Good-bye

Suddenly it's time to say goodbye. Three and half months' worth of experiences, challenges, and learning in Ghana, and I'm at a loss at how to sum it up in a final blog post (literally, while most of my posts have flowed quite easily, it's difficult this time to find the right words). For the sake of those reading this post who will never come to Africa, I suppose I should talk a little about the misconceptions people in America have about this continent.

People don't live in trees here. Africans are in many ways no different from people in any other region, especially the US (to a rather disappointing degree, actually. The notion of "cultural diversity" takes on a peculiar meaning here.) Nor are people fresh out of the bush. Ghana urbanizing at a shocking (and unsustainable) rate, and has been since before independence. Ghanaians see all the images on TV that we see, and people here listen to Ne-Yo, Lil' Wayne, and every other artist popular in America (and like music in America, most people listen to crap here). There are many wealthy people in Ghana, a result of the immense economic growth in most African countries that has favored a small wealthy minority of people and in turn greatly increased inequality. Children go to schools, and for every child with a swollen belly you see at least an equal amount of children who are well-nourished. Africa is, in many ways, quite modern (and notice I use Ghana and Africa almost interchangeably, since the country that was the epicenter of Pan-Africanism in the 1950s and 1960s has had as conventional a history as any African country).

Yet exploitation and underdevelopment has taken its toll on Ghana, just like the rest of Africa, and the fact that Africa re-gained her independence only a generation ago means she has one foot in tradition and the other in modernization. The result is a tenuous society that sustains a lot of friction as people are forced to become more and more like Americans socially, economically (though still incomparably poor compared to us), and politically. Some here are trying to preserve the very traditions that are endangered, but it is a fight against the future in a way. "Globalization" gives Third-World countries like Ghana no choice but to develop the way the West wants them top develop, with no consideration of what ramifications there are to what my mentor in high school would call "cultural imperialism" (I would highly encourage those interested in how this change came about to read my Independent Study Project, posted at the bottom of my previous post).

So Africa will trod on, as the West hypocritically encourages her to develop while pretending to wring its hands at the loss of everything that made Africa wonderful for thousands of years. I believe some will be preserved and survive, but some will and already has disappeared as dances, songs, and stories fade out of existence. Again, I highly encourage everyone reading this to come see Africa for yourself. Africa is an ancient place, and she will survive this current threat. But to truly understand what I'm talking about you have to come and see it for yourself.

I hope people learned something from this blog I wrote this semester. I only managed to include a small portion of what I experienced, but what I wrote I wrote to help people back home understand what is happening in Africa and what it means to be an American in a continent where so many live on less than a dollar a day. Our world is one of Facebook, iPods, iPhones and Blackberries, laptops, cars, television, and all those things. I hope Americans can remember that beneath all those layers there is something called a human being screaming to be recognized. If nothing else, I hope the reader truly understands how lucky and unlucky they are. Lucky to live in the land of opportunity that most of world resents yet desires so strongly to live in, and unlucky to be sheltered from the real world, where humanity was born and is struggling to endure in the wake of so much de-humanization.