By Dr. Halifu Osumare | Special To The OBSERVER

As my husband Gene Howell and I arrived in mid-October last year in Accra, Ghana, we were greeted at Kotoka International Airport by a huge ad for Heaven beauty care products – Africa in the 21st century. It pictured a Ghanaian man in a traditional dashiki and a trade bead bracelet and a Ghanaian woman wearing a straight wig and western clothes, with words reading “Akwaaba (Welcome).”

This became a symbol of the changes and enduring traditions awaiting us since our last visit to Ghana 12 years prior. My husband and I, as African Americans, have a great interest in the motherland.

I launched my book “The Hiplife in Ghana: West African Indigenization of Hip-Hop,” at the University of Ghana, Legon, in 2012 after my 2008 six-month Fulbright Fellowship research trip there. Now, I was eager to see not only the changes in the hiplife (a mix of highlife and hip-hop) music scene, but the general shifts in modern Ghanaian life. We were on a two-week trip to reconnect with colleagues and friends; we then would go to Nigeria for a major dance festival in Lagos.

I had made arrangements with Dr. Terry Ofosu, the Head of the department of dance studies at UG-Legon, to meet us at the airport. Once through the perfunctory immigration and customs areas, he drove us to our apartment suite in Madina, a suburb of Accra, not far from UG.

Our suite at the Mayama Apartments had a living room with a kitchenette and utensils, complete with refrigerator, microwave, and a two-burner electric stove. We were happy there was a Melco market just across the street to stock our fridge with some staples. Melco is like Target, with everything from groceries to appliances and household goods, rivaling the older Shop-Rite markets that usually are only found in the Ghanaian malls for the high-end buyer.

Gene was glad we had a modern wide-screen television programmed, not only with local stations to follow the Ghanaian presidential election, but also loaded with his coveted YouTube so he could watch Steven Colbert’s latest take on Trump and our own then-upcoming election. Our bedroom had a nice king-size bed and an adequate bathroom. Our accommodations in 2024 definitely were a welcomed upgrade from the small room we had rented before.

I was pleased to see Ghana keeping up with international standards of the global Airbnb market. Even with frequent power-outages, Mayama had a huge generator that kicked in within a minute’s time. Now in our elder years, we had all the American creature comforts we had hoped for.

Black Music And Food in Ghana

As Dr. Ofosu introduced us to new eateries and clubs in Accra, the capital city, and its suburbs, examples of continuity and change continued. Chez Afrique, our favorite restaurant/club featuring live music, was still there in East Legon. It is owned by a Ghanaian woman and her African American husband, Michael Williams. We were treated to a jamming local highlife/reggae band that featured traditional drumming, as I ate banku (fermented cornmeal and cassava) with light fish soup, while Gene stayed with his more familiar fried fish and French fries. 

Dr. Ofosu took us to a new East Legon restaurant, Dstrkt24, on Lagos Avenue with the motto “Your district, your rules!” This is an exclusive restaurant catering to Western tastes, including serving cappuccinos and cocktails like mojitos. There’s also a separate section for young people smoking tobacco from hookahs brought to their dining tables. Satisfying the Western palate and sensibilities, Dstrkt24 offers a modern upscale ambience with polite, fast customer service.

Traditional Ghanaian servers at restaurants and “chop” bars are not known for their timely and cheery attentive service. During this trip we were definitely getting a sense of Ghanaians’ adjustment to Generation Z’s orientation toward global Western tastes.

We also noticed the preponderance of KFC fast-food places with their fried chicken with spicy Jolof rice, a nod to a familiar West African side dish. Change and tradition are consumed side by side in modern-day Ghana.

Dr. Ofosu’s friendship with the manager of Accra’s Plus 233 Jazz Bar and Grill got us into this large open-air club for free. Featured that night was the Bessa Simons Band, led by a former member of Osibisa, one of Ghana’s most internationally known highlife bands. 

I first heard Osibisa in the Bay Area club scene in the 1980s, but they became nationally famous when their music became the soundtrack in the 1973 “Super Fly T.N.T.” movie sequel.

Keyboardist Simons’ musical performance was impeccable that night, including three singers spanning traditional highlife to R&B. They covered classics by James Brown and the Temptations, as well as the currently trending West African Afrobeats. We were taken on a sonic journey from Accra to Harlem, from Motown to Lagos and Abidjan, Ivory Coast, all in one evening. 

The Ghanaian musicians demonstrated Black American music’s African roots and its influence on West African pop music. Ghanaians are adept at all the music genres of the Black Atlantic, which I had first recognized when researching hip-hop in 2008. I have since dubbed it “the arc of mutual inspiration.”

One of the most important clubs we visited showing a major shift since we were last in Ghana was Rockz Waakye, the current eatery of Reggie Rockstone, the “godfather” of Ghanaian hiplife music. Twelve years ago, he was running his club The Office, with a full bar and VIP room. Economics and the shifting music scene has him now focusing on a simple food service, featuring waakye, Ghanaian rice and beans originating among the Hausa people in Northern Ghana.

But Rockstone still has a mixtape of diasporic Black music blasting on the sound system for dancing, featuring hiplife and old-school R&B. Having grown up between Ghana, London, and New York, he is schooled in a wide array of Black music. His multinational upbringing is responsible for him returning to his homeland in the mid-’90s to help originate a unique Ghanaian form of hip-hop, rapping in his indigenous Twi language of the Ashanti.

My book features him on the cover, so when Gene and I arrived at his new 3 Rockz Waakye club, I bestowed another copy on him, as his sound system rocked the house with some of his original hiplife tracks from back in the day.

Economics And Politics

I was not surprised that Rockstone had to shift his business focus. In 2012, the year of our last visit, the exchange rate for $1 was five Ghanaian cedis, and in 2024 inflation had shifted the rate to 16 Ghanaian cedis. Our U.S. money went a lot further now, but this does not bode well for Ghanaians.

Uber had entered the Ghanaian market, and we could command a rideshare on our phones to go way across town for next to nothing, eliminating the usual haggling we had to engage with regular taxi drivers just a decade ago.

But we soon found out one of the general sources for the economic downturn: illegal gold mining. Ghana’s pre-independence name was the Gold Coast, because it has the source of the world’s largest gold deposits, making it ripe for continued global exploitation of its resources – exploitation that accompanied the Atlantic slave trade.

The current issue around gold is known locally as “Galamsey,” or illegal mining of gold that is not only exploiting local labor, but is polluting the rivers with mercury that is used in the gold refining process. Ghanaian youths have organized national protests carrying polluted brown water in bottles to demonstrate the literal poisoning of its people. They have been met with mass arrests.

Student activism has generated global internet hashtags such as #FreetheCitizens and #StopGalamsey. The central issue is small illegal miners who dig shallow holes across greater farmland near riverways. When these holes are not filled back in, the quality of the arable land decreases. According to Ghana’s Ministry of Land and Resources, mercury used in the process is polluting rivers throughout the country.

On the other end of the supply chain, gold has risen in price by 40% and Ghana is Africa’s top gold producer and the world’s sixth largest. Hence, the issue of European exploitation of the colonial Gold Coast continues in the wider global 21st century gold economy, which now includes China and the Middle East. In the process, Ghana is being poisoned and reaping little profit. Hence, the historic exploitation of Africa’s rich natural resources continues in new forms such as Galamsey.

African Americans And Ghana

We made two side trips outside Accra. One was to my African American friend Harriet Kaufman and her Jamaican husband Kawku. They have a five-acre plot of land near the small town of Otimpoku, in the Akosombo Volta River region, right on the river.

They represent African diasporans who have chosen to live in Ghana, bought land, and are contributing to the economy. This trend stems from Ghana’s early days of independence in 1957 during the ascendancy of its first president, Kwame Nkrumah, a Pan-Africanist. Nkrumah was actually educated in the United States at Lincoln University, an HBCU. Nkrumah invited several African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans to help him in building the new nation, including W. E. B. DuBois, who spent his final years in Ghana.

Ghana always has been among the most welcoming of West African countries, and this historical trend built to a crescendo in 2019 when its then-president, Akuffo-Addo, proclaimed it “The Year of Return,” commemorating the 400th anniversary of the first recorded arrival of enslaved Africans in what is now Virginia in the United States. 

The proclamation aimed to unite Africans on the continent with their diaspora counterparts and to encourage African Americans to settle and invest in Ghana, just as the Kaufmans have done. For their long-term dedication to Ghana, they and 126 other diasporans received dual citizenship with a Ghanaian passport during “The Year of Return.”

The Kaufmans have created a bed and breakfast retreat, Black Star African Lions, on their land with individual chalets for visitors, a model several African diasporans have replicated. The name reclaims Marcus Garvey’s maritime journeys on his Black Star ship, with Ghana as one of his port stops.

Every time we visit them we go to the Volta Hotel restaurant at Akosombo. It overlooks the Volta Dam, which supplies the country with electricity. Nkrumah built it just before the coup that ousted him in 1966.

The hotel balcony view includes the lush green Volta River banks and the hillside on which Nkrumah built a mansion home, which current presidents still use – another example of the historical continuity that Ghana maintains.

Our second trip was to Kumasi, the capital of the Ashanti, the country’s largest ethnic group, who the British had to conquer in the early 19th century to colonize Ghana. Although only 155 miles from Accra, the trip to Kumasi took six hours on an air-conditioned VIP bus. We were entertained by a wide-screen television playing a local soap opera in Twi and Pidgin English. Kumasi was definitely worth the long bus ride because it reinforced Ghanaian history for us. We visited two important museums: Prempeh II and Manhiya Palace. In the first gallery we had a private docent-led tour by a young Ghanaian woman named Yaa, who was very knowledgeable and personable. When she realized that we knew some Ashanti history already, she gave us an even more informative tour regarding the eight tribes that make up the Akan Clan, to which the Ashanti belong.

The tour continued with us viewing several well-known Ashanti artifacts. We viewed and learned about the autumpans or “talking” drums that are tuned to the Twi language and can carry specific messages.

We also observed some ancient kente cloth woven with specific proverbs. The strips of kente cloth that African American students often wear over their robes at United States college graduations have a long and significant history. Traditional Ghanaian culture is filled with symbolism and wisdom that has not been forgotten.

The second museum, Manhiya Palace, was built by Prempeh II, the 14th Ashanti king, or Asantehene. His uncle, Prempeh I, had been exiled by the British after the final Anglo-Ashanti war in 1900. This museum has a palace in the back that is the residence of the current Asantehene, the current high chief of the Ashanti, Osei Tutu II.

The museum itself has wax figures of each of the former Asantehenes accompanied by memorabilia associated with each. Manhiya Palace also includes its famous woman warrior, Yaa Asantewa, who actually led the Ashanti army in that last war against the British. The Ashanti are very proud of their kingdom and history, and it is on full display at both museums we visited.

The trip to Kumasi steeped us in traditional Ghana, which serves as the foundation for the shifting, changing cultural dynamics brought on by globalization, the internet, Western style and tastes, and multinational capitalism. Gene and I realized that change and continuity are the bookends for African countries struggling to hold onto their cultural footing in the midst of sweeping 21st century influences. Ghana is no exception.

Airlines That Fly Directly To Accra

American, Delta, United

Recommended Tourist Agencies

Ghana Must Go Tour: ghanamustgotours.com 

Landtours Ghana Ltd.: tourradar.com/o/landtours-ghana-ltd

Ghana Association of Sacramento

Facebook: facebook.com/GhanaSac1993

Ghana celebrates its independence this year March 5-7.