Accra, and the Dream of Returning
by Genara Necos
We step through the narrow doorway, leaving the dank entrails of Elmina Castle, going out into the afternoon sunshine. The Portuguese built the castle in Elmina, Ghana, about 100 miles from Accra, in 1482. For centuries enslaved men and women were kept chained in its cramped dungeons before passing through the “Door of No Return” to begin the arduous journey across the Atlantic. Many perished; my ancestors survived.
Sadness can cause dislocation. Was I really here? A young woman brushes by me, iPhone in the air; Kente trimmed bracelets swivel on her delicate brown wrists. Blue waters, luminous skies, coconut trees—all in the vicinity of the castle—this scenic vision of their homeland is the last my ancestors saw. No wonder we are filled with longing for home. The young people around me are exchanging Instagram handles, making plans to keep their interest in Ghana and their newly formed bond alive. The sun seeps into my pores. I am here.
Some have compared our visits to the dungeons of Elmina Castle to people of Jewish heritage visiting concentration camps. The place of great suffering can be a source of deep strength to the descendants of the survivors. The kindest man I ever knew, my great uncle Simon, sent money from his meager wages to Marcus Garvey’s repatriation to Africa project. Political machinations shattered Mr. Garvey’s dream of returning. My uncle died of diabetic complications in a hospital in Santo Domingo; I wonder if he thought about this dream deferred at the end. I made it to Elmina for both of them.
At a restaurant in Osu, Accra, artificial red roses surround the words “Akwaaba, the Bukka Restaurant welcomes you during the Year of Return.” I join Margaret, a petite, youthful doctor from Texas, and her son Jordan, a handsome, reticent young man, for a meal outdoors. The server places fish stew, yams, and spicy plantains on the table. Seated next to us, two beautifully dressed African American women chatter away. At another table, a young man explains his plan to build bridges—through film—between young people in Washington DC and Accra to a young Ghanaian woman. His voice is calm and measured; she’s focused on her salad. Then he says he had an eye injury that kept him in a Baltimore hospital for weeks, and he almost didn’t make it to Accra. She drops her fork and leans forward for a close look at his eye.
Jordan is on break from attending a Historically Black University. Maybe at this stage, he doesn’t relish traveling with his mom. My 25-year-old son is profoundly autistic; our last international trip was to my hometown in the Dominican Republic when he was nine. Maybe I should envy Margaret and Jordan, but I don’t. I learned a long time ago not to compare my experiences with mothers of neurotypical children. Jordan breaks his silence to share that one of his missions in Ghana is to find the perfect Ashanti stool.
Margaret, Jordan, the African Americans at the other tables, the men and women who toured the dungeon in Elmina with me, came to Ghana in December 2019, during the proclaimed “Year of Return.” Ghana’s tourism industry gave 2019 this name ostensibly to remember the 400th anniversary of the first shipment of enslaved men and women from the Gold Coast to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. Ghana has promised that all of us descendants of enslaved men and women in the diaspora could return to live there if we wished. An outsized promise that would take time and energy to deliver on.
Small business owners sell postcards replicating Ablade Glover’s paintings, bottles of natural honey, and Selena Beg designer pocketbooks at the “Made in Ghana” street fair on Oxford Street. Tourists buy. On a typical day on this street, men selling belts, shoes, old radios; children selling Ghanaian chocolate; women with boiled and fried delicacies in bundles on their heads; they swirl about, earning a living. These traders are all part of Ghana’s informal sector that makes up too high a percentage of the country’s employable population. I suspect that diminishing the number of individuals dependent on this informal sector for employment is the political reason behind the “Year of Return.” Ghana wants to attract American investors.
Never mind my suspicions of the Ghanaian government’s motives. Days later, walking into Elle Lokko, a boutique known for its supply of Osei Duro fashion—clothing using traditional Ghanaian textiles—I recognize my cousins Juliana and Pilar in the faces of women I’ve never seen before. In the days that follow, whether meeting new members at the Accra Ridge Church, strolling Labadi Beach, listening to music at the Zen Garden, or weaving through the whirlwind of Mokola Market, I am possessed by a strong sense of well-being and belonging. If not for my son in New York, I would extend my visit. It’s no wonder Dr. W. E. Dubois, who left the US for Ghana, wrote:
Yet Ghana shows its might and power
Not in its color or its flower
But in its wondrous breadth of soul
Its joy of life.
“Wondrous breadth of soul” indeed; I feel more at home in Accra than I have in the Dominican Republic, where I was born.
Before we leave Ghana, Jordan accomplishes his mission. Margaret sends me a picture of his Ashanti stool, solid wood with the Sankofa symbol on the seat: a golden bird with a beak reaching backward and feet forward. Ghanaians translate Sankofa from the Akan language as “Go back and pick what’s meaningful from your past and bring it forward for your benefit in the present.” For me, that meant the strength I felt growing within me at Elmina Castle, the hope that rose when I saw the vibrant, young descendants of the men and women who survived the horrors of that dungeon.
*
I arrive in New York on Christmas Eve, throughout the holidays and beyond, particularly during the lockdown that began in March; Ghana’s “Wondrous Breadth of Soul” haunts me. I fantasize about returning to stay. But Ghana suspended flights into the country in March 2020.
One evening in May, my dreaming abruptly turns into concrete planning. My friend Dennis calls—since I stopped watching the news, overwhelmed with the impact of the pandemic on New York—he often gives me updates. “I didn’t sleep last night; they kept showing that awful video,” he said.
“What awful video?” I ask; this is how I learn that a policeman has set his knee to George Floyd’s neck and murdered him.
Dennis has nephews, cousins, and in-laws in the police force; he is a no-nonsense carpenter who lived through the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland. If he is disturbed by the video, I know I can never see it.
In the ensuing nights, I wake up in chills that turn to sweat, but I reason that this may be a product of the pandemic. I test negative for COVID-19, but the symptoms persist. Fear is irrational. I become distraught, picturing my son having a run-in with the police. During the lockdown, no one at his residence is allowed out, and no one can visit. A confrontation with the police is unlikely. But my irrational fear is because I cannot see him—and have not seen him for more than two months—the most prolonged separation in our lives.
Every day I watch videos of the African diaspora returning to various countries on the African continent, a desire sparked in some by the barbarism of the Floyd tragedy. All over the US, cities are burning in protest. Soraya, my friend from Los Angeles, calls. She remembers the riots of 1992.
“I haven’t seen the video,” I tell her.
“I saw it, and I am furious,” Soraya says.
“I want to go to Ghana, get my son out of here.”
“Ghana sounds like a perfectly lovely place to live,” she muses.
My friend Kelly, a fierce civil rights activist, calls, anxious and afraid that her black friends are angry at her. No, I have no resentment towards her. Unlike Soraya, she says she does not want me to leave for Ghana.
Julia in Atlanta tells me about the two College students the police pulled out of a car, breaking one of their arms, during a night of tumultuous protest. She wonders out loud where the Jon Lewis of today is. I say that perhaps he has not emerged because no one thought we would be fighting this same battle over and over again. I discuss my desire to flee with Julia, Soraya, and Kelly, who are white, but I don't with Margaret or other black women. I don’t want to set them on the same anxious path about their sons. But which one of us isn’t distressed about her son? I persuade myself that my anxiety won’t end until my son and I are in a place with a “Wondrous Breadth of Soul.”
Driving from Costco, I mention to Dennis my anxiety about the police; it’s a month since the Floyd murder and time has assuaged his initial outrage. “If kids were more respectful to the police, these things wouldn’t happen.”
A vision of the two young people in Atlanta, the young man with the cast on his arm, flashes before my eyes. “What about the twelve-year-old boy they shot?” I ask, referring to a previous murder.
“Kids should be taught to respect,” he says. I scream into the car’s rooftop, a series of epithets I don’t recall ever uttering to anyone.
“Don't you ever call me again,” is the last thing I say when we arrive at my complex. I mean it. I understand the desire to set houses on fire. After a series of calls from him, Dennis and I reconcile, but I know I have to leave New York. Enraged and embittered, I, too, can’t breathe. A week later, I learn that my shortness of breath is a symptom of acid reflux.
In her biography of Church Vaughn, Lisa A. Lindsay tells the story of a free man of color who departed, along with several skilled, literate free people of color, from South Carolina to Liberia. Vaughn was distraught about the turn of events in mid-19th century South Carolina after Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 (the Act). Signed by President Fillmore, the Act endangered free people of color, as anyone could accuse them of being fugitives and reduce them to a life of enslavement.
Church Vaughn and his cohorts departed from America; however, these “reverse immigrants” arrived at a Liberia full of challenges: an inhospitable terrain, disease that decimated the “settlers,” and a sometimes hostile indigenous population. Church Vaughn left Liberia and found the success he had not known in the United States, in Yorubaland.
I would not be facing pestilence or a hostile indigenous population, despite the Western media’s depiction of Africa, by moving to Accra. But there would be other, albeit less daunting challenges for a mother of a 25-year-old with autism. The irony of leaving America out of anxiety for my son was that he was the best argument for staying. The spirit in me said, “leap, and the net will follow.” But a vision of the past flashed before my eyes: my son at 15, during a meltdown I could not de-escalate; the police arrived, handcuffed him, and escorted us to Mount Sinai emergency room. Encased in a glass room, he flapped his arms incessantly while leaping into the air until a psychiatrist prescribed Seroquel.
Soon after the incident at Mount Sinai, I placed him in a community residential program for young men with behavioral challenges. It took a combination of empathic and well-trained residential associates, teachers, therapists, an extraordinary social worker, and a cocktail of medications to transform him into a young man who sat with me on visits, completing simple puzzles. My son no longer has the extreme aggression that sent us to the emergency room, but he still needs comprehensive care that may not be available in Ghana. Instead of leaping and hoping for a net, I settle for researching an answer.
My research on services for individuals with disabilities in Ghana leads me to a pioneering mother who founded a school out of the necessity of addressing her daughter’s needs. Salome Francois founded New Horizons Special School (New Horizon) officially, Ghana’s first school for individuals with a range of disabilities. She founded the school in the early 70s, primarily so that her own developmentally challenged daughter could receive an education with other children.
Today New Horizon offers a variety of instructional services and therapies for children from 6 to 18; at 18, the students move on to a vocational program with 32 students. There are other programs in Accra, but none with room for adults. Was I ready to be a founding pioneer for adults with disabilities in Accra? How would my son fare without a structured program while we waited to integrate him into a new community?
In the meantime, people are stretching to be kind to each other all around me in the Bronx. My neighbors ask that we order out to help the restaurant industry; there are notices of people offering to deliver food to the elderly in the building link online; friends donate to food banks. Black Lives Matter signs sprout up on manicured lawns. These actions are also reflective of New York and America.
My mother, who left the Dominican Republic to give her children a better life in the United States, used to say, “no hay mal que para bien no llegue,” that is, “there is no evil that does not bring about some good.” This proverb proves to be my Sankofa—my return to the wisdom of my ancestors to benefit my present life. Perhaps these heinous tragedies, the deaths of Floyd and too many others, instead of making us flee, can force us to participate in creating a different story. A story where we honor Jon Lewis’ legacy by no longer having to ask, “where is the Jon Lewis of today?”
❦
Notes:
Cornelia Rowena Amoah, Women of Distinction, Ghana: Journey to the Top, 175-179
Lisa A. Lindsay, Atlantic Bonds: A 19th Century Odyssey from America to Africa
W.E.B. Du Bois, “Ghana Calls”
Genara Cristina Necos is a civil rights attorney practicing in New York City. She has conducted bilingual workshops on gender, race, and disability discrimination in the Tri-State Area, Puerto Rico, and Mexico.
In March magazine, she recently published a short cultural piece about longing for West Africa during the pandemic. She wrote the essay “Accra and the Dream of Returning” to reflect on the emotional and physical pain she and many others endured in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. The essay is a testament to the tragic incident, reminding us that acting to make a difference may be a better option than fleeing.
Genara is currently working on a book of braided essays about women in her family and their inter-generational immigration experiences when moving from St. Kitts to the Dominican Republic, Curacao, and the USA.
She is the mother of a charming young man on the autism spectrum. She lives in the Bronx, where she grew up.