Let me tell you the spiritual bit of why I do this

When the decision was made to split up Africa into countries demarcated by capitalist greed, whole families, communities and clans were left on opposite sides of the industrialist’s artificial curtain. My family is from the eastern part of Ghana – the old British Togoland – which voted in a plebiscite to join the then-forming new state of Ghana that was wresting independence from the British. This happened in 1956. My dad who was born in 1949, along with all current Ewes who were born before 1956, were born in occupied country. The Germans, after their defeat in World War 2, lost greater Togoland in two halves to the French and the British. My dad’s family, then in the British half, was united with the new state of Ghana under its charismatic leader Kwame Nkrumah after the 1957 independence declaration. The French allowed their other half of Togoland to stand alone, today’s Republic of Togo.

What this demarcation of Togo did was to take a people, the Ewe, and spread them thinner, across a third capitalist construct of state after Benin and Togo. The very fibre of what the new nations of Africa were to be built on, and what they have actually ended up being built on, has meant that the split Ewe communities of these three countries will grow up to be strangers a generation later. In the giddy years post-independence, there were calls to have Africans unite in the way they were before colonialist boundaries were enforced, only this time, under a political structure. This has not happened. The ensuing years of ebb and tide of this grand dream have lasted so undecidedly long as to have French shoots sprout over Beninois and Togolese Ewe, much the same way Ewe children of today’s Ghana will be caught speaking English with their parents at home.

I had a spiritual moment in 2013, on the first of my subsequently many transits through Togo while journeying across the continent. On my hour’s wait to catch an Accra flight, I strolled through a duty-free shop to get chocolates and such-like for home. It did not take long and I was soon at the counter to pay off and go on to check in. I speak rudimentary French, and at the counter, I made my initial conversations in French. The lady turned after taking my orders and to my fascination, spoke Ewe to other helps in the shop.

I had been away in Congo for 5 months. I had heard no Ghanaian language while I was away. I entered Togo with the awareness that this country was more spiritually close to my origins than the Ghana in which I was born. But I had not the faintest idea I will hear people in the airport speaking the language I speak at home. That, standing before, selling me confectionery, were probably a half of my family that stayed behind the industrialist curtain, borne out of capitalist greed and a mad scramble for this our Africa; and a plebiscite that chose the Gold Coast.

We concluded our transaction in Ewe, the sense of otherness more complete, that I could bring this language back across the border into the country from which we were first culled.

Since then, on my travels across Africa, I have stayed alert to the remnant spirits of our collective oneness, long before the colonialists separated us. I felt two of these again today in Congo.

This morning, another three weeks since I’ve been back in Congo, I spoke to an Ivorian. In the middle of our conversation, I asked randomly if he was Akan. After saying yes, he started speaking Twi. For a minute, I was baffled. There was absolutely no difference between his word choices, diction and inflections from those of any Akan on the streets of Accra. I indulged him. We went on and on. All along in my head and my heart, I fist-pumped at another spiritual reunion, a travesty on Ghana’s Western neighbour and us, that the Akan family had been split by these same boundaries. Every minute, I felt closer to this Ivorian when we spoke Akan than when he spoke English to me or when I tried to speak French with him. This is who we are!

On our way to lunch, my Congolese driver asked if I was from Ghana. He knew for sure because I’m quite popular as the only Ghanaian among a host of Nigerians and Congolese, but he had to start his conversation from somewhere. He struggled through his basic English, halfway a cliff where I met him with my basic French. At the point where our communication met, he made it clear he was descended from Ghanaians; that his maternal side, a family of Addos, had traveled to and settled in Congo where they married and never again left. He didn’t know the tree well, but he was related to famous showbiz personality now turned pastor Azigiza Jnr back in Ghana. When he asked if I knew Azigiza, I was more than excited to say of course!! But that response was, inside me, in answer to a burning question, ‘Did I just walk into a spiritual moment?’

Yes and yes. YES!! YEEEEEESSSS!!!! Yes!

I could have screamed.

Are we one across Africa? The blog address up here is afrilingual, connoting that I try here to be fluent in the language of our Africa. Welcome with me to 2015. Welcome to many more spiritual experiences of our oneness.

Dreamy shot of my driver and I. Connected over vast spaces, like all of us.