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Aperture

Ghana Obscura

“Small Rally, Accra.” 1964. Townspeople, watching and listening with rapt attention, sit in a semicircle, oriented toward a speaker just outside the frame. It’s a mixed group: uniformed high-school girls in sleeveless white dresses, men in traditional woven cotton cloth worn toga-style, others in long sleeves and slacks with a cigarette clasped between their lips. Children of all ages sit, squat, and crouch on the swept-dust floor. A juvenile rebel stares at the photographer—Paul Strand. A group of women sit on a bench in front. Signs pinned to their headscarves say “C.P.P.”: Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party.

The scene is an early glimpse at Nkrumah’s ongoing project of building a modern Ghana, a new country that piqued the attention of seemingly the whole world. Where the Cold War thinking held countries hostage to the narrow interest of Western white powers, Nkrumah and his peers in the so-called third world were putting forward an alternative global vision. Where Western leaders and their security details were cracking down on political protest and minority rights, Nkrumah himself embodied a continuation of the Pan-African struggle forged in the streets of Harlem, Philadelphia, and London.

It was easy, then, for many Black people in the diaspora to imagine Ghana as a home. Its name harkens back to the idea of a great African empire; its invitation to create a new African presence was compelling. This was the chance for people to go “back” to the motherland, roll up their sleeves, and help build the future. From Richard (1954) and Maya Angelou’s (1986) to Ekow Eshun’s (2005) and Saidiya Hartman’s (2007), writers and artists from the diaspora, having made journeys to Ghana, have composed distinctive travelogues about this possibility of a different world. They came to explore and see where they might fit in. This place of ideal perfection would provide a familial embrace. “We had come to Africa from our varying starting places and with myriad motives, gaping with hungers, some more ravenous than others,” Angelou writes in , “and we had little tolerance for understanding being ignored.”

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