The Ghanaian Way
I recently spent a week at NYU Accra, in Ghana, as part of the College of Arts and Sciences Presidential Honors Scholars Program. Ghana brought me on an emotional roller coaster, provided me with deep revelations, and left me with a profoundly new understanding of the world. The trip to Ghana did not go smoothly. I was the only student flying into Ghana from Shanghai, and I was unable to locate my classmates from New York when I arrived at the airport. As I walked around frantically, I encountered Ghanaian culture for the first time—groups of people were gathered outside the rundown airport, singing, dancing, and cheering. The music wasn’t unpleasant, but the crowd made the already packed airport seem all the more chaotic, leaving a bad taste in my mouth. To make things worse, when I asked a security guard for help, he led me around the airport aimlessly for half an hour and demanded that I pay him 200RMB, saying that “we guards have to eat.” Amidst the franticness, warnings from my parents came to mind—Africa is a ‘backward’ place, people are out to cheat you, do not get near ‘those’ people. Unfounded bias always sounds ridiculous to outsiders, but in the moment, I started to feel paranoid and my inner voice of reason cried out. One hour and 200RMB later, I found my friends, and made it to the hotel. But on the way there, I compared the experience at the airport with the impression I got from the class I took on Ghana. The semester-long class I took in the Fall described Ghana as a country that has made great progress, but looking at all the disorder, I was not sure what to expect in the coming week. I began to learn what Ghanaian culture is really like when I attended a lecture by Professor Nat Amarteifio, the former mayor of Accra, who is now a faculty member at NYU Accra. He gave us a brief introduction of Ghana’s history, including her imperial past, bringing us around the town to introduce the significance of each district and its architecture. In Accra, the houses are shoddy, and the streets are filled with peddlers selling food products to drivers. The city reeked of poverty. But the city was also, in some aspects, more ‘civilized’ than what I’m used to in New York and Shanghai. Drivers do not honk their guts out at the slightest discomfort, neither do people speak at the top of their voices just to make themselves heard. There is something very special about the way Ghanaians respectfully share the space with fellow Ghanaians; this dynamic is obvious to outsiders at first, but its subtleties are harder to recognize. I first got a glimpse of this custom at the Black Star Square. The square was named after the black star on the Ghanaian flag, which symbolized the Black Star movement in America in the 1920s that called on the African Diaspora to return to Africa. But while the movement originally started out with welcoming Africans of different ethnicities and nationalities back to the continent, it soon came to take on a greater meaning of pan-Africanism, which believes that for Africans to succeed, they must see beyond their national borders and work together as one continent, one Africa. Unconditional international cooperation might seem like a fantasy, but in Africa, national boundaries are indeed secondary to continental interests. This strong commitment to cooperation was unlike anything I have learnt before about international relations, and made me realize that I should not impose my worldview on this society that operates on a fundamentally different axis. People here hold the belief that the collective is more important than the individual, and this causes the community to behave in a way that is different from the more familiar self-interested model. As the days passed, I started to see the manifestation of this inclusive social commitment for myself. As I was walking on the streets of Ghana, hawkers would initiate conversations with a handshake, followed by a snap on my middle finger. I found this peculiar, and was later told that every handshake in Ghana was conducted this way for the Ghanaians believed it conveyed luck and blessings—even in the mundane activity of shaking hands, they wish each other well. There is also a special tradition when starting a conversation. Before anyone speaks in a group, he will usually say “Ago (ah-go),” an Akan term that seeks the group’s attention. The group will reply “Ame (ah-may),” meaning that they are ready to hear him speak. In Chinese or Western society, people may call for attention but listeners may not feel as obligated to be respectful; only in Africa is there a specific code of practice for maintaining mutual respect in conversation. Besides learning about Ghanaian culture, I also learned about the country’s history. We visited Elmina Castle, one of the slave castles that operated during the era of transatlantic slave trade. Standing in a tiny cell that once held about 120 slaves, I realized that the slaves’ suffering could not be properly understood from the comfort of a classroom. Slaves ate, slept and defecated in the cell; there were no bathrooms, and ventilation was restricted to a tiny hole at the top of the wall. Even today, the room still smelled of mold, making many of us feel nauseated. I tried to imagine how I would have felt locked up in a cage teeming with such death and despair, and how I could have watched as the bodies of my friends, killed by sickness and abuse, were dumped into the sea, not knowing if I would be next. I’d be lucky to shower once every three or four months, unless I was female and slept with the governor for special treatment. I don’t know how I could go on living if my family were to be captured and sold to different parts of the world. Giving up would mean letting my conquerors win, but they would be more than happy to work me to death. What would be the point? I can only imagine the slaves’ despondency at that time, struggling for survival after their dignity was stripped away from them. It was no use resisting either, for their captors had superior weapons, and rebellious slaves were sentenced to death by suffocation in a poorly ventilated room—one of the most painful ways to die. As I toured the castle, I imagined the countless dreams that once occupied these walls, dreams that were dashed by the greed of human nature. I became overwhelmed by anger and sorrow—frustrated by the extent of human cruelty and depressed by the number of lives lost from such selfishness. I became numb to my own intense emotions and quietly sought time alone to come to terms with what I had just experienced. As I left the castle, my perception of the hawkers who approached us changed. The people who were trying to sell me customized wristbands and decorated seashells are the descendants of those who escaped the slave trade, losing family members in the process. Interested, I decided to approach one stall owner. We struck up a conversation about the prices of souvenirs, and I asked him if he had a painting of the castle so that I could frame it to remember my experience by. “This is a dark moment in Ghanaian history, and I do not want to profit off it,” was his reply, a profound statement on the solidarity he has with the slaves of before. Seeing how strongly he felt about the country’s history, I could not help but ask more about his views towards the English and Dutch today. He replied that although the colonial masters committed unspeakable atrocities that impeded Ghana’s development, Ghanaians should not bear grudges against anyone else today, because the fault lay with the people in the past, not those in the present. His words showed me that he, as well as the rest of his country, have long since moved on from its past. I realized then that Western perceptions of Ghana are grossly outdated, and that my own initial misgivings at the airport had been biased by the stereotypes and paranoia laden in Western media. By traveling to Ghana and witnessing the selflessness and maturity of its people, I believe I’ve gained a clearer understanding of its culture as well as a new appreciation of how little I know. If almost everything I knew about Ghana turned out to be wrong, what else might I be wrong about? Confronting the unreliability of my knowledge is demoralizing in some ways, but encouraging in others—it’s helped me to see the world for what it is, rather than what I expect it to be. The author would like to credit Allen Wu for his excellent preliminary edits to this article.This article was written by Benjamin Goh. Send an email to [email protected] to get in touch. Photo Credit: Benjamin Goh