Maya Angelou wasn’t the first African-American to find comfort and voice in Ghana – a land liberated by and operated by black people.
W.E.B. Du Bois became a citizen of that West African country in 1963, after years of being hounded by the U.S. government for refusing to put Cold War expediency over the liberation of Africans and African-Americans. He and his wife, Shirley Graham, became citizens there after the U.S. government refused to renew their passports after a visit there. Ghana also inspired actor and civil rights activist Julian Mayfield, as well as writers such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and countless others.
That country shined as a beacon of possibilities for African Americans in the late 1950s and early 1960s when Kwame Nkrumah, its president and later its prime minister, guided it through its liberation from its colonizer, Great Britain, in 1957.
Nkrumah was a fervent advocate of pan-Africanism, a movement grounded in the idea that people of African descent should work together for political and economic progress worldwide – and many U.S. blacks saw Ghana as the country that they could have created if not for the disruption of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the instability that it wrought on Africans on that continent.
“For African-American expatriates, Ghana’s black power was multifaceted,” wrote Kevin Gaines in the article “African-American Expatriates in Ghana and the Black Radical Tradition.” Gaines’ article was published in 1999 in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society.
“They experienced Ghana – and Africa – variously as a political sanctuary; as a haven for professional and technical opportunities unfettered by racism and, more important, as the last best hope for democracy and human freedom.”
Yet that’s not exactly how Angelou came to know Ghana – a country where, according to some estimates, more than 3,000 African-American expatriates now live.
She came there by way of Cairo, Egypt, where she lived with South African dissident lawyer Vusumzi Make, and where she became associate editor of the Arab Observer, a small, radical newspaper, from 1961-62. She moved to Ghana in 1962 after her
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MAYA ANGELOU AS JOURNALIST
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