Distant Cousins: African Americans and Ambiguity in Ghanaian Newspapers during the Nkrumah Years

With the exception of Kevin Gaines, the historical study of African American encounters with Ghanaians has been lacking. Instead, this topic has been explored in the fields of anthropology, African American Studies, tourism, and performance studies. The results show that both groups experience culture shock while interacting around sites of memory and the Atlantic slave trade in Ghana—slave castles/dungeons. African Americans that try to make sense of the Middle Passage by touring the slave castles/dungeons find that coastal Ghanaians have divergent views of the slave trade, slaves, racial identity, and of African American strangers. My research paper on newspaper representations of African Americans to the Ghanaian public during President Kwame Nkrumah's term (1957-1966) helps to provide the vital historical background for current debates between Ghanaians and African Americans as they engage issues of memory, Atlantic slavery, and each other. Within The Daily Graphic and The Ghanaian Times—two top-selling newspapers since the 1950s—are advertisements and articles on African American political figures, athletes, and socialites. They construct narrow, yet complex images of African Americans as outsiders and victims of US racism, while also showing African American celebrity and financial success. This complicated dichotomy helps explain the ambiguous space that African Americans in Ghana occupied during the Nkrumah years as potential investors in national development and Pan Africanism, and fictive kin. In my research paper, I argue that such narrow yet complicated notions of African Americans began a trend for both groups' encounters into the 21st century.