Learning to be African; Step Two - Get your armor ready.

Learning to be African

Step Two – Equip yourself with the right armor, it will not be made easy.

As soon as I landed in Ghana on the 28th of August my life changed dramatically instantaneously as was to be expected. I was quite content riding home from the airport to my Grandparents house, but still held a small amount of trepidation within. This was my home, to be sure, but not everything is sunshine and roses on this side of the planet.

I had a history here, a history I knew a lot of my counterparts had been privy too, a history that ended up acting like a slow poison, affecting me more and more as each day went by until I had finally overcome it.

So why did I still harbor fear?

My first official day in Accra I was incredibly apprehensive of anything and anyone. As beautiful as my people are, they are not to be trusted, not in the sense that we are all thieves and crooks (cough Nigerians cough) but more along the lines of the fact that we simply cannot keep our damn mouth shut about situations that do not and will not concern us. I didn’t want to be the subject of anymore malefic conversations and I didn’t want to create any more havoc than I did by simply existing.

The thing about this place is, although we remain without civil war and actual everyday threats to our physical survival, spiritually? This is the bloodiest battlefield I have ever had the displeasure of coming across. Without strength and self conviction this country will destroy you.

Not with machine guns, or rebel leaders, or AIDS.

But with words. You will find yourself slaughtered by the hands that you hold dearest to you, and because you see Ghana as such a calm and peaceful place the shock of such a disturbance completely overwhelms you.

You have to understand one thing, before anything else.

You are still a foreigner.

Because you do not speak the language, and might not even look Ghanaian, as desperate as you are to fit in, to be a part of your people understand that this will never be the case, because you are different, you are raised differently and you come from a completely altered home. So there will never be such a thing as “fitting in”. Although all of the things that make you different were completely out of your power you have to learn how to embrace the fact that you can never truly be THAT kind of Ghanaian and there is a reason for this.

I’ve come to think of myself as a prototype, there are plenty of kids out there who are just like me, were raised just like me outside of their cultural region and are feeling the exact same way I am, and believe it or not a lot of my counterparts want to make the move I have, and we have been afforded all the amenities that the so called “white man” has and this education, these opportunities that have been given to us now can be used to better the home our parents were so desperate to get away from.

We’re all rushing back, hearts filled with hope and about a thousand schemes and proposals to put to work as soon as we get “home”, we never question how receptive the locals will be, because after all “I’m Ghanaian too”.

And that’s where we get shot down. Because in all honestly, sometimes it feels like the people in this country have no interest in progressing at all. My mentor touched on something very interesting the other day; it goes a little something like this;

“You can do business like a white man, or a black man, I do business like a white man. The black man will open a shop selling drinks, bread, the staple stuff that has no need to be refrigerated, and doesn’t try to develop the stall at all so the stall stays the same and he makes the same amount of money for the rest of his life. The white man on the other hand, will use bits and pieces of his profit to develop his product, he’ll buy a refrigerator to enable himself to sell more goods, he’ll buy more land, more products to sell and he will in turn grow. Always striving for something more, that is the problem here. People like to live just as they did 5 years ago. We cannot survive like that”

And that is precisely the problem the average Ghanaian seems to have, no one wants to grow, and so when we come along, ready with new seeds and a brand new irrigation system they seem to want to make it their life goal to sabotage EVERYTHING.

In turn sabotaging themselves.

The trick is to not let any of this get to you, my motto for my life now in Ghana is simply “Forgive them father for they know not what they do” and I will not let any naysayer deter me from developing my country as much as I can.

I’ll even buy said naysayer a mother fucking Range.

The trick is to protect and prepare yourself. Laughing generally helps, face the world with a quaint sense of placid amusement and continue on with your work, because they might not accept you now but they will have no choice but to thank you in the end.

But still remember, that when they kiss your feet, as soon as your back is turned they will still try to stab you.

So I’ve learnt to embrace my difference, to embrace my foreign background with the clear knowledge that such a background has enabled me to kindle the fire of evolution. With the knowledge that my laughable “Obroni” ways gives me a different view of my home.

I am willing to give this land a chance simply because I am knowledgeable of the shortcomings of others. Before I had even boarded the plane to Ghana I had messages in my facebook inbox along the lines of "A lot of people like you come down so full of enthusiasm but get deterred very quickly, Ghana isn't easy oh" You know what I would say back?

“It doesn’t take a day to recognize sunshine.”

So now, no matter what I hear being said about my person, or my work it doesn’t affect me as much as it would’ve say 2 years ago. I got my bulletproof vest of guaranteed success on, so much has been said about me simply because I am a foreigner, simply because no one knows me, a foreigner who chose to leave what some would call a Mecca and return to what most refer to as hell.

Maybe one day you’ll notice that you’ve set yourself on fire.

Because I downright refuse to move back to America and work like a slave for a country that will never give back to me.

I refuse to invest in my own slavery.

So no matter how much trouble you get, how many “best friends” stab you in the back, no matter how many ridiculous and downright malign things are being said about you always remember the reason you came back, always remember your future.

STAY STRAPPED.