Introduction

People of African ancestry who have been scattered throughout the world as a result of forced or voluntary migration have felt, to a greater or lesser degree, a desire to return to their roots. Although this motivation has many similarities with those of other diasporic groups such as the Jews, the Irish, or the Italians, its primary difference lies in the psychical disorientation that was the result of the system of slavery imposed upon these diasporic blacks by their Western masters. This disorientation is also evidenced among non-diasporic blacks, inasmuch as the domination of Africa by Europe reduced Africans to similar positions of subservience, though with some differences.

One of my major arguments in this chapter is that Ghanaians and African Americans, although they are derived from the same basic roots and both have suffered the dehumanizing effect of Western domination, are differentiated especially by the dominance of the role of the family and community in Ghanaian life and the dominance of individualism in the lives of African Americans. For the Ghanaian, communalism is inseparable from life itself, and personal happiness is secondary to that of the community. For the African American, individual concerns dominate within a wider framework of an increasingly fractured communal structure.

This dilemma of communalism vs. individualism is famously described by W. E. B. DuBois as “double consciousness.” According to him, African Americans strive for the individualism of the West, but cannot separate themselves from a tendency toward communalism, which is African.