Flipping through a family album, Keachia Bowers stopped at a photo of herself as a baby on her father’s lap as he held the 1978 album “Africa Stand Alone” by Jamaican reggae group Culture.
“When I was 10, I was supposed to come to Ghana with him,” she said. A day earlier, she had celebrated the tenth anniversary of her father’s death. Although he was a Pan-Africanist who dreamed of visiting Ghana, he never got there.
Bowers and her husband, Damon Smith, however, are among 524 members of the diaspora, most of them Black Americans, who were granted Ghanaian citizenship in a ceremony in November.
Bowers and Smith moved from Florida to Ghana in 2023 after visiting the area several times since the 1990s. They now run a tourism business that caters to black people who want to visit Ghana or elsewhere in South Africa. West, or who, like them, have come to consider a permanent move.
The November group was the largest group to be granted citizenship since Ghana launched the “Year of Return” program, aimed at attracting the black diaspora, in 2019. It marked 400 years since the arrival of the first slaves Africans in Virginia in 1619.
The Ghana Tourism Authority and the Office of Diaspora Affairs have expanded the program into the “Beyond Return” programme, which promotes diaspora relations. Hundreds of people have been granted citizenship, including people from Canada, the United Kingdom and Jamaica.
Bowers said moving to Ghana gave her family a certain sense of ease that they didn’t have in the United States.
“When we see Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, all these stories of people murdered right in their homes, living in their homes and murdered by police brutality, hearing about it creates trauma,” she said.
She was also worried about her 14-year-old son Tsadik.
Tsadik dominates those close to him, as lanky teenagers often do. He is shy but opens up to his younger sister Tselah, 11, and the family dog, Apollo.
“In America, being a black man who is very tall for his age, he is treated as a threat,” Bowers said.
Americans face few barriers to living in Ghana, with most paying annual residency fees. But Bowers said obtaining citizenship means much more than just living in Ghana.
“I didn’t need (citizenship) to tell me that I’m African. Everywhere I go in the world and someone looks at me, I’m melancholy,” she said.
“But my ancestors who wanted to come back and come home, those ancestors who never came back,” she said, “this passport, for me, is for them.”
Between 10 and 15 million people were forcibly taken from Africa to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade, with the majority coming from West and Central Africa.
Ghana, then a British colony known as the Gold Coast, was a main departure point.
As memorials to the slave trade become tourist destinations across West Africa, painful reminders of its brutality are easily accessible. From Ghana to Senegal via Benin, you can visit variations of the “Door of No Return”, haunting doors that open onto the Atlantic Ocean where slaves left Africa and their families for last time.
The joy people feel at reconnecting with long-broken connections is palpable. Videos from the recent citizenship ceremony show men and women of all ages waving Ghanaian flags and applauding.
Deijha Gordon, 33, was one of them.
“I visited Ghana for the first time in 2015. From that moment on, I knew it was a place I wanted to be and a place I wanted to show other diasporas, African- Americans, that we had a place where we belonged,” she said. .
She moved from Brooklyn to Ghana in 2019 and opened a food truck, Deijha Vu’s Jerk Hut, selling Jamaican food.
Between packing takeout orders and chatting with a couple of Black American tourists, she explained how she built her business from the ground up.
Gordon was giddy remembering the moment she gained citizenship.
“It feels good to have a connection to an African country as an African American, as a Black American. Because in America we have no other source of origin other than Africa. For having this connection here, I feel like I did something good,” she said.
Like Bowers, Gordon has had many people reach out and ask about the citizenship process.
The path is not clearly defined. Citizenship must come through a grant from the Ghanaian presidency, a process made legal by the Citizenship Act of 2000. It is granted to those resident in Ghana who have declared to the Office of Diaspora Affairs that they wish obtain citizenship.
Ghana’s government describes the program in part as a benefit to the economy and focuses on investment opportunities for those wishing to relocate.
Festus Owooson of the Migration Advocacy Center, a local nonprofit, said that while the government emphasizes the economic aspect, the real benefits of citizenship are intangible.
“I don’t think (the beneficiaries) were crying because they discovered a gold mine, or they found oil or some kind of business opportunity. But it’s something so relieving, to which we cannot assign a value or price,” he said. said.
The administration of President Nana Akufo-Addo, which launched the “Year of Return,” is on its way out. Ghana’s main opposition party won the presidential election on December 7.
But Owooson said Black Americans and other diaspora citizens would likely continue to receive citizenship by presidential grant.
Citizenship can also be passed on to the next generation. Bowers and Smith’s children received it automatically after their parents’ ceremony.
Bowers’ father, like her husband and children, was a follower of the Rastafari faith. “Part of the Rastafarian tradition is repatriation. We see repatriation as the ultimate experience that one can have on this land,” she said.
She thinks her father is proud of her. “I really feel like he’s smiling right where he is. He wanted to experience this for himself, so he’s experiencing it through me.”
USA voanews
