s gutters could be lethal with the possibility of exposure to a variety of vermin and diseases.

Despite the beautiful leafy Cantonments avenues or stately mansions of East Legon, Accra is one of the dirtiest cities in Africa. In 2008, the World Health Organization (WHO) and UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) ranked Ghana the fourth most unsanitary country in Africa and the second dirtiest out of 15 West African countries. More recently, the WHO declared Ghana the 7th dirtiest country in the world. 

Following the floods of June 2015, the city’s beaches were littered with trash. Residents living on the Accra shore will recognize the regular sight of people squatting on the beach to relieve themselves. From dawn to dusk, men urinate on the roadside in plain view of traffic. I, myself, had the extremely unfortunate (and somewhat traumatic experience) of witnessing someone defecate in front of me on a city street.  

Not only does poor sanitation affect health, but it also affects the national economy. Aside from obvious effects on tourism, poor sanitation reduces Ghana’s capacity to export goods. Products made in Ghana often find it difficult to enter EU markets because of a failure to meet minimum quality assurance standards and requirements. Many Ghanaian exports are frequently labeled as “unsanitary” or “uncompetitive.” With a high import-export ratio, Ghanaian citizens – quite literally  – suffer the price. Unable to export their own goods and forced to import many commodities, the cost of living in Accra is quickly rising while local salaries are unable to keep pace.

An article written by staff at Brand Ghana, a non-partisan organization established under the Atta Mills administration, notes the following:

Charity, they say, begins at home and cleanliness is next to godliness. While public officials fail in discharging their duties, the evolving Ghanaian drop-as-you-go attitude has exasperated the already nauseating level of dirt in the city. We seem to lose all sense of the virtue of keeping our surroundings clean as we litter the streets without a wince. The sense of community and self-help spirit has given way to an I-don’t-care spirit. This problem goes beyond the unavailability of trash cans. We simply lack the mind-set of carrying our trash along till we find the next receptacle.

A visit to the University of Ghana Campus for example is enough to buttress this point. Students who are expected to know better about the implications of unsanitary conditions drop litter anywhere even in the full glare of available trash cans. We throw rubbish anywhere, turn around and make all the noise that someone needed to clean up Accra. Really? Truly, the core problem of our dirty and unkempt city environment is behavioural constraints. We cannot run away from this under any pretexts.

With these conditions, it is no surprise that Ghana has experienced cholera outbreaks roughly every 5 years since the 1970s. In 2014, Ghana experienced its severest cholera epidemic in three decades, registering 28,975 cases and 243 deaths. In 2015, over 6,000 cases have been reported. Cholera is an easily preventable disease if proper sanitation practices are observed.

Since November 2014, the first Saturday of every month in Ghana has been marked as National Sanitation Day, but this call to action (in my view) appears to be poorly respected. Ghana could learn from the example of The Gambia and Rwanda where respect for sanitation is viewed as a civic duty.

In The Gambia, the government has established the practice of “Set Settal” (also known as “Clean the Nation”).  Each Saturday, between 9am and 1pm, all activities are halted as people are encouraged to clean trash around their compounds and public areas. Set Settal is taken so seriously that you cannot drive between 9am – 1pm without risking arrest. Originally a monthly event, Set Settal is now bi-monthly.

Rwanda is a notoriously clean African country. Kigali, its capital, is regularly ranked as “Africa’s cleanest city.” To those who have visited the Land of a Thousands Hills, the label should come as no surprise. Enter Kigali airport with a plastic bag and you’ll soon find yourself slapped with a nasty fine; plastic bags are banned across the country. Rwandans practice “Umuganda,” which roughly translates to “working together." Since the 1990s, Rwandan citizens have participated in Umuganda on the last Saturday of every month when they come together to clean and maintain the community. Activities include everything from basic cleaning to weeding and planting as well as building structures like homes and bridges. During the Umuganda hours, circulation of traffic is stopped for non-essential movement. Close to 80 percent of Rwandans take part in monthly community work.

That being said, environmental cleanliness is admittedly the joint responsibility of government and citizens. On the government-side, poor sanitation is partially due to low levels of access to toilet facilities. Across Ghana, access to toilets has only risen from 6 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2013. According to Julis Debrah, former Minister for Local Government and Rural Development, 5 percent of urban dwellers in Ghana patronize public toilets and a whopping 23 percent of the population defecates in the open.

Slow progress is being made to improve access to toilet facilities. In April 2015, the World Bank signed a $4.85 million grant agreement with the Ghana government to provide sustainable toilet facilities in low-income areas of Greater Accra. However, aside from the mere provision of public toilets, the government must enforce residential permits mandating that houses and apartments have washroom facilities. In effort to squeeze a few more cedis from tenants, many landlords have converted household toilets into bedrooms. Such practices cannot continue — building regulations must be enforced and existing units converted to adhere to common standards. Moreover, the nation must address its waste management woes, stemming from poor collection practices and the shrinking available to safe landfill sites. Further reading on Ghana’s waste management triumphs and woes via the Pulitzer Center.

As a country that calls itself the “Gateway to Africa, “ Ghana must take the lead in leading Africa into a century of better sanitation and healthcare.

Historical Amnesia and the Case for Reparations in the 21st Century: The Herero Genocide and Its Afterlives

The following blog post is excerpted from a paper that I wrote during my time at Yale as a final essay for a class on the Rwandan Genocide in Comparative Perspective. The course was taught by phenomenal lecturer David Simon, the Director of Yale's Genocide Studies Program and an expert in the politics of development assistance and post-conflict situations. If you have any interest in reading the essay in full, please reach out via the Contact page on this website. I am publishing this here because of recent reports that German authorities are moving towards recognizing these horrific events as "genocide." Talks with Namibia on a joint declaration about the events of the early 20th century are ongoing.

The Holocaust has been the central preoccupation of fields such as Judaic Studies and Genocide Studies, however our comprehension of how such unspeakable evil came to be is incomplete without an understanding of the atrocities committed in German South West Africa (modern-day Namibia) under the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II at the beginning of the 20th century. As the indigenous Herero tribe attempted to rebel against the German colonial administration’s campaign and oppression, they were met with a brutal response that decimated almost 80% of their population. Although the Holocaust may garner the most attention, the Herero genocide is almost universally acknowledged as first genocide of the 20st century. Moreover, the events of 1904 - 1908 laid the groundwork for many Nazi philosophies and extermination tactics. In 2001, the Herero People’s Reparation Corporation sued the German government and several German companies for $2 billion in reparations. Although the Namibian government and the German government have rejected the legitimacy of this claim, the examination of the nature of the genocide as well as its pernicious legacy in modern Namibian society have important implications about how abuses under the colonial era should be addressed today and the role of reparations as a part of reconciliation. Despite claims that the genocide took place outside of the purview of current international humanitarian law, numerous historical treaties undermine the argument that Germany’s actions did not violate the jurisprudence of the colonial era and a growing contemporary consensus on human rights and post-conflict reparations legitimate the Herero’s right to compensation. 

In the idyllic town of Swakopound, on the coast of Namibia, German and English tourists often frolic on the beach or explore the desert dunes unaware of the mass graveyards that lie forgotten just next to the century-old railroad line.[1] In Namibia, there are no memorials of the victims of the Herero genocide. Rather, there are memorials to the oppressors, the soldiers from the Second Reich who waged a war of annihilation on the Herero people. Despite the lack of acknowledgment of these events, the deliberate nature of the violence is undeniable. Before the war, the Herero population stood at 80,000. By the end of General Adrian Dietrich Lothar von Trotha’s vicious campaign, there were only 15,130 Herero in Namibia.[2] Over 80% of Herero were killed during the genocide and their land was re-distributed among various German settlers by the German government. Initial attempts at extermination took brutal forms such as death by bullets and clubs, hanging, burning of huts and forced starvation or ingestion of poisoned water.[3] However, even after the extermination order was lifted, the Herero continued to be killed in a less conspicuous fashion through de facto concentration camps. The tales of starving Herero who were given smaller rations than prisoners from other communities bear an eerie resemblance to events that would take place only 30 years later in the Holocaust.

In hindsight, the genocide was an easy way to mitigate the overpopulation in Germany’s major cities that created an atmosphere of misery in Deutschland. To alleviate this suffering, the Kaiser’s government encouraged settlement in the German territories of Africa, especially German South West Africa (GWSA). Although indigenous peoples already occupied these territories, the Germans were prepared to take the land by force if necessary. “The issue of who was to own the land created huge tensions between the German settlers and the Africans, but what also began to push the two groups towards conflict was that many settlers were so convinced of their racial supremacy that they began to treat the Africans with impunity.”[4] With no legal resource to fight their abuse and objectification, the Herero began to rebel. While the Germans had legitimate reasons to quell the rebellion, they responded with a disproportionate level of violence. The Herero rebellion finally gave them a pretext to take over the land. Their method of choice would be ethnic cleansing of all Herero, regardless of their level of participation in the rebellion. Correspondence from that era reveals that the merciless nature of the genocide was the explicit design of its architect, General von Trotha. His reputation for cruelty was widely known in the Germany’s other African colonies. “Between 1894 and 1897, von Trotha had been a commander in German East Africa and had forged a reputation for ruthlessness. During the Wahehe uprising, von Trotha had unflinchingly ordered mass hangings and summary executions of prisoners of war. He had burned down entire villages, sometimes with their inhabitants still inside.[5] His reputation for violence would follow him to German South West Africa.  

Von Trotha adopted these same tactics in his war against the Herero. His brutality is unsurprising in light of the fact that he “described [the Herero] in his diary as Unmenschen – non-humans”[6] and wrote that the Herero “nation must vanish from the face of the earth.”[7] At the Waterburg Plateau in northeastern Namibia, the von Trotha-led mass extermination of the Herero began when 50,000 Herero men, women and children retreated from the German army in hopes of escaping the violence. As the Germans encircled their encampment, the Herero’s last attempt at an offensive was met with machine gun fire. The survivors were forced into the desert where they died of thirst or exhaustion.  The Waterburg massacre was followed with an official annihilation order on August 2, 1904 when von Trotha proclaimed his intent to kill all Herero within the territory. Although the Kaiser ordered von Trotha to end the campaign in December 1904, the extermination continued unofficially through the establishment of concentration camps that served as “reservoirs of slave labor”[8] as well as a de-facto hell on earth. The most dreaded concentration camp during this era was Shark Island. It inspired such fear in the Herero that after one prisoner was informed that he was to be sent to the camp, he “fell to the ground, bleeding profusely, having drilled his fingers into his own neck in a desperate attempt to commit suicide.”[9] Gruesome postcards from this period show soldiers at the concentration camp posing with the skulls of dead prisoners. By the end of the genocide in 1907, there would be “one corpse for every 100 meters of railway track where enslaved Hereros were forced to participate in infrastructural projects for the colony.”[10]

From explicit nature of the extermination order, there is no mistaking the intent of the von Trotha's orders. He wanted the Herero dead. The 1948 Convention of Genocide defines genocide as an act “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”  By this definition, the events of 1904 – 1908 constitute genocide. However, many Germans as well as those who oppose the idea of reparations for the Herero claim state that, because the Genocide Convention took place after the Herero Genocide, the acts of the Germans were legal at the time. This stance neglects to acknowledge the stipulations of agreements among Western European states at the turn of the century. “At the signing of the General Act of the Berlin Conference in 1885 [which] formalized the partition of Africa between imperial powers…contracting parties undertook ‘to watch over the preservation of native tribes and to care for the improvement of the conditions of their moral and material well-being, and to help in suppressing slavery.’”  The 1890 Brussels Conference reinforced these views by prohibiting slave trafficking. Furthermore, arguments that the acts of genocide might be permissible because they occurred in the context of war must also be refuted because the 1899 Hague Conference on the Law of War contains language mandating the humane treatment of prisoners of war. Article 7 of the agreement states that “failing a special agreement between the belligerents, prisoners of war shall be treated as regards food, quarters, and clothing, on the same footing as the troops of the Government which has captured them.”  From these three agreements, one can decipher that customary law of the colonial era prohibited slavery and mandated the ethical treatment of Africans.

While some scholars might argue that the Herero Genocide lies outside of the bounds of the Hague Conference because the tribe was not a signatory to the proceedings, the study of the Berlin Conference and the Hague Conference gives strong credence to the idea that an consensus among European states on the treatment of prisoners of war developed pre-genocide, making Germany’s crimes even more reprehensible. Additionally, “these conventions conferred rights on the Hereros through the third-party beneficiary doctrine. The parties to these international agreements intended to confer a distinct set of protections upon indigenous Africans.”  Despite the fact that the term “genocide” may have been an anachronism in 1904, the events of that time period were clearly illegal due to the human rights laws of that period. According to Article 15 of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, “if a crime was criminalized under customary law before [any of these treaties] came into effect, it is not limited by the retrospective nature of the operation of the treaty.”   

Considering that Germany paid reparations to individual Jews as well as Israel after World War II, the concept of reparations is neither unrealistic nor misplaced. If the Germans paid reparations from crimes committed a mere thirty years after the Herero genocide, “what is the legal – or moral – distinction between German genocide directed at Jews and German genocide directed at Africans?”  Reparations for the Herero would be a logical step because the precedent of reparations has been set repeatedly throughout the 20th century. “Germany [has] paid some 103 billion DM to victims of Nazi persecution.”  The United States paid reparations to Japanese-Americans who were placed in internment camps during World War II. In Rwanda, survivors were able to claim compensation against individual perpetrators. “Payment of damages is a symbol of moral condemnation of the abuses that occurred.”  The lapse of time between the genocide and the tribe’s decision to take legal action should not be an impediment to receiving compensation because “if human rights are truly inherent and universal, then they apply not only territorially, but temporally and provide a basis to judge past practices.”  Additionally, in the 2001 UN Articles on the Responsibility for States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, “the state responsible for an internationally wrongful act is under the obligation to make full reparation for the injury caused by it. ‘Injury’ is defined as any damage, material or moral, caused by the act.”  While the Articles state that restitution is the preferred form of reparation, compensation is an acceptable substitute in its absence. 

Was Oscar Wilde right when he said “no man is rich enough to buy back his past” or are reparations capable of repairing some of the damages of the dark side of Namibia’s colonial past? Historical precedent suggests that it may help alleviate old wounds. Reparations are a standard mechanism of making amends for misconduct. In the case of the Herero genocide, this misconduct amounted to genocide, the deliberate killing of an ethnic group. Considering that the Herero genocide laid the foundation for the philosophies underpinning the Holocaust and the Namibian government’s attempts to undermine its legitimacy, reparations would be an effective mechanism for the Herero and Germany to settle their score without engaging the Namibian bureaucracy. Despite the fact that Germany has repeatedly set the precedent of paying reparations for their genocidal acts of the 20th century, they have refused to do so on the grounds that international law in 1904 did not prohibit their acts and because of their substantial development aid contributions for Namibia. However, numerous treaties pre-genocide illuminate European customary law condemning such flagrant abuse of indigenous peoples. Moreover, Namibia’s vast inequality prevents the Herero of reaping the benefits of this aid. 

Morality and a growing international consensus on human rights both compel Germany to shift its position on reparations for the Herero genocide and to make a comprehensive apology that recognizes moral wrongs and legal obligations. 

Recently, the rights of indigenous peoples have risen to the forefront of the international agenda. In 2007, the UN General Assembly adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Article 28 of the documents contains a clause that states that “indigenous peoples have the right to redress, by means that can include restitution, or when then this is not possible, just, fair and equitable compensations, for lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned or otherwise occupied… which have been confiscated… without their free, prior and informed consent.”  In light of the fact that this resolution was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations, a body of which Germany is a member, Germany has a clear diplomatic obligation to provide compensation in order to mitigate the landless status of today’s Herero people. 

[1] Namibia - Genocide and the Second Reich, directed by David Adetayo Olusoga, BBC, 2005, accessed April 28, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4OZ7Xc5pWQ

[2] Allan D. Cooper, "Reparations for the Herero Genocide: Defining the Limits of International Litigation," African Affairs 106, no. 442 (January 2007): 114, accessed April 28, 2013, http://afraf.oxfordjournals.org/content/106/422/113.short.

[3] Jeremy Sarkin, Colonial genocide and reparations claims in the 21st century(Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2008), [Page #], accessed April 28, 2013, http://orbis.library.yale.edu/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=10451248.

[4] Namibia - Genocide and the Second Reich.

[5] David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s forgotten genocide and the colonial roots of Nazism (London, UK: Faber & Faber, Limited, 2010)s, 138.

[6] Olusoga and Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust, 40.

[7] Olusoga and Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust, 40.

[8] Namibia - Genocide and the Second Reich.

[9] Olusoga and Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust, 210.

[10] 100 Years of Silence: The Germans in Namibia, directed by Halfdan Muurholm and Casper Erichsen, 2006, accessed April 28, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3P_gvFVuXA.

Dashiki, a New Trend? Hardly.

This morning, I came across an Elle Canada online article labeling the dashiki “the new kaftan” and lauding it as "the new it-item of note." I laughed. The dashiki is hardly a new trend – roam the streets of Accra or any other major West African city and you’ll be confronted with dashikis in various styles in a rainbow of colors from sunshine yellow to cerulean blue.

Nor is the dashiki “tribal."  Vlisco textile designer Toon van der Manakker designed the iconic motif based on a 19th century Ethiopian noblewoman's tunic. The print was originally known as “Angelina.” While the design is often copied, Vlisco produces the true original.

Production of the "Angelina" fabric in a Vlisco factory. Photo credit to Vlisco. Click through for access to image and history on the Vlisco website. 

While I object to the characterization of the dashiki as a “trend,” I hesitate to call its popularization cultural appropriation, the buzzword du jour. In the vein of Magritte’s treachery of images, African fabric (i.e. wax print) isn’t necessarily entirely African. The “African print” that we often see on the streets of West Africa and that experienced has a renaissance in the diaspora, is known by a wide variety of names including “ankara” and “Dutch hollandais.” What we know as wax print or ankara was introduced to Africa by the Dutch, who popularized the Javanese batik following their colonization of Indonesia. The van Vlissingers, a Dutch merchant family, brought the fabric to the masses when they established Vlisco in 1846. During the 19th century, Africans embraced these designs as a form of self-expression. Today, Vlisco continues to be the marker of high-quality batik. The Vlisco Group also owns more affordable African textile brands Uniwax, Woodin and GTP. What is often called "African fabric" is based on an Indonesian design that was commercialized by the Dutch. 

The Dashiki as a symbol of African-American history

In the United States, four young businessmen popularized the design when they formed a company called New Breed in 1967. During this era, the black power and white counterculture movements in the United States embraced the dashiki as a symbol of affirmation and “Black in Beautiful.”

The name dashiki originates from the Yoruba word “dan shiki,” which refers to a work shirt typically worn by men. The Yoruba adopted the word from the Hausa “dan chiki.”

The late Gil Scott Heron, a popular African-American musician and spoken word poet in the 1970s and 1980s, wrote in his 1970 novel The Vulture:

'You rilly like them African clothes that N’Bala sells? I mean, the shirts like the one you got on. What’choo call ‘um?'

'It’s called a dashiki, brother. I think they’re better than the white man’s shirts.'

Beyoncé in a dashiki

As he mobilized people during the civil rights movement, Marion Barry, who would later become mayor of Washington, D.C. (a city that once bore the affectionate moniker “Chocolate City”), famously wore dashikis.

With this long history, it would be reductionist to merely label the dashiki a “trend.” Celebrities rocking the style are merely late to the party. 

A Brief History of The Gambia's Aku

I've always found the history of the Aku, my mother's people, particularly fascinating because it underscores The Gambia's cultural diversity and shines a light on an under-told part of the slave trade. 

The Akus (also known as Krios) are a minority Gambian ethnic group that migrated to the Senegambia region from Sierra Leone during the 19th Century. They comprise 2 - 5% of the Gambian population, are primarily Christian, and speak Aku (Krio), a language similar to the English-based Sierra Leonean Krio.

The Aku are a mixture of recently freed slaves who were liberated on the high seas by the British in West Africa and freed slaves returning from the diaspora from such places as the US, the Caribbean and Nova Scotia. Many of the freed slaves were of Yoruba descent, which is why it is common to find Aku with Yoruba names — like many people in my mother's family.

You can also see the direct link to the Aku's Nigerian ancestry through the word ashobie. In Krio, ashobie is a word used to describe group outfits worn on special occasions such as weddings and funerals. Among the Yoruba, who also engage in the practice of ashobie, the word is aso ebi.  The pouring of libations to recognize ancestors is another Aku tradition that stems from Yoruba culture.

In March 1807, the British abolished the slave trade, but illegal slave traders continued to smuggle slaves to the British West Indies and other countries. Because of the harsh conditions in the New World plantations, slaves often died, so plantations were in frequent need of new workers. Despite the inherent risk involved, illegal traders who could evade capture by the British navy made a huge profit. During this period, the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron patrolled the seas liberating around 150,000 enslaved Africans and returning them to Sierra Leone.

Some of the liberated people returned to their hometown of Abeokuta, Nigeria, in Ogun State, a traditional part of Yorubaland. The name Abeokuta means "underneath the rock" or "refuge among rocks" and was used as a place of refuge from slave hunters from Dahomey. There, the Krio returnees became prominent businessmen and traders. 

According to Godfrey Mwakikagile, during the 1830s, the British began moving many of the Aku who remained in Sierra Leone to The Gambia. As one of the first African groups to be exposed to a Western education, the Aku had skills the local Gambian tribes did not, giving them a privileged status in the colonial hierarchy. Many Aku have English surnames adopted from the merchants they trained under. In some ways, the relationship between the Aku and other ethnic groups resembled the relationship between Americo-Liberians and other ethnic groups in Liberia where the new arrivals began to dominate local politics. In an ironic twist, the Aku  played a pivotal role in pushing for Gambian independence.

———

Many thanks to my Aunt Dayo Forster, who helped supplement some of the historical details of this blog post. 

A Little Piece of Brazil in Ghana

One of the many murals surrounding Brazil House 

To enter Jamestown, the heart of old Accra, is to step slightly back into time. Gone are the skyscrapers and shiny new developments of downtown Accra. Instead, densely populated Jamestown is full of small shacks and shops with corrugated-iron roofs interspersed with pieces of colonial history and lively exclamations in Ga.

While Jamestown might be poor, it is rich in history. Two of the most striking landmarks are Fort James, a former British trading post turned prison, and the Jamestown lighthouse, built during the 1930s. While these two tourist attractions might garner the most attention during the popular Jamestown walking tours, it was a third building - Brazil House - that immediately caught my eye on a recent visit to the area. After learning tidbits about the house's history from my friend Mike, I was eager to learn more about its history. 

The bright yellow Brazil House was built by the Tabom (also spelled Tabon) people – an Afro-Brazilian community of former slave returnees who arrived in West Africa on the S.S. Salisbury after the Malê Revolt of 1835 in Bahia. Approximately 10,000 former slaves returned to West Africa from 1835 onwards. From Lagos' "Brazilian Quarter" to Benin's "Ecole Bresil" and the plethora of families with Brazilian names like Souza, Silva, Cardoso, Da Costa, Gomez, and Costa, traces of this history can be found throughout the region.

While some Afro-Brazilians settled in communities in Togo and Nigeria, they received a particularly warm welcome in Ghana. The Gas, one of the most hospitable ethnic groups in Ghana, readily offered the new arrivals a tract of land in the area now known as Jamestown. The returnees were known as the Tabom people because when they arrived in coastal Ghana, they could speak only Portuguese, so they greeted each other with “Como esta?” (How are you?) and replied with “Ta bom." Over time, the seven original Tabom families integrated into Ghanaian society by marrying local people.

With their arrival, the Tabom brought many useful agricultural skills such as superior mango, cassava and beans techniques. Having been exposed to the European, African and Amerindian cultures in their native Brazil, they synthesized knowledge from each culture and also brought valuable skills  such as irrigation, architectural design, and tailoring to Ghana. The Taboms founded the the First Scissors House in 1854, the first tailoring shop in the country, which once provided uniforms for the Ghanaian Army.

In 1999, recognizing the historical value of Brazil house, local and international groups began to renovate it. Following Brazilian President Lula’s visit to Ghana in 2005, the Brazilian Embassy leveraged financial support  for further repairs from the Brazilian and Ghanaian private sector. Today, the house has been completely restored with a museum of Tabom history on the ground floor.

Since 2001, the Right to Abode Act has given members of the African diaspora - including Afro-Brazilians -  the right to live and work in Ghana. While there may be some red tape, the restoration of Brazil House and the passage of the Right to Abode Act reflect the renewed interest in solidifying the relationship between Africa and its diaspora. 

'To An English Friend in Africa': Okri and the Void

I first read Okri's The Famished Road in high school. At the time, I was enamored with magical realism, the poetic, fantastical writing style of Latin American heavyweights like Gabriel García Márquez and Isabelle Allende. The Famished Road explores a life in-between - the void in this case being life or death. The navigation of antipodes is a common theme that runs throughout my life and a theme that appears frequently in Okri's work.

"To An English Friend in Africa"

Be grateful for freedom
To see other dreams.
Bless your loneliness as much as you drank
Of your former companionships.
All that you are experiencing now
Will become moods of future joys
So bless it all.
Do not think your ways superior
To another’s
Do not venture to judge
But see things with fresh and open eyes
Do not condemn
But praise what you can
And when you can’t be silent.

Time is now a gift for you
A gift of freedom
To think and remember and understand
The ever perplexing past
And to re-create yourself anew
In order to transform time.

Live while you are alive.
Learn the ways of silence and wisdom
Learn to act, learn a new speech
Learn to be what you are in the seed of your spirit
Learn to free yourself from all things that have moulded you
And which limit your secret and undiscovered road.

Remember that all things which happen
To you are raw materials
Endlessly fertile

Endlessly yielding of thoughts that could change
Your life and go on doing for ever.

Never forget to pray and be thankful
For all the things good or bad on the rich road;
For everything is changeable
So long as you live while you are alive.

Fear not, but be full of light and love;
Fear not but be alert and receptive;
Fear not but act decisively when you should;
Fear not, but know when to stop;
Fear not for you are loved by me;
Fear not, for death is not the real terror,
But life -magically – is.

Be joyful in your silence
Be strong in your patience
Do not try to wrestle with the universe
But be sometimes like water or air
Sometimes like fire

Live slowly, think slowly, for time is a mystery.
Never forget that love
Requires that you be
The greatest person you are capable of being,
Self-generating and strong and gentle-
Your own hero and star.

Love demands the best in us
To always and in time overcome the worst
And lowest in our souls.
Love the world wisely.

It is love alone that is the greatest weapon
And the deepest and hardest secret.

So fear not, my friend.
The darkness is gentler than you think.
Be grateful for the manifold
Dreams of creation
And the many ways of unnumbered peoples.

Be grateful for life as you live it.
And may a wonderful light
Always guide you on the unfolding road.