Next Stop; Ghana!


In all my years as a travel writer, I have never anticipated a journey as much as I have for my journey to Ghana, West Africa. I will be taking my first steps on the African continent but this is an extra special trip for many other reasons. I will be on assignment for Ebony Magazine , covering preliminary activities for Homecoming 2019, which is the historic commemoration of the African Diaspora returning to Africa exactly 400 years after the first recorded landing of a slave ship in Virginia. Thanks to the efforts of The Adinkra Group, a cultural resource organization, I will meet the President of Ghana, Nana Akufo Addo at his official residence, Jubilee House. I will also meet Chiefs and Queen Mothers in Kumasi, Cape Coast and Accra. If that's not enough excitement, I will have my DNA revealed by sponsor African Ancestry at the Cape Coast Castle, which was the main British hub for the horrific transatlantic slave trade from 1665-1807. Ghana was the first African nation to declare independence from a European colony in 1957 and the country's significance for African Americans is boundless. I will be sampling the Ghanaian dishes red red, kenkey and fried fish, banku and tillapia and especially, kelewele.  I'll be dancing to afro beat at clubs and also taking in the local art scene at the Chale Wote Festival.  In other words, I will be embracing as much of Ghanaian life as possible. Please stay tuned.





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Puerto Rico's Taino Culture

Image
The original inhabitants of the Caribbean region of North America were the Arawak, Taino and Carib  native peoples.  The Tainos are a subgroup of the Arawaks and are recognized as the founders of the island of Boriken or Puerto Rico.  These were the people who offered a peaceful welcome to Columbus in 1493.  They didn't know the cruelty and violence that would follow his so-called "discovery" of the land that they had cultivated for centuries. Despite official government pronouncements that the Taino have been killed off by the massacres and slavery that followed in Columbus' wake, they live on.  As demonstrated in the photo above by  members of  the Puerto Rico Folklorico Dance & Culture Cultural Cente r, Taino traditions, food and names remain strong. Throughout Puerto Rico, town names like Mayaquez, Utuado and Caquas echo the Taino language as do the musical instrument maracas and hamaca or hammock. Legends of Taino warriors, like Hatuey, who ...
Read more

Traveling Through A Liberian Childhood

Image
I like to explore the world with books as much as I like to actually travel. A well-written narrative can transport you to places that you'd never experience with just superficial details like photos and descriptions. I've been interviewing writers about the criteria they use to select books for Summer reading and it made me think about my own general reading criteria. As a journalist, I'm really drawn to biographies, autobiographies and memoirs more than fiction. There's something about using the facts to entice readers into your world that gets me. It's no coincidence that some of my favorite writers--Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Zora Neale Hurston, Hemingway, started out as journalists. So when I glimpsed The House at Sugar Beach , at my local bookstore and saw it was a memoir written by a journalist, it was pretty much a done deal that I would buy it. Now it wasn't only that the author Helene Cooper was a journalist, it was that she was a Liberian journalist chro...
Read more

Switzerland's Fete Des Vignerons

Image
                                               Once every generation, the centuries-old viticultural festival, Fete des Vignerons, unfolds in Vevey, Switzerland. Watching this spectacle of music, dancing, wine and fanciful costumes, felt like I had been transported to something out of a Dr. Seuss story. With a law that prohibits the fest from taking place more than five times in a century, I felt incredibly lucky to witness this celebration of Swiss wine traditions dating back to the 17th century.  Some of the fetes 5,500 performers in costumes strolled the narrow streets of Vevey after a show that featured fairies, bees, royal courts, playing cards and 17th-century wine growers. The performance was in French but the drama transcended language barriers. It's a difficult experience to describe but if I had to sum it up, I would explain it as the magic of Cirque D...
Read more