"Odo nyera ne fie kwan." It's such a simple proverb in Twi, but it tells so much about my life and the journey I have been on. It means, "Love never gets lost on its way home."
Becoming a Baha'i in the summer of 1979 when I was 17 was the end of a five year spiritual search. It was the feeling of coming home after a long journey, but the irony was that there was no home to return to.
That summer, I went to work for a family friend in Hawaii for the summer. I saved my money from my part time job for my plane ticket and left for Moloka'i a week after school was out. Working at a charcoal factory was tough, but I loved it because I was finally seeing the world. When I was a kid, my favorite book we had at home was this huge atlas. I would lay sprawled out on the floor in the living room, turning the pages and looking at all the countries, planning my big adventure when I was old enough to go out and see the world. Moloka'i was the first step, learning about different cultures and a way of life that was completely new to me. Everything was going great until July of that summer when I found out through my boss that my parents had split up and my mother moved out. They didn't want to tell me because it would ruin my trip. I called home and asked what was going on, and they told me that things were not good, and now that I knew I was to come home immediately and help with the chaos. I said no because I had made a commitment to stay until the end of the summer as I had planned. Frankly, I felt that if it wasn't important enough to tell me the news, then it wasn't important enough for me to rush home and clean up the mess. When I came back in September, I walked through the front door of our house and everything had changed. It felt so dark inside that house. It was empty and cold, as if its spirit had moved away. All that was left was a place to sleep and eat. Home was gone.
My parents agreed that my father was supposed to raise the three of us in that house, but he didn't have the maturity to understand what that would take. His new-found freedom meant that he was never around and not really interested in the responsibility of children. My mother was focused on finding her own way, so focused on herself that she left her children to fend for themselves. My older brother moved north to Humboldt in northern California to get away from the fallout from the continuing battle so no one was there except me to keep my younger brother on the right path. The divorce ate up any money they had left between them, so all hopes to go to Dartmouth vanished. Instead, I got a job at a fast food restaurant, took over running the house and made sure my younger brother stayed in school. I knew as a matter of survival I still had to get a degree, so I enrolled at San Diego State University down the street because it was public college and I could afford the fees. Life suddenly flipped upside down and became about self-preservation, so dreams like Dartmouth would have to wait.
At 17, I assumed my parents would be there to keep us safe and the responsibilities of adulthood would be further down the road. But instead, I was the parent and everything I thought I could rely on was gone. With fear came anger, because I had been robbed by the two people I needed to protect me. I learned that needing anyone would only end in heartbreak, so I decided I would only need myself and I would protect my younger brother, making sure he had a place to go for guidance and support. I was so busy running the house, working, keeping up with my own education and watching out for Scott, that I fooled myself into believing I had no time to let anyone in. I kept my head down and just kept going. Even while I was living in Ghana on a scholarship, I still felt guilty. I didn't deserve it. I wrote my brother often to make sure he was studying and getting good grades, but the panic would set in at night, lying awake and worrying if he was OK while I was gone.
When I came back from Ghana, it dawned on me how independent I had become. My father didn't like it and two years later he kicked me out of the house as I approached my senior year at the university. He is an uneducated man, and felt threatened that his sons could potentially be more successful than he was. He assumed that sabotage could be the means to make sure his fear never became realized. So at 21 I had to find an apartment, feed myself, pay the rent and somehow get my degree done. But that was no problem for me, right? That elusive word "home" would have to wait with my dreams because I had to survive. Home would have to come later.
The sense of being home didn't appear again in my life until the summer I first stayed at Uncle Prince's house. I was 48 years old. Each morning as I would eat my breakfast in Brafoyaw, Auntie Aggie would make sure to come to dote on me like one of her own, asking me how I slept and how the food was. She would ask me, "Yaw, are you happy?" In the evenings, Uncle Prince and I would sit and talk for hours in the courtyard and he would always ask me right before I went to bed, "Yaw, are you content here with my family?" These two kind people actually wanted to know if I was happy. I had never thought about an answer to that question because no one had ever asked me. It was uncomfortable for me to be taken care of. I didn't know how to let anyone do that, but I decided to open my heart and stop running away. I learned that they really loved me and would never hurt me or leave me. I had found home and I wasn't about to let go of it ever again. It was their love that ignited the idea of moving my life to Ghana.
Two years ago, Uncle Prince and I were glued to the television each night watching the local news and "Ghana's Most Beautiful," sort of like a beauty contest but showcasing the music, languages, traditional dress, dance and traditions of each of the regions of Ghana. I kept seeing ads running from a real estate development company building homes in gated communities. I had a long talk with Alex and Uncle Prince about the prospects of building a house independently in Cape Coast, but they advised me that unless I was living there full time it was too risky, because I would not be able to stay on top of the sub-contractors hired to carry out the building process. There had to be another solution.
Later when I went to Accra with Sammy, we stayed at my brother Akwasi Osei's house in Roman Ridge and we found out the developer's office was in walking distance just down the road in Kotobabi. So Sammy and I went to speak with them, and I was really impressed. There was no hard sell, no pushy pitch to buy. Best of all, this method of building communities was tailored for expatriates who can't be in the country to supervise building. They would also provide a 10 year mortgage so that I could make monthly payments.
The terrain changed as we drove along, getting greener with mango orchards and banana farms, and the rain forest getting higher and more dense as we drove along. We watched the Aburi Hills rise from the plains as the fog rolled down the hills and into the mango orchards. It reminded me of how beautiful the campus and surroundings were at KNUST when I was a student in 1982. The town of Dodowa is small and clean, and the Ga-Dangme people are friendly. It was so beautiful that I lost my cool. I blurted out in the car, "THIS IS IT!"
We drove to the site where the community is being built, and it hit me. I loved it here. I was excited to think that I could have a house here with the view of the hills and trees each morning, and where I could live in the countryside and have a tropical garden, grow orchids and plumeria flowers, and provide a home where my boys and my grandchildren can come stay as long as they like. This would be home.
We then drove to Katamanso in Adenta, which is part of Accra, in order to check the construction of houses that were almost completed. It was exactly what I was looking for, so after a couple of days of praying and consulting with Akwasi, Alex, Sammy and Uncle Prince I decided to sign a contract.
When I got back to Los Angeles, I started to think about the Ga-Dangme and Krobo people who will be my neighbors. I realized I knew very little about the them because almost all of my studies had to do with the Akan peoples. The Ga-Dangme and Krobo were not Akan. The Akan trace their heritage from the great Asante migration out of the kingdom of Ghana originally in Mali, while the Ga-Dangme and Krobo have an incredible story of how they found the Accra plains, migrating from areas east of Ghana. It brought me back to the question of home. Who were these people and why did they decide to settle in the Accra plains after a long journey across the continent of Africa?
The Krobo people along with the Ga, the Ga-Dangme and the Shai peoples are groups who share the common languages of Krobo and Ga, and live in the Greater Accra areas of Osu in Accra, Shai east of Dodowa where my house is, La, Ningo, Kpone, Krobo south of Koforidua and the Aburi Hills, Osudoku, and Prampram along the beach east of Accra on the way to the Togo border.
Anthropologists have several origin theories for these ethnic groups, including a possibility that they descended from peoples of the Upper Volta River and even as far north from areas of what is now Niger. Genetic studies link them closely with the Akan peoples of Asante, Central and Western Regions of Ghana, however this is not conclusive with regards to origin since the Ga, Krobo and Akan have intermarried for centuries.
Their own oral tradition tells a more fascinating story. They believe that they had descended from two out of ten of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel - the Dan and Naphtali. Descending from those two tribes, they crossed into Egypt, then Ethiopia, then into Sudan intermarrying with the people referenced in Biblical history as the Nubians. They then moved on, and after years and years of migrating across Central Africa they finally settled in Ile-Ife, the spiritual homeland of the Yoruba people of western Nigeria. It was temporary though, and they continued moving west crossing through what is now Benin and Togo, where some settled and integrated with the Ewe people who occupy the area east of the Volta River and Togo. The remaining groups continued their migration and found their home in the Accra plains and the land just north along the foot of the Aburi Hills in the Shai forest which includes where my house is in Dodowa.
An anthropologist did a study comparing the Ga language with the Jewish Aramaic language, and the results are incredible. More than 70 words in each language are identical with the same pronunciation and meaning. Also, many traditions such as the rite of male circumcision and the timing of the rituals are identical.
Here's more of the story from my brother Freddie Agamah.
"My people, the Ewes, also believe their roots go back to Israel. I listened to an oral account which drew a relationship between the name of the powerful Yewe cult (an Ewe cult) and Yahweh/Jehovah. An interesting fact about the cult is that members spot ten tribal marks on their faces. That, we were told, stands for the ten commandments. According to the Ewe account, before Ife, they had been in Ethiopia. I found out from a recent Facebook conversation that the name Selase, a popular Ewe name and Selassie (Ethiopian) have similar meanings, and beyond that they share other names and words. The part [of the migration] after Ife is now properly documented. The Krobos and Ewes share a strong brotherhood. The Krobo word for Ewe is 'the friends'. It's all oral and almost impossible to verify, but you can just feel it that there is so much of our history that may not be recovered."
In my experience over the last 32 years with Ghana, I have come to the conclusion that I have no answers. Oral traditions come from somewhere, and they must be important enough to the people that their linguists and their grandmothers felt they had to safeguard them by handing down the stories through generations upon generations. There must be truth to this.
I often wonder about what caused the Ga-Dangme and Krobo to pack up and leave the Middle East, to start a migration that would lead them across a continent. What kept them going, packing up their entire community to continue a walk across Africa that must have spanned generations? Why did they decide to settle for good in the Accra plains, never going back again? The answers will probably never be found. But that's part of the mystery of life - searching for what our hearts are yearning for. I can't wait to get settled in Dodowa and start learning from my neighbors about their history.
For me, my life has been a search for love and a sense of belonging. It's one thing to believe the principles that I do as a Baha'i, that mankind is one and that we are all part of the family of man. But my experience has made my understanding very personal. I have a sense of permanence that I did not grow up with. I have children who have allowed me to take care of them in a way that I was not taken care of, and in doing so they have healed my past. It's not just four walls and a roof; home is a place in the heart shared by the people we love. We aren't here on this earth to go through this journey alone. I'm blessed to have been given this life of mine, and to be sent on a long journey to find my family and my home.
