The K Experience

Nationality

Present - Here and Now

Friday, 29 August 2008

Ghana UK

From having travelled quite a bit, and being a black man with a very British accent, I have often been asked the question "So where are you from?". I usually answer with "I was born in Ghana, but grew up in the UK". That's the short answer, but there is so much more in that question that just can't be explained in passing. For example, "where is your allegiance?", "which do you feel more?", "where is your home?"...

Ghana Flag

My parents are from Agona, but I was born in Kumasi (KNUST hospital), and lived there for the two or so years that I lived in Ghana. At that time, my father worked at the university, and as part of his post got to go to the UK to further his education. He left in 1981 ahead of my mother, my brother and myself, and the rest of us followed the following year.

The plan was for my father to finish the 4 year course and go back to Ghana. Unfortunately, Ghana at that time was experiencing serious political turmoil and had been since early on in its independence. The new government which had been instilled in the early 80's was not a great supporter of the educational establishments, and hence decided to cut much of the funding for its students abroad. This included my father. The decision to remove funding came half way through my fathers course, and he had the choice of either going back home, having waisted the last two years, or continuing on and supporting himself.

He chose the latter, which meant that the course would take considerably longer than initially anticipated. He managed to finish the course, totally self funded but the unfavourable political conditions in Ghana which persisted for a further 2 decades or so, and the opportunities that my father had gained in the UK encouraged him to stay. 27 years on from the migration, my family are still living in the same town.

Since then, the politics in Ghana has improved considerably, however that time away from "home" had an affect on many Ghanaians, many of which left the country around that time, and didn't return. So a whole generation of young Ghanaians were brought up outside of Ghana, and all had different experiences.

But what experiences were they? How did that affect them? Having spent most of my life outside of Ghana, can I really call myself Ghanaian? Being a black man who wasn't born in the UK, can I really call myself British? These are questions I didn't even think about, let alone think were important until I was faced with them from others.

While living in Japan, one of the questions I was often asked was "Where are you from", an obvious question. However, the answer "I'm from the UK" wouldn't often satisfy their curiosity. I could hear the gears turning in their brains while they were probably thinking "But you're black, you can't be from the UK". I would tell them that I was born in Ghana, and grew up in the UK, which would put them at ease, but that didn't really solve the issue. To them, someone from the UK was white, probably blond haired, blue eyed, tall...That wasn't me. Little did they know that there were lots of people like me, or more accurately, lots of people that didn't match their stereotypical images.

More recently, when running a project with a group of Iraqi students, one of them told me "I didn't know that there were black people in England" to which I answered, "yeah, there's quite a few...". And this was the comment from an extremely well educated, (probably privately educated) and insightful young teenager.

So the rest of the world (mostly the non-Western world) tells me that I can't be British, largely because what they have been taught by the western media mostly, tells them that a black person can't be British. In the UK, and the USA and other Western nations, people are accepting that non-white people can be nationals (I'm talking more of societal acceptance and not legal acceptance). The problem is, the rest of the world hasn't caught up.

But hey, Ghana is my home? I'll always be accepted there right? Yea, I still class myself as Ghanaian, but a Ghanaian that only spent 2 of his 28 year in Ghana, the first two years at that? A Ghanaian, that can speak better Japanese than Twi (The main Ghanaian language)?

I went back to Ghana shortly after my year in Japan, and I fit in perfectly, as long as I kept my mouth shut. For if I talked, even if it was in my poor broken Twi that I attempted as much as I could, they would see through my guise, and identify me as a foreigner. A foreigner in "my own" country. To be honest, even though I felt that way, it wasn't other Ghanaians that told me that I wasn't Ghanaian. They never did. They never even suggested it. It was mostly me that felt that I couldn't be Ghanaian, because of my inadequacies as a Ghanaian. This was from comparing myself to my image of what a Ghanaian was. Ghanaian's speak Twi (as well as all the other Ghanaian languages), Ghanaians have lived in Ghana for most of their life, and Ghanaian's don't have to try to be Ghanaian. I don't pass on any of these.

The only things that make me Ghanaian are: the fact that I was born there; and that I have Ghanaian parents. That should be enough, but is it? What makes a person a certain nationality? Is it their place of birth? The place they grew up? The place they attended secondary school? The place they spent most of their life? Whether their mother tongue is the language of that nation? A combination of the above? Or maybe there are degrees of Ghanaianness, or Britishness depending on which of the above points you can tick off.

Or maybe it's just how you feel. That simple. When I was growing up in my parents house in Slough, I was always led to believe that I was Ghanaian, and that Ghana was my home, despite everything that I felt, which was confusing.

It took me a while to come to terms with who I was, but when I did, it was like a weight being lifted off my shoulders. Before, I felt like I should feel an allegiance to one place, like it was my home, like I had been there forever, but I don't know how that feels. I don't know what it feels like to have lived in a country all my life, to have people like me all around me, to solidify my notions of self. I don't know what it's like to feel sense of pride when a national anthem sounds, or when a flag is raised.

The world is creating more and more people like me. It didn't used to be like that, but with globalization, the minority of people that don't quite have that sense of grounding, is getting larger. There are more and more people moving around, living all over the place, being born here, living there, and settling somewhere else, and repeating the cycle with others somewhere totally different. The world is getting smaller.

I'm British Ghanaian. I still feel that I'm not enough of either to be counted as any, but I'm a bit of both, and always will be. I'll sing my own anthem, and raise my own flag.

My Flag