It’s been said, you can’t go home again, but I beg to differ.  Recently, I had the opportunity to travel on business to Ghana, West Africa for an intensive seven days of work and, when permitted, play. 

West Africa is considered to be the gateway for the slave trade that brought my ancestors across the Atlantic and dropped them off on to the auction blocks of Southern plantations, for a life of arduous and oppressive labor.  Though my extensive mental list of places in the world to see had already checked off China, Japan, Israel, South America, Europe, Mexico and Greenville, South Carolina … that’s another story, I had never been to Africa, the Motherland.  Last month, I departed Chicago with my client, a small entourage of fellow globetrotters, my trusted video camera, and no expectations other than making sure I got all the interviews and footage needed to justify the cost of the trip and to make the post-production process palatable.

As soon as we arrived in London preparing to change planes, I began to see how much this trip was going mean to me and a great many people.  As we waited at the airline gate for our flight south to Accra, the “complexion” of the travelers changed from majority white - those who had flown the first leg of the trip from the States to Europe - to majority black, those who were going from Europe to Africa.

This new congregation consisted of a myriad of black faces, all with stories to tell.  There was a group of African-American college students from Spellman, who were using their Spring Break to travel and study.  Then there were seemly entire families of Africans draped in “bling-bling,” dressed “to the Nine’s” and wearing the latest Western fashions.  This group was loaded with over-stuffed suitcases and boxes that read in bold letters television, microwave, DVD player.  They reminded me of the biblical wise men bearing gifts to a King.  Then there were the respectable elders, dressed from head to toe in bold African regale.  Their attire signaled that they had not been overtaken by the West, neither in mind, body, soul or spirit.

The seven-hour flight would serve as a short bridge between the western world, which I knew, and the African world, which I was about to know.  When my seatmate, a matronly African woman, had difficulty communicating with the flight attendant, I suddenly became a “cultural interpreter,” making sure that both parties sufficiently understood one another.  In many ways, that small act would foreshadow my own personal experiences in Ghana.  There, I would have to reconcile many things: thoughts and emotions, sights and sounds, what I saw behind the camera lens and what I felt in the recesses of my heart.

Through the seven days of touring Elmina and Cape Coast Castles, sites of the original slave trade, visiting schools, and hiking through fishing villages, our days were full and deeply satisfying.  One of the highlights of the trip was watching a special performance of African cultural dancers from a school for the deaf and blind.  Seeing two young blind boys furiously beating on the talking drums and young deaf girls moving in a syncopated motion belied the fact that they could not hear the music, but only “feel” the beat.  

With that dramatic performance, I began to see Africa through a new set of eyes and to feel her through the beat of a different drummer.  Before, I might have said that I heard the drums, but the sound was so faint because I was on a distant shore.  But being there, on the land itself, my heartbeat became synchronized with Africa - not just because she is a cultural homeland, but because she is also a place of spiritual revitalization, a place where the blind can “see” and the deaf can “hear.”

The trip, which was short to begin with, seemed exceptionally abbreviated, as I began to embrace everything the people and places had to offer.  A few days before we prepared to depart, I was already feeling more than a tinge of sadness that I would be leaving my new and ancestral home.

For me, the trip was more than a business engagement, it was profoundly life changing.  I learned by experience, as I visited the villages and took pictures of the hordes of children, who eagerly gathered around me to see their mirror images on a postage size digital camera screen, that it really does take a whole village to raise a child.  Yet, I felt deeply saddened that back “home” in the States, while we have made that proverb our mantra, we have failed to embrace what it really means.

A village denotes community, a place where we know and care for our neighbors, a family where we are our brothers’, our sisters’ and their children’s keeper.  But in the United States, where we increasingly live our lives in isolation from our neighbors and even from those in our own home - blessed by an embarrassment of riches and consumed by a society that fosters addictions of all kinds - we may live in a community, but few of us have community.

One day while walking through a small village, I noticed that all the women had gathered at a “central kitchen” and there was a flurry of activity.  I inquired as to what was going on, and was told that an elderly woman in the village had died.  She was 104 years old, and I was witnessing the community coming together to give the old woman an honorable home going.  Everyone contributed something, whether it was food, money or time, it was about community, a coming together, to love and support one another.

That simple act of communal kindness made me reflect on the nature of my journey to Africa: was it a homecoming or a home going?  Could it actually serve dual and complimentary purposes - being both life-giving and at the same time, a passing away?  After returning to the States and taking time to reflect upon the entire experience, I can say yes to both.

The homecoming came full circle, when a small secondary school marching band serenade us with the Negro National Anthem.  In that moment, I realized that the soul of a people taken from those distant shores centuries ago was still alive and resonating across the Middle Passage to the Midwest of America and back again.  On the same hand, as a descendant of slaves, it was a home going, a passing away of the cultural shackles that had unknowingly bound me.

Somehow, looking over the fortified bunkers of the Elmina slave castle, across the rolling waves of the Atlantic Ocean, I knew that this trip had become more than just about the business of the day, it was about taking care of some business from the past, as well.  It was about knowing that you can go home, again.

The End