Being A Minority in Ghana

By: Adrienne Green 

Everywhere in the world there are people who look like they belong and people who don’t.

 In Ghana, it was obvious to the many people that we encountered that my nineteen Caucasian colleagues were not indigenous to the city of Accra or any of the other places that we traveled.

They suffered the escalated bargaining prices, received the quizzical looks from small children, and faced barriers when interacting with the people of Accra because they stood out.

But, many of the Ghanaian people didn’t know exactly what to make of me. At first glance I think my dark skin, long braids and ability to blend into the crowd deceived them. If only for the few moments before I spoke, I looked like I belonged.

Though my place within their culture was always fleeting, it was interesting to see how people would approach me compared to my classmates.

People approached me speaking in their native dialects, extending hands for handshakes I did not know, and asking for directions to places I had never been. They would always quickly uncover that I was in fact a foreigner, and quickly that insider treatment would change to something much more distant. Native Ghanaians called me something that I had never been referred to before—Black American.

Although it made sense that they would not call me ‘African American’ since I wasn’t born anywhere near their continent of Africa, it still sounded strange.

 Traditional wrap for carrying children. Photo taken at African dance practice.

I didn’t expect to fit in. We were warned during our orientation that it would be one of the first times in our lives that we would feel different from those that surrounded us. But, I didn’t believe that. I was used to being different my whole life.

Being an African American woman, I understood what it meant to always feel like a “minority”. I had always assumed that because of my African American heritage, going to Ghana would be like a symbolic homecoming where I would discover some lost part of my history. That didn’t exactly happen. And after arriving in Ghana I had an uncomfortable feeling that despite the fact that I don't physically stand out like my classmates, my place as a Black American came with a lot of stigmas. 

After having many conversations with Ghanaian citizens I found that some held very stereotypical views of the Black American community, and I had to defend questions about those negative ideas. I think that the media in Ghana has a lot to do with the way African American people are portrayed to other black and brown people across the diaspora. Interestingly enough, they felt that American media did not give a fully accurate representation of Africa.

Sadly it was rarely discussed that some Ghanaian people knew very little about the African American community outside of pop culture and negative media coverage. But that is similar to the fact that American media broadcasts little about Ghana/Africa outside of poverty or conflict. The lack of a variety of presentation for black men and women as well as the African population perpetuate negative stereotypes for each group. Ideas of the poor and destitute African or the deviant African American stem from the types of images that we are exposed to. 

Media and Society play an integral role in how other cultures come to interpret people when they interact. The portrayal of Africans in the media affected how I sought a relationship with the Ghanaian culture, and heightened how different I felt from the people I encountered and how different they thought they were from me.  

After traveling to Ghana and returning to America I feel that I have learned so much about myself and about how people relate to each other. I now recognize in a more impactful way that the only way you can truly identify or empathize with another group of people is to admit that the things you knew and the assumptions you made might not have been true. I also learned that the way in which someone identifies is much more complex than the location on their birth certificate and

Call and Post: Blood and tradition

By Fernando Venegas Traba (Chile)

One of the main things that the general public, and a pretty respectable amount of journalists thinks about our profession, is that we have to be objective. We should check the facts, organize the information and communicate it to the public. Well, I have never agreed with this point of view, don´t get me wrong, I believe that we must be accurate, that we must pursue the facts to built a good non-fiction narrative that gives an idea of what is going on in our societies, that we must contrast sources,but I don´t think that objectitivity is possible.

Basically because we are always making decisions, when we choose to cover this instead of that, when we choose to use a source over another one, when we took a photo, we use an adjective or even when we decide the headline, we are, at all time, using our own experience and subjectivity. 

This doesn´t mean that we are blind, or we are slaves of our own perceptions, what it means is that we are always, talking from somewhere, from our experience, culture, religion (or non religion), values and even political point of view. When we acknowladge this, we can start to compromise, to take a stand, not to lie, but to be real honest in our approach to reality.

Constance Harper (Associate Publisher/Editor)

This is what I saw in our visit to the Call & Post, a niche newspaper, founded in 1916 by the inventor Garret Morgan, centered in informing the black community of Cleveland, from a black community point of view, and they are blunt honestly in recognizing this.

As you may have deducted, by seeing the photographies and reading the texts at this blog, we are quite a colorful group, and in the day of our visit, the questions and subjects that we rise were pretty direct, most of them not very politically correct in a society like this one (U.S.), but importants and necesaries to understand the culture and the focus of this publication. Racial issues, editorial focus, salaries, subjectivity and objectivity were discuss by our group and a number of the staff at the Call & Post. It was at least refreshing to see the honesty and how up front they were with their answers. They declare themselves as a commit newspaper, interpreting the reality from an african american point of view, because it is necessary, because the history of the USA has been hard with the black community, and is part of their job to give voice and opinion to those, that in many times, has been abused or forgot by the goverment or the society.

Felicia Haney, Journalist C&P

It was really interesting, and certainlly makes sense that in a place like Cleveland, with a population integrated by a 51% african american, the Call & Post is a very important media. With a circulation of 20 thousand, this newspaper reviews al of the topics that this particular community needs to know, and also, the ones that they are interested in.

This paper is made of flesh and spirit, of real truth, not only the one supported by facts, but the one that is achieved when you are clear in your point of view, in your way to see the world. The Call & Post is ink and blood.