by Edwin Asa Adjei
My identity, your identity, our identities!!! Who am I? Who are you? Who are we? Where do I belong? It’s all about identity. Which group or class or people am I identified with? It’s all about identity. The word is often bandied around, but for many, the issue of identity is one which encapsulates one’s past, present and sometimes one’s future and one’s dreams. Identity could even go as far as being the criteria for deciding who lives and who dies in times of hostility.
The Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana celebrated this year’s black history month in February in partnership with the African World Documentary of Films festival (AWDFF). One of the key topics discussed was the issue of identity, which revolved around Sean Addo’s film, Deeper Than Black. Fortunately for the audience at the institute, Sean Addo was invited to be a guest at the showing of his film and it turned out that he wasn’t the only one with an identity crisis.
Sean Addo’s film, Deeper Than Black, is about a Ghanaian-American filmmaker who looks to bridge the divide between his African pedigree and American birthright by confronting the questions: “Who am I, and where do I belong?” Born and raised in the United States to Ghanaian parents, Sean Addo is a product of two different cultures, African-American and African. Propelled by his fear of the loss of his Ghanaian culture, Sean sets off on his quest to clarify his identity. He looks to connect to his African heritage through dance, food, and language. In the process, he challenges what it means to be ‘Black’ in America, and shares a similar story of the new American in a growing multicultural society.
I find myself in my own small way in a similar situation to Sean. My mum is Guan and my dad is Akan. I grew up in my mum’s hometown and I know every corner of the town. On paper and on all my documents, I come from my father’s hometown even though I don’t even know the name of the area in which the family house is located and finding my way “home” is more like a stranger attempting to find his/her way around a foreign land. But on paper, that is my hometown and that is supposed to be my home. So, I see myself as Guan, but I am Akan. Maybe, I am both, but definitely more Guan than Akan even though I speak more Akan than Guan due to the limited number of people who speak or understand the Guan dialect. When I am among the Guans, I am told I am not one of them because I belong to my father’s hometown, but when I am in my father’s hometown, I feel more Guan than Akan. So where do I belong? Am I Guan or Akan? The Guans reject me but I feel like one of them. The Akans accept me but I feel like a stranger when in my own hometown because I don’t know my roots. Am I Guan or Akan?
So at the end of the day, as I discovered through the discussions on Deeper Than Black, a person’s identity goes beyond speaking the language of a group of people or having the same skin color as them or eating the same food as them. Sean has Ghanaian parents and thinks he is Ghanaian and American but when he is in Ghana, he is told he is not a Ghanaian because he cannot speak his mother-tongue. When in the USA, he doesn’t get accepted in the black American community because he does not have a part in the shared history of slavery that the black-Americans feel makes them who they are. If Sean was in Ghana and he spoke a local language, he could be rejected as Ghanaian because of his American accent and mannerisms. So where does that place people like Sean? Is he Ghanaian, American, American-Ghanaian or Ghanaian-American, Black American? Which comes first: his Ghanaianness, Blackness or Americanness? Where does he belong? Legally, he belongs to both, but socially he is lost because neither claim him as their own. And as someone commented, is he more Ghanaian in America and more American in Ghana? For various reasons, migration has brought about people like Sean who do not know who they are or where they belong and the world is yet to come out with a name for such people.
The debate on who an African is continues to rage on and will likely continue for a while. Is African-ness defined by language, skin color, food and culture, ancestral heritage or roots, behavior and mannerisms or philosophy? Sean is one of many who find themselves lost in the sea of identity. There are many like him from various African countries who find themselves in similar situations. Where do they belong since they are not accepted by either culture?
When the issue of identity is related to humanitarianism in Africa, one might ask: what kind of critical questions does this raise for African diaspora and African-American work on the continent of Africa? What identity claims are implied or assumed and what kind of histories (for example regarding the slave trade and experiences of slavery and its legacies) are concerned in African and African-American humanitarianism towards Africa today?
Edwin Asa Adjei is an MPhil student at the University of Ghana-Legon and is an editorial assistant with The CIHA Blog.