Orville Taylor | Mi did ‘Ghana’ mi yard

Akwaaba! Welcome in Twi, the official and most popular language spoken in Ghana. “Medaase!” (thank you) in my best imitation of a Ghanaian accent. After almost 400 years, Africa sees me again.

Apparently, assuming I am Ghanaian, a female in tourism garb says, “welcome home!”

Accra is a large city. My mischievous tongue quietly remarks, “Nuff Accra round me.”

Then the bellhops say, “You do not look Ghanaian; South African maybe!” Wow! There goes some 40 plus years of misidentification. Truly Jamaican; even the ancestors ‘get jacket’.

Then come Kojo and Kwame from the Cape Coast, Fanteland. Doppelgänger of two Brooke Valley youngsters, they say, “Many Akan people look like you.”

The ocean that took my ancestors away comes into view. Tears. “Welcome home Kwesi Boakye”, the renaming ritual is complete. Singing, drumming and dancing. Hugs from the Queen Mother and elder females.

A five-hour journey, as soon as we leave Accra, pieces of St Thomas, St Elizabeth and Westmoreland appear. Familiar fruits; bissi, cassava, plantain, afu yam, and… no kidding; a delicately sweet yam, with bilaterally symmetrical rounded ends, puny yam is like sweet potato. A bit sweeter and softer than its Jamaican counterpart, another double-named version, beginning with with ‘pu’ is also quite popular, according to a dead-ringer for Shabba Ranks.

Coconut vendors with machetes, trucks laden with charcoal, burnt in exactly the same way we set up ‘coal skill’. Roasted corn, served with coconut soaked in salt water, on stoves made from car rims and original coal pots. And yes! A woman with a striking resemblance to Alice.

Yabbas and the larger version of the Dutch pot, ‘ankra’ baskets, cocoa (chocolate) watermelons, and guava, only begin the list.

Cape Coast and the entire region surrounding it share many topographical similarities with our island: a practicum in physical and social geography.

CUT AND PASTED

Amazingly, the ‘River of No Return’, the Assin Manso, where enslaved Africans were scrubbed like animals, en route to the castle of no return in Elmina, might easily have been cut and pasted from St Mary or St Ann.

Someone even remarked that it tastes just like the Wag Water River; but that cannot be confirmed.

The compatibility of the ‘alien’ sub-species of homosapiens Africanus, clearly made Jamaica an almost ideal place for us introduced mega fauna to adapt with zero issues. Not even the mongoose or cane toad have well done as we did.

Jamaica is a displaced piece of sub-Saharan Africa. By the way, some Ga tribesmen from Jamestown, just outside of Osu, say that Jamaica came a Ga/Twi word ‘Gyamakya’ and not the Taino, Xaymaca. Either way, the coincidental convergence of the similar names, actually supports the compatibility thesis.

Yet, in trying to understand the anthropological history of Ghana and its contemporary impact, a simple question came to me.

If the enslaved Africans were stripped to their basic clothing and were not allowed carry on luggage or ‘Dulcimina grips’ with their ‘cuchiments’; how did the plants come across?

True, the Europeans developed familiarity with some fruits and edible plants themselves and deliberately selected them.

Soursop, sweetsop, pineapple, cassava and cocoa, all came from the Caribbean and were introduced by Europeans to Africa, as Captain Bligh with otaheite apples, breadfruit and jackfruit here.

Indeed, the Jamaican almond is called ‘white man’s almond’ by the Ghanaians, and both Kojo, Kwame and our driver Emmanuel were blown over by the completely similar way we eat them.

Indians and Chinese came willingly to Jamaica in the mid to late 1800s and the former would have brought all varieties of mangoes, although I am still tempted to think that the Chinese developed the ‘sweetie come brush me.’

Something tells a sadder story though. Given that many other plants, including countless medicinal herbs, were unknown to the Europeans, there must have been very meticulous effort made by someone else to source and pack the African flora.

SHORTAGE

As in Jamaica, where there was a shortage of European men to run the plantations, and the need to recruit either full-blooded Africans or the mixed-race progenies to serve as slave drivers; they had their middle men on the continent too. A cadre of ‘mulattoes’ were directly involved in the entire process from the capture to export of their brothers and sisters.

Europeans, having left the Garden of Eden millennia earlier and evolved low pigment and other features to inhabit colder, temperate regions, were absolutely unsuited for life around the equator.

‘Explorers’ such as Livingston and Morton Stanley surviving in the Congo was enigmatic, because Europeans had high mortality rates in Africa and did not typically go deep inland.

As it would turn out from the literature, oral history and biological evidence, the transatlantic trade in Africans was also made possible by local facilitators (with emphasis on the first two syllables,) themselves.

This is something we must confront in the overall processes of healing, repatriation and reparation.

Africa has a deep history of intra-continental and inter-ethnic slavery. While not as horrific, as that which our forefathers experienced, it was built on a platform of one set of people being inferior to others and ascription of status at birth.

Trust me, the details of the slave experience from capture to expatriation is worse when you go into the physical spaces. An entire column on this will follow soon.

For the record, for those Africanists who spew nonsense about us all being kings and queens from royal lineages; ask the Ga, Fante, Ewe and others if they are as in awe of the fact that the Asantehene (Ashanti King) had to be carried by men, his feet never touching ground, among other things.

True, the rich history and knowing that we came from great civilisations is an awesome process of self-discovery.

However, royalist preferential, hereditary ideas and sentiments have no place in modern democracies.

Now more than ever, I am convinced that black reparationists and pan-Africanists cannot morally be KCs, or Sirs.

Akyiri!

Dr Orville Taylor is senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com