Your Excellency President John Dramani Mahama,
I am writing to you not as the coordinator of an organization, though I am that too, but as a Jamaican who is, in a matter of weeks, going to stand on Ghanaian soil for the first time to begin exploring what it might mean to come home.
I wanted to write to you before that journey, not after it, because I did not want gratitude to arrive only once I had something to ask for. I have none. This letter carries no request. I simply wanted you to know, in your own lifetime and your own presidency, what your leadership has meant to someone like me, a Jamaican watching from Toronto, in a country that was never quite mine either, waiting for a journey that finally points toward one that might be.
What I Have Watched This Year
I watched in March, when you returned to Accra having led the effort at the United Nations General Assembly to secure a resolution recognizing the transatlantic slave trade as the gravest crime against humanity. I understand that for many, that resolution will remain a diplomatic instrument, words in a chamber. For those of us descended from the people that crime was committed against, it read differently. It read as an acknowledgment, at the highest level the world has, of something our families have carried in silence for generations because no institution large enough to matter had ever said it plainly.
I watched in February, when your government paused its diaspora citizenship program rather than let it continue failing the very people it was built to welcome. I know the criticism that pause drew in the days it lasted. I also know what it takes for a government to look honestly at a program it is proud of and admit the mechanics were shutting people out, a DNA requirement with a deadline no one applying from outside Africa could realistically meet, fees that put belonging behind a paywall. You fixed it in ten days. By March, a hundred and fifty people who had been waiting, some of them for years, stood in Accra and took an oath. I do not know all their names, but I know the shape of what they were feeling, because I expect to feel it myself before long.
And I watched this August, when you did something I did not expect a sitting Ghanaian president to do in my lifetime, you stood in Gordon House, in Kingston, in the actual chamber of Jamaica’s Parliament, and you told us plainly that the relationship between Africa and the Caribbean could not remain rooted only in a shared history of slavery and colonialism, that it had to become something with real weight in trade, in institutions, in how the world’s financial architecture treats both our regions. You laid a wreath at the shrine of Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican who spent his life insisting that Africa and its diaspora were one people separated by an ocean and by force, never by nature. I do not know how many Ghanaian heads of state have stood at that shrine. I know it mattered that you did.
What “Sixth Region” Means From Where I Stand
Your Vice President, at that citizenship ceremony in March, called the diaspora Ghana’s sixth region. I have thought about that phrase more than she probably expected anyone outside Ghana to. A region is not a slogan. A region is a place with people who belong to it by right, not by favor. I do not know yet what my own relationship to Ghana will look like once I have actually walked through Elmina, or Cape Coast, or wherever my own journey takes me first. I know that a government willing to call us a region, rather than a diaspora it hopes will visit and spend money, has already done something most of Africa’s governments have not yet found the courage to do.
I say this as someone who has spent real time in East Africa, building something small and real of my own in Kenya, and who has spent the better part of two years writing policy memoranda to governments across this continent asking them to see people like me as more than tourists with sentimental attachments. I have had memoranda go unanswered. I have watched thresholds set at levels that quietly exclude the exact people asking to be included. I do not say this as complaint, only as the honest backdrop against which your government’s choices this year have stood out to me as something other than ordinary.
Before I Arrive
I left Jamaica young, to study opera in Canada, an art form built on a continent that was never mine either, sung mostly in languages that were never mine either. My parents still live in Jamaica. My father raised me on Pan-Africanism before I understood what it cost him to say some of those words out loud. He put names in my mouth before I was old enough to carry their weight, Lumumba, Nyerere, Sankara, Nkrumah. He taught me the shape of the Anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa before I understood why a man in Kingston would care so much about a prison on an island he would never see.
I did not know, as a boy learning those names at my father’s table, that one of them belonged to the man who built the very country whose president I am now writing to. I am aware of what it means that I learned Kwame Nkrumah’s name in Jamaica, in my father’s voice, and now write to the man who leads the country Nkrumah built, having spent the years since training my voice for a very different purpose. My father did not raise me to become a policy coordinator. He raised me to know where I came from. Everything since, CRDEA, the work in Kenya, this letter, this trip, has been me trying to live up to that, in whatever form it happened to take.
I do not know yet what I will feel when I land. I have read enough accounts from others who have made this journey to know that I should not expect it to feel simple. Ancestry is not a light thing to go looking for, and I understand that whatever I find, or do not find, will not be Ghana’s responsibility to resolve for me. That was never what I was hoping for from a government. What I was hoping for, and what this year has given me before I have even left home, is the sense that I am not arriving at a closed door asking to be let in as a guest. I am arriving at a door that a President of the Republic stood in front of, this year, and called by a name that includes me.
Thank you, Mr. President. I look forward to the day I can say this to you, or to Ghana, in person rather than in a letter.
With respect and anticipation,
Julius Nyerere Lead Coordinator, Coalition for the Repatriation of Descendants of Enslaved Africans (CRDEA)
Further Reading
Ghana Dropped the DNA Rule for Diaspora Citizenship. Now What?
Ghana’s Homeland Return Bill: A Head-of-State Signal for Diaspora Right of Return Policy
