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Oh, so you are in Ghana on holiday? Actually, it’s not a holiday, I am travelling. OK, no one comes to Ghana on holiday; it’s not like Rome. We have museums and a lot of culture in Rome; perhaps too much. This was a conversation I had with a very charming Italian gentleman. It was all very good natured and it came from a good place.
The gentleman is right, it is not Rome. For starters, Ghana is a country and not a city. Unlike Rome, Ghana has very few museums and the ones I visited had quite questionable curation.
However, like Rome, Accra and all of Ghana tell powerful stories of human history and endurance. I visited Ussher Fort in Accra which was built as a trading post by the Dutch in the 1600s; when the Europeans and Africans operated on a more equal footing. It was then turned into a slave holding place when the Europeans found a more lucrative business in trading humans to work on the plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas.
Post independence Ussher Fort became a prison and held many prominent Ghanaian politicians before becoming a refugee centre hosting people fleeing war in The Sudan and Liberia.
Ghana is where the notion of Pan Africanism flourished. So my travels in Ghana have a rather political leaning. Not through design on my part. It just happens to be the first African country to become an independent state, the Pan African ideologue was elevated when W. E. B Du Bois was invited to move to Ghana by Nkrumah and he set out to write the African encyclopaedia.
Ghana draws a lot of Africans from the diaspora as they attempt to follow the steps their ancestors would have taken. It is a painful journey but it provides an anchor that many of us take for granted. It gives slave descendants some understanding of their roots and thus Ghana becomes a representation of the motherland.
So it is not your typical holiday but there are many delights. Ghana is a thriving democracy, the traditional food is superb, the people are friendly and they have a love for colour so a nation after my own heart.