ACCRA, Ghana — Ever since Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, invited his classmates from Pennsylvania's Lincoln University to come home with him to help build Africa, black Americans have been coming to Ghana to visit, work, volunteer, invest or live in what has become the quintessential African homeland.
W.E.B. Du Bois lived here. So did Maya Angelou. Today the country, once at the heart of Africa's slave-trading routes, has the largest community of black Americans in West Africa, most of whom have come looking for their roots and a sense of purpose.
Now Ghana, a poor country eager for more American tourists, donors and investors, is about to make life even easier for its far-flung black diaspora: It plans to soon offer slave descendants lifetime visas or possibly even dual Ghanaian-U.S. citizenship.
Blood ties and economic sense
People are also reading…
"Who we most want as tourists and investors are our own people who left 200 or 300 years ago," said Jake Otanka Obetsebi-Lamptey, the country's tourism chief, whose department last month was renamed the Ministry for Tourism and Diasporan Relations. "It's not just about blood ties. It's good economic sense."
Lifetime visas should be easy for regular visitors to get. But the new passports — still awaiting approval in Parliament — won't be handed to just anyone, Obetsebi-Lamptey said. African-Americans eager for formal Ghanaian identity will have to commit to invest, help develop or live in Ghana because "citizenship carries some responsibility," he said.
Ghana does not offer any particular tax breaks for investors from the diaspora.
But it is eager for help from its relations abroad, be it regular visits from American tourists, donations to development projects or investment in job-creating enterprises it desperately needs, officials said.
Winning such commitment should not be much of a problem if the existing African-American community, which the U.S. Embassy estimates at less than 5,000 people, is an indication.
For many African-American immigrants, however, adjusting to life in Ghana has been more of a challenge than they expected.
Obetsebi-Lamptey said his agency is working hard to make life easier for black Americans coming to Ghana. Next year, to mark the country's 50th anniversary of independence, it hopes to launch a media campaign to educate Ghanaians about the country's slave-trading past — a topic still largely overlooked in classrooms — and about how to treat visitors.
Treating "obruni" like kin
For instance, he wants Ghanaians to stop referring to African-Americans as obruni, "white foreigner," the term used for any foreigner with a lighter skin tone, and instead call them awkwaaba anyemi, which roughly means "welcome brother (or sister)."
"They come here, and the first thing they're called is 'stranger,'" he said. "It's a real slap in the face. We want them to be called 'kin.'"
Tucson's newest Shake Shack gets neighbors
