Should diasporans return to their ancestral lands?
In September 2018, Ghana President Nana Akufo-Addo proclaimed the ‘Year of Return, Ghana 2019’ for Ghanaians in the Diaspora.
The programme “gives a fresh impetus to the quest to unite Africans on the continent with their brothers and sisters in the diaspora.” [See ‘2019: Year of return for African Diaspora,’ by Benjamin Tetteh in the ‘Africa Renewal’ edition of Dec. 2018-March 2019].
President Akufo-Addo said “we know of the extraordinary achievements and contributions they [Africans in the diaspora] made to the lives of Americans, and it is important that this symbolic year (2019) 400 years later, we commemorate them.”
That refers to the 400th anniversary of the “arrival of Africans (as slaves) in the-then English colonies at Point Comfort, Virginia, in 1619.”
As ‘Gold Coast,’ Ghana was a major hub for the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
The Nana Akuffo call for the return of Africans in the diaspora isn’t new. Following Gold Coast’s independence from British rule in 1957, successive Ghanaian leaders have initiated policies to attract Africans living abroad.
In his maiden independence address, Dr Kwame Nkrumah “sought to frame Africa’s liberation around the concept of Africans all over the world coming back to Africa.
“Nkrumah ... wanted to utilize the services and skills of African-Americans,” said Henry Louis Gates Jr., Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard.
In year-2000, Ghana enacted a law on dual citizenship, allowing people of Ghanaian origin who had acquired citizenship abroad to take up Ghanaian citizenship as well.
Fair enough... or so it seems!
But, the 64,000-dollar question is: should people in the Diaspora return ‘home?’ Or should they return to their ‘ancestral lands?’
Look at it this way... People in the Diaspora already have homes wherever they’re. In My Book of Things, the correct way to put it is that such people should return to their ancestral lands to establish new homes...
Secondly: what’s the rationale for wanting Diasporans to return to their ancestral lands, pray?
Most of them are already well-established abroad for generations, from the Atlantic Slave Trade days which started in the mid-17th Century!
Besides – and a BIG BESIDES, here – many Diasporans have been remitting untold billions in hard currency to their ancestral motherlands annually: a Big-Up for the Diaspora and Diasporans!
Tanzania’s Foreign Affairs Minister told Parliament on April 17, 2018 that Tanzanians living in the Diaspora remitted a total of $2.283 billion to ‘their motherland’ between 2013 and 2017: an average of $456.6 million annually! [See ‘Tanzanians abroad send home Sh1trillion yearly;’ The Citizen: April 18, 2018].
So, why kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, pray? Why, indeed?
Not only have the ‘Tanzanian geese in the Diaspora’ been laying golden eggs in the form of the legendary Yankee dollar... Working through their ‘Diaspora Council of Tanzanians in America’ (Dicota), Tanzanians in the US have, for example, been donating assorted medical supplies, and sending teams of medical experts, to Tanzania to beef up the country’s healthcare system... [Vide supra...].
This is to say nothing of the 20 containers-full of school furniture that became infamous in Dar as the ‘Makonda-20 Containers...’ Et cetera; et cetera... Cheers, Diasporans!
