Sonya Beard
The UN designated the International Decade for People ofAfrican Descent, from 2015 to 2024, to promote the recognition, justice, and
development of individuals of African descent worldwide. Through various
programs, events, and awareness campaigns, the Decade seeks to create a
platform for dialogue, understanding, and positive change in the lives of the
African diaspora. Africa Renewal will publish 'In Search of Long-Lost
Identities' - a four-part series highlighting the journeys African-Americans
are taking to reconnect with Africa - the continent their ancestors called
home.
In 1977, a record-breaking mini-series carved its place in
the milestone of US history. Based on Alex Haley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning
novel, Roots: The Saga of an American Family, the small-screen adaptation
exposed the atrocities of the transatlantic slave trade and its impact on
generations thereafter.
Suddenly overnight – eight nights, to be exact – the Emmy
Award-winning Roots made the phrase, “Go back to Africa,” sound like a call to
action, an opportunity for African-Americans to reclaim their stolen heritage,
and not a racial slur.
Back to Africa
Nearly 40 years after the release of Roots, Diallo Sumbry
went to Ghana to seek spiritual discipline. “Initially, I came to study
manifestation and traditional African science,” the Washington, DC-based
entrepreneur said.
On a trip in 2016, Mr. Sumbry received a prophecy, that
"if I moved to Ghana and decided to do business here, things would go well
for me. I would fulfil my life's mission, and Ghana would be my spiritual
home."
A dozen trips later, he found himself fulfilling that
prophecy by reconnecting people in the African diaspora to the African
continent.
As co-architect of Ghana's "Year of Return," Mr.
Sumbry helped to facilitate an international campaign for the 400-year
commemoration of the first documented arrival of enslaved Africans in America
in 1619.
[The Year of Return 2019 was an initiative of the government
of Ghana and the Adinkra Group, that sought to encourage African diasporans to
come to Africa to settle and invest in the continent].
With more than 1.1 million international visitors, according
to the Ghana Tourism Authority, the return may go down as the largest
transatlantic African-American homecoming in history.
"The 'Year of Return' changed African tourism,"
Mr. Sumbry said.
In 2020, the "Year of Return" campaign evolved
into "Beyond the Return," the tourism authority's 10-year initiative.
"Everywhere you go, people are talking about the diaspora," Mr.
Sumbry observed. "It sparked something, and we probably won't see the full
breadth of its impact for years to come."
Respite from racism
Every person of African descent should visit the continent
at least once in their life, according to Mr. Sumbry, who arranges trips
through his firm, the Adinkra Group, where he serves as president and chief
executive officer.
"The experience can offer African-Americans a high
level of freedom," he said. "There is no racism here as we see it in
America. You are more rooted here. You can feel your spirit and your ancestors.
You can be who you are."
His efforts may place the Sumbry name on the list of
historical figures who championed 'Back-to-Africa' movements. He would be in
excellent company.
Paul Cuffe the shipping magnate
In 1815, Massachusetts shipping magnate Paul Cuffe doubted
whether he would achieve racial equality in his lifetime. The philanthropist
convinced 38 other African Americans to settle in Sierra Leone, and he financed
their resettlement there.
According to the White House Historical Association, Mr.
Cuffe is believed to have led the first successful Back-to-Africa movement in
the United States; and his efforts served as inspiration for the American
Colonization Society, founded in 1816 to establish Liberia and resettle
African-Americans there.
A century later, Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey moved to New
York City and encouraged African-Americans to board ships of his Black Star
Line for the voyage back across the Atlantic.
Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah took inspiration from the
Harvard-educated Pan-African scholar W.E.B. Dubois, who co-founded America's
longest-running civil rights organisation, the National Association for the
Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), in 1909.
According to the Constitutional Rights Foundation, Mr.
Dubois renounced his US citizenship and became a citizen of Ghana, where he
spent his final days. He rests in peace at a museum named in his honour in
Accra.
In the early 1960s, poet Maya Angelou and her son also lived
in Ghana among nearly 200 African-American expatriates whom she referred to as
the "Revolutionist Returnees."
"We were Black Americans living in West Africa, where
-- for the first time in our lives -- the colour of our skin was accepted as
correct and normal," Ms. Angelou wrote in her autobiography, All God's
Children Need Traveling Shoes.
To this day, Ms. Angelou's sentiments resonate with
African-American mothers who have decided to repatriate to the motherland.
Peace of home
In corporate America, Ashley Cleveland was working her dream
tech job with an executive title and a lucrative salary while management
treated her as if she were in an administrative role.
"Black women get brought into corporations, and they
are celebrated at first," the Boston native said. "Then they go
through all these micro-aggressions, and finally they are let go."
After three layoffs in five years, she checked into a
psychotherapy treatment centre, only to find it filled with other senior-level
Black women with similar stories. She took a year to reset her life: she traded
visiting psychiatrists and using prescription medication for taking hikes and
walking on the beaches of Tanzania in East Africa.
Initially, she doubted whether she should move abroad when
her first child was born. Recently, the mother of two relocated to
Johannesburg.
Maya Angelou, author, poet and civil rights activist
When she is not working as head of growth for BrandUp
Global, she echoes Ms. Angelou in telling other African-American families why
they must relocate to the continent. “I explain the benefits that it provides
Black children to live in societies where their skin colour is not an issue.”
Ms. Cleveland, whose children are learning Zulu and
Kiswahili in primary school, said they are more well-rounded and intellectually
challenged abroad. “They have a better childhood. We no longer worry about
sending them to school and wondering if they’re going to make it back safely.”
When asked whether she had any plans to return home, she
answered: "Where? America? I have a sense of peace here that I shouldn't
have to give up. We don't worry about getting pulled over by the police. I'm
not operating with that anxiety as a parent anymore. Here, I'm a better
mother."
For Ms. Cleveland, Africa is home.
Ms. Beard is a writer and educator based in New York.
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