‘The Ancestors Were Speaking’: My Pilgrimage to Ghana

By Denim Fisher, Word in Black

Every year, tens of thousands of African Americans — including former President Barack Obama and Kendrick Lamar — flock to Ghana to reconnect with their African roots. And Ghana encourages them to come home..

Not long after arriving in Accra, Ghana, from Nantes, France, I found myself on a three-hour bus ride heading for the coast. Our tour group, consisting mostly of young Black Americans, was headed to a destination that stirred up mixed emotions: Cape Coast Castle, one of the forty dungeons built on the Gold Coast of West Africa. 

As the bus banged along the dirt road, I caught fleeting glimpses of sights both foreign and familiar: A woman walking with a purse on her head and a baby wrapped on her back; three boys on a wooden bench, engrossed in a game. All the faces were melanated, like mine. 

I’m a student at Spelman College in Atlanta, a historically Black women’s college, studying the transatlantic slave trade and its impact on contemporary societies. I am familiar with my HBCU and haven, a microcosm of Blackness but not an entire society.

I felt a different connection in Ghana, even though I was a first-time visitor.

‘Loved in All My Blackness’

I had joined the thousands of Black Americans who flock to Ghana every year. The West African country has become a destination for people seeking spiritual and emotional refuge, as well as a potentially life-changing experience of racial consciousness. 

Former President Barack Obama has made the pilgrimage. So have celebrities such as Kendrick Lamar, SZA, Chance the Rapper, Idris Elba, and Boris Kodjoe. Some tour the fortified slave ports on its coast; others receive African names in traditional ceremonies, forging closer links to their heritage. A growing number of Black Americans are moving to Ghana for good.

“I came to Ghana to be fully seen and loved in all of my Blackness,” said Blair Moore, a rising junior at Spelman College. She took the trip, she says, was “to exist not as a ‘Black person’ defined by racial ideologies as I often am in the U.S., but simply as a person.” 

Ghana, meanwhile, has embraced its role as a wellspring of racial healing. Its government includes an office that handle diaspora affairs, it has created outreach programs for descendants of enslaved people, and its immigration laws include special provisions that streamline their path to Ghanaian citizenship.

Read more on why African Americans are flocking to Ghana for racial healing.

Check out our exhibit Three of the World Most Influential Empires that includes Ghana.

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