A home for my words.

I decided to celebrate Juneteenth this year in the motherland! Specifically, I booked flights to Ghana. Here were some key experiences:

Kakum National Park

I don’t know if you can quite tell how much I was sweating in this photo. You had to hike up before choosing which ropes course you wanted to do and by then I just wanted to be back in the air conditioning! I felt like I sweat more during my time in Ghana than I ever had in my life.

African Ancestral Wall

This location has portraits painted on a long stretch of wall. The faces are of different historical Black figures through history, going as far back as royals from BCE! I was impressed at how much information the young man who walked me through each portrait knew. Tip: if you go, bring a sun umbrella or wide brimmed hat. There are a lot of portraits to go through and you will be fully exposed to the sun.

Food

Everything I ate isn’t pictured here, but the highlights were:

• I picked my own cacao from a tree! The guide gave me a wooden stick with a sickle attached and coached me through it. I didn’t realize Ghana was such a large producer of cacao and I highly recommend buying chocolate as a souvenir.
  
• I ate a typical dish, light soup, and the one I ordered came with crab, fish, goat, and beef
  
• I participated in a cooking class and made traditional Ghanaian food, much of the menu I was able to research and select myself. The leftovers also helped me out on the following day.
  
• I went to a fancy co-working cafe on my last day and laughed to myself. I told the server I’d like my potatoes, bacon, and egg super fried. And the kitchen delivered! It was also my first time seeing a ShooAway, which helped to swat flies away from my food on my behalf.

Aburi Botanical Gardens

The botanical garden was a great excursion despite the fact that my tour guide didn’t seem enthused at all. He’d been working in the same exact location doing the same tour for 18 years though, so I gave him a bit of a break. He can probably recite the entire tour in his sleep. I saw so many interesting plants, including ones that looked like they had been painted on but naturally grew that way and mimosa pudica plants, which close when you touch them. They are found in various places around the world. When I visited the Ancestral River, I learned that Africans would sometimes observe these plants to know if captors were near.

There was a tree that had been carved from root to tip by an artist and a tree that had been completely over taken by an incredible disease. Basically it is one that takes years to wrap itself over the entire tree. Then, once it’s done that, it starts to kill the tree that it has now enveloped. Eventually, the old tree is no more! You can actually walk INSIDE of the tree and look all the way up. I wish I could remember the name of this phenomenon. I can’t even find it online from a quick search. Can anyone help me with the name?

If you’re interested in booking this same tour, you can do so here. It also includes visiting a cacao farm, where I was able to use a tall sickle-like object to cut down my own cacao (!) and a waterfall hike. Both were lovely, although I do not go into detail about them here in this post.

Cape Coast Castle

This stop was part of a larger day tour that I booked here.

This was one of the heavier trips during my stay. It is one of the locations that Africans were enslaved and held before being shipped off. You are able to walk into the underground caves where they were held. Each is stifling and devoid of light or air flow. I had to take my inhaler and still barely felt like I could make it through. And I wasn’t crammed in there the way the ancestors would have been. It was a heavy experience.

I do feel it important to mention that it seems personal tour guides must drop you off at the gate. From there, you have to join whatever guided tour groups are available at the time that you arrive. You are sorted into what language you want to listen to the guided tour in and nothing more. My group was large and not every individual was necessarily taking the experience in with the same amount of respect. This is just a heads up should you be planning your own trip.

Political Incident

I always register my international travels with the State Department’s Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP) program. Basically they alert US Citizens in the event of an emergency so that you can stay away from danger areas or be evacuated in the worst-case scenario.

While I was in Ghana, citizens were exerting their right to protest a recent political event. I was returning from an excursion and my tour guide was antsy. He said although the protest was intended to be peaceful, sometimes things escalated to protesters being tear gassed. He said he wanted to drop me off and immediately head home. The issue was it took ages to move just three blocks in the vehicle due to the thick of the crowd. In the distance, I saw six rows of armed guards preventing people from reaching anywhere near what is the equivalent of Ghana’s White House.

Finally back at my Airbnb, I showered and started to debate walking through the crowd to grab dinner. I pulled out my phone to view the walking directions and realized my tour guide was right:

Needless to say, I made do with whatever was in my Airbnb for dinner.

Ancestral River (Assin Manso Slave River Site)

This was the highlight of my trip and I scheduled my experience here.. The guide described it as a pilgrimage. He said many people feel themselves pulled to visit Ghana without exactly knowing why and he felt this experience was part of the reason. I completely agree.

The Ancestral River is a place that people who are descendants of slaves can visit to make peace. Descendants can visit the river to pray, wash, or even spread the ashes of their late relatives so that they can be returned to the motherland.

As it was explained to me, Africans from all over the continent were brought to Ghana before being sold into slavery. The river is the last stop they had to be bathed before being kept in castles and eventually shipped into slavery throughout the Western Hemisphere.

I have no shame in saying I cried almost the entire time. But it truly did feel like my purpose for visiting Ghana and the motherland was fulfilled. If you are a descendant planning your visit to the Ancestral River, I wish you well ❤

Nkyinkyim Museum

I originally though I would try to make my way to this museum myself, but although pricey, it was easier to just book a tour so that a driver could get me out there. Most excursions outside of central Accra are a pretty arduous ride and I was so grateful that I had tour guides/drivers who could manage throughout my stay. It also allowed me to take in the sights around me, like the pretty red bird I saw just about a mile out from the museum!

People can send in images of their ancestors to the museum and get them sculpted. Then those sculptures are placed in a special area on the grounds. What you see in the above photo is just one small area of sculptures.

Accra

I happened to land in Accra around the time of Eid al-Adha. It was SO beautiful to see so many Ghanaian muslims dressed in their best to pray together. I booked my day tour here and was picked up at my lodging.

Sidenote, you know that moment when someone favors someone else, but you’re hesitating telling them? Well it took me half the day to tell my tour guide for my Accra tour that he looked like D.C. Young Fly. Once I finally did, he was happy! He saw the resemblance and looked up a bunch of his videos on YouTube.

Bonus

Regrettably I’m forgetting the name, but I went to a gallery where if you’re lucky you can see artists at work as well as standing exhibits. While in a photography exhibition hall, I saw this photo. It is so striking, and not just because I love retro dresses and classic cars. The woman in this photo looks like she could be related to me! Unfortunately, I didn’t see anymore details for me to dig for more information 😦

In Conclusion

There is so, so much more I could say about my trip. But this is long enough. Suffice to say, I had a time and I do not regret going!