Welcome Home Black Man

Saul Loeb / AFP/Getty Images

President Obama and his family arrive in Ghana’s capital, Accra, for his first visit to sub-Saharan Africa since taking office. His low-key stop there will last less than 24 hours

By Jeff The Interpreter

This week marks the first visit of what I hope will be many to the continent of Africa. Ghana is the place of his landing. Ghana is significant because it is Ghana where our people were held in the slave dungeons for months awaiting the arrival of British, Portuguese and Spanish ships carrying the raw materials and the raw emotions of a proud people.  The circumstances leading to their capture is immaterial because the tradition of bringing under submission African people for the purpose of servitude is not new in African culture. The reasons could include restitution for crimes against a family to the spoils of war between neighboring tribes.  What made the last place of freedom in the dungeons of horror significant was the indefinite sentence of a permanent removal of a people from their native land with absolutely no hope of returning.  Ghana and many other ports of call along the western coast of Africa was the beginning stage of a journey that lasted over three hundred years.  A journey that scattered African people throughout the lands of North America, South America, Central America, the Caribbean and Europe, yet when all other countries were giving up the slave trade and in some way assimilating African people in to their culture.  It was the United States that instituted social, educational, mental, cultural and legal bondage.  The United States that would sanction laws and policies that would maintain status and access based on color.

Now the son of a native born African father and a European mother, who is married to a descendant of African American slaves will touch the soil of the motherland and bring with him the authority of the highest office of the most powerful nation in the world.  Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States will represent the closure of the circle of life.  When he talks to the African people he will do so as a person with African and European Blood.  He will do so as beneficiary of the blood, sweat and tears of many who had to die for his life to be acknowledged.  When he stands on the soil of Africa, the souls of millions of Africans who choose death rather than be made a slave along the trans-Atlantic slave route will breathe a sigh of a homecoming. When President Obama shakes the hand of the Ghana President, millions of Africans and African Americans who were raped, disfigured, dismembered, castrated, mutilated and killed will be reunited with their African legacy.  When President Obama puts on the traditional Kente cloth robes, former African Kings and Queens will regain their rightful place that was stolen from them.

Welcome home Black man, breath again the air of Africa as a King. Welcome home Black man; dance the dance of our forefathers. Welcome home Black man, eat the food and drink the drink of freedom.  Welcome home Black man, welcome home!