Oct. 4, 2022
I have not finished what I
wanted to say abour my visit ti Lurthuli Hospital, but I just got busy. So here
is something to feed on in the meantime. See you later,
Sept. 26, 2022
Well my thoughts revolve
around the failure to make any headway at the Luthuli Central hospital.. We (I
plus others)_ had hoped that we would have been given the ok to have a baclofen
pump installed, which would have eased
off or eliminated the spasms. Bu we were told that there are no such ops at
this hospital any more.
I had thought that I had
prepared myself d for a negative response,
but I was emotionally and psychologically exhausted. Feeling down is the word. Not
quite depressed, but close. However. Let me explain a few things.
Chief Albert Luthuli Central
Hospital is the highest you can go in hospital care. If you are referred to
Luthuli by another lesser hospital, and get oked by the staff at Luthuli for an
op, all is free. Cancer , heart,
kidneys, etc. the best of the
best are here.
When you make the
appointment, you are given a number and a date. When you arrive on your date
you show the guard your number and he refers you to the next person. When he
sees your number, he checks his info and gives you another number which will be
called out and shown on a board as in air terminals. We ( a friend kindly
volunteered her time for the day with me---the one whose friend is the
neurosurgeon who arranged this appointment) arrived about 7:30am and our number
was called at 9:10am. We were told to go to counter 4. That is where the normal
information is taken that will be your file from now on. You are then given
your precious hospital card with your patient number for all future visits. We
were then sent to the neurological clinic full of other people and again you
hand your file over to one of the nurses and wait your turn to see one of the
doctors. We finally go called to see a doctor at 12:10 afternoon. So the wait was
from just about 9:30 to just after 12 noon
Diana Ejaita for The
Washington Post
MAGAZINE
The Case for Leaving America to Escape Racism
As a Black woman, I
want freedom from oppression. So I’m finally plotting my exit.
Perspective by DeNeen L. Brown
Reporter
September 26, 2022 at 10:00 a.m. EDT
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The mouth of the Volta River in Ghana seems to be swelling with the
stories of my people. By day, the river, black and thick, runs south, dumping
its fresh water into the Gulf of Guinea and eventually the Atlantic Ocean,
where it churns in a powerful vortex. By night, I swear I see the river reverse
itself, running inland, as if an invisible force were swallowing it whole. The
pink water lilies, with plump green leaves that floated south that morning,
appear to be moving backward. It is magical and mysterious. I’ve never
witnessed a river reverse course.
I believe this river carries the stories of my enslaved African
ancestors who may have been transported down its waterway hundreds of years ago
into waiting boats anchored out at sea before making the transatlantic voyage
as “human cargo,” heading from this Gold Coast for South America, the Caribbean
islands and other parts of North America. As many as 15 million Africans were
packed in the belly of slave ships, often without proper ventilation or
sufficient food. It is estimated that up to 2 million died in the Middle
Passage, lost in deep-water graves.
My ancestors, though I do not know them, must have survived that
gruesome voyage, only to have to endure the barbarity of enslavement in the
Americas. As with many people in the African diaspora — scattered by the evil
of the slave trade, disconnected from our language, song, culture and people —
I am not exactly sure where my ancestors are from. Still, I know that my
distant ancestors are from this continent. As Peter Tosh sang, “Don’t care
where you come from / As long as you’re a Black man, you’re an African / No
mind your nationality / You have got the identity of an African.”
In December 2021, I jumped on an airplane to reconnect with the
continent — and to explore Ghana as a potential place to live and plant new
roots. It was a time when America seemed to be splintering, with state laws
banning the teaching of critical race theory — effectively, barring the teaching of historical truths — and
constant warnings about real dangers to democracy and the possibility of a new civil war. Eleven months earlier, I
had watched as insurrectionists attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, scaling
walls, beating police officers with American flags, breaking historic glass
windows, bursting doors and trampling through a building built by enslaved Black people. Someone erected a gallows and noose outside. One man carried a
Confederate flag, a symbol of entrenched racism, through the halls of Congress.
The fight for racial justice seemed to be failing. The moral floor had cracked.
Democracy appeared to be imploding, and the country seemed to be
increasingly dangerous for Black people — although racist terror was embedded
in the fabric of American history and is not a new phenomenon. In 1999, Amadou Diallo, a student, was shot 19 times by
four New York police officers who were then acquitted of all charges in his
killing. In 2006, police shot Sean Bell the morning of his wedding. In 2009,
transit police fatally shot Oscar Grant III in Oakland, Calif. In 2014, Michael
Brown was fatally shot by a police officer. Walter Scott was killed in 2015,
Philando Castile in 2016. In 2018, Stephon Clark was fatally shot in his
grandmother’s backyard. In 2020, George Floyd was murdered, and Breonna Taylor
was fatally shot while she slept in her bed. In Kentucky, Charleston and
Buffalo, self-proclaimed white supremacists attacked Black people in churches
and grocery stores.
As a reporter for more than 35 years, I watched, researched and wrote
with a sense of journalistic distance while consuming the emotions of every
tragedy. Each video was so terribly sad. The 2019 police killing of
Elijah McClain in Colorado ripped at my core. I replayed the videos of McClain,
23, a peace-loving vegetarian who played his violin to shelter cats, pleading
for police to stop hurting him and to just let him walk home in peace. We
couldn’t walk the streets, drive, study, go to the grocery store or sleep
without fear of getting killed.
One night while on my trip to Ghana, my driver made a U-turn in traffic
and was stopped by a police officer. My stomach dropped. It was the middle of
the night and I was terrified. I watched as the driver got out of the car and
walked toward the officer standing on the side of the road. The driver motioned
to the officer, talking with his hands, explaining he was lost and apologizing
for making the U-turn. The officer listened. After a pause, the officer said,
“I forgive you. Go about your way.”
I want this kind of freedom: to live in a country where traffic stops
end peacefully. I want the ability to move among people who look like me. I
want to engage in intellectual debates without having to explain the history of this country’s racism. I know no place is perfect. But I want to live in a country where
racism is not a constant threat. Which is why I have decided to eventually
leave America. When or where I will go I can’t say for sure — but I am finally
ready.
Writer DeNeen L.
Brown at the former site of Fort Kongenstein in Ada Foah, Ghana, where enslaved
Africans were traded. (Courtesy of DeNeen L. Brown)
I am not alone in my plot to leave the country where I was born in an
attempt to flee entrenched oppression. There is no official tally of African
Americans who have recently chosen to leave, but anecdotally there has been a
surge of interest in the topic.
Looking ahead to the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first
enslaved African people on the shores of what is now Virginia, Ghana’s
president, Nana Akufo-Addo, issued a call to people in the African diaspora to
“return home” by visiting and moving to Ghana. “In the Year of the Return, we
open our arms even wider to welcome home our brothers and sisters,” Akufo-Addo
said in 2018 at the National Press Club in Washington, “in what will become a
birthright journey home for the global African family.”
For many, the death of Floyd in 2020 may have been a turning point. “In
the last two years, there has been a groundswell of Black people in America who
want to go to Africa,” says Greg Carr, a professor of Africana studies and
former chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. “I
haven’t made the jump yet, but I’ve been thinking about it all the time. … I
would prefer to experience the full range of human experiences on the
continent, rather than put up with the default position in the United States,
where we are ‘othered’ and excluded from the definition of humanity. It is a
perpetual field of violence.”
Celebrities have been part of this trend. In 2020, the singer and actor
Ludacris announced on Instagram that he had become a citizen of
Gabon, a country in central Africa. Actor Samuel L. Jackson also became a
citizen of Gabon after he took a DNA test that showed he was connected to the
country’s Benga tribe. “It was spiritually uplifting to connect with the tribe
and to look down and see my relatives and ... to be welcomed by some people
that looked at me ... like, ‘Come home,’ ” Jackson told “The Daily Show” host Trevor Noah. In
2021, singer Stevie Wonder announced he was moving to Ghana. During an interview
with Oprah Winfrey, he explained that his decision was prompted by the recent
political climate in America: “I don’t want to see my children’s children’s
children have to say, ‘Oh, please like me. Please respect me. Please know that
I am important. Please value me.’ ”
The U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs says it does not
keep track of the number of Americans who have moved out of the country. “U.S.
citizens are not required to register their presence abroad, and we do not
maintain comprehensive lists of U.S. citizens residing overseas,” a State
Department spokesperson wrote to me. “Estimates of U.S. citizens in particular
countries can vary and are constantly changing. We do not want to provide
figures that cannot be considered authoritative.”
But online, one can find growing communities that are sharing stories of
what they sometimes call the Blaxit, i.e., Black Exit. The YouTube
channel GoBlack2Africa has posted dozens of videos
interviewing African Americans who’ve moved to Africa. A video from the African Web YouTube channel titled
“Why Are So Many African Americans Moving to Ghana” has been viewed over 217,000
times.
In 2021, Tim Swain, a poet and educator who moved from
Indiana to Ghana, told the YouTube channel Odana Network that the first time he visited
Ghana in 2007, he was transformed “as a Black person.” Then in 2014, he went to
join peaceful protests in Missouri after the police killing of 18-year-old
Michael Brown. The attacks on protesters left him shaken. A few months later,
he traveled to Ghana again. “It was like this juxtaposition of America where I
am feeling like the bottom of the bottom, reminded every day that I’m a Black
person that is a stain on the fabric of America,” Swain recounted. “I come to
Ghana where I literally exist as a human being. I have no conscience about the
color of my skin. … Every time I came to Ghana it became literally harder and
harder to return to the U.S.” After about two years of planning, he and his
wife moved to Ghana in 2019.
Rashad McCrorey, who owns a
travel company that organizes tours to Africa, told BNC
(“America’s Black News Channel”) that he
was traveling in Ghana in 2020 when the pandemic hit the United States. He
decided to stay. “It’s been an amazing experience,” he said. “In America, we
deal a lot with racial oppression, [systemic] oppression, whether it’s red
lining ... the prison industrial complex. But what I appreciate most about
being in Africa is that I just wake up every day and being a man.”
Winthrope Wellington, 38, who runs Throp, a YouTube channel that highlights economic
business development in Jamaica, has interviewed African Americans who have
recently moved to the island. Wellington — whose father is Jamaican —
permanently moved from New York to Negril after college. Last year, Wellington
interviewed Rahel Teklegiorgis, a guest at his family’s hotel who decided to
move to Jamaica from Philadelphia during the pandemic. “As a single Black
female ... I felt welcomed. That’s the beauty of the culture here,”
Teklegiorgis told Wellington. “Wherever I go, they’re like, ‘Empress!’ It’s
just a beautiful thing to feel welcomed and valued and held up. ... It’s like a
breath of fresh air. ... I would encourage folks to just try it. Take the first
step.”
After he posted the interview, Wellington noticed a theme in the video’s
comments. “I realized there was an underground movement of people asking, ‘How
can I, as a Black American, move to a country where I don’t feel oppressed and
automatically judged by my skin color?’ ” Wellington told me. He added that during
Donald Trump’s presidency, “people were driven to my channel. People were
looking for a way out.” He also noted another element that may be a key driver
of the trend: In the age of remote work, people can choose to live abroad
without quitting their jobs.
And yet, people have also been making this choice since before the
pandemic and George Floyd and the upheavals of the Trump era. Mark E. Blanton,
53, a former U.S. Secret Service agent, and his wife, LaTasha R. Blanton, 44, a
doctor of physical therapy, decided to move from their home in Virginia to
South Africa after visiting in 2011. “We saw beautiful homes, luxury homes,”
LaTasha told me of her first visit to South Africa. “We saw Black people
holding positions.” It made her think of all the work she had put into her
career in the United States without ever really feeling as though she had quite
arrived. In America, she recalls, “I checked all the boxes they asked me to
check: Go to school, get a degree and at the end you would have a life where you
don’t have to worry as much. But it was never that.”
In 2018, they moved, resolving that “we should live out the rest of our
days around people who think like us, look like us and feel the same way we
feel about our accomplishments,” says LaTasha. “When I first arrived in South
Africa, that is when I realized I was living.”
Mark and LaTasha now own the Real South
Africa tourism company, which is based
in Johannesburg and introduces visitors to life in the country. They have seen
an increase in the number of people booking tours. For many, the trip is an
experience that shifts their inner core. When their airplanes land, “everybody
says they felt something,” Mark told me.
Whenever Mark has to travel to the States, he sobs on his return flight
to South Africa. “It’s the feeling of freedom,” he explains. “I don’t want to
let it go, even for a moment. I love my freedom. I truly do. You must
understand the experience on this side as an African American. … A lot of
African Americans are figuring this thing out. That is the biggest draw. They
are getting their freedom.”
