Last full day in Amurrica.

or Amerika or AmeriKKKa. The US of A. When we got off the airplane my first trip to Ghana in 2007 i was so upset that they treated us like...Americans. In my mind i was coming home and should have been greeted like Elizabeth Smart finally being released from captivity. I had conquered my kidnappers and was running towards the front door of the house when they stopped me and asked to see my passport. I'm sure Baba Ajishafe and Brother Africa had a good laugh at my naive comments and out of place emotions. That incident is very telling of the person that I am and the struggles I have reconciling with my identity as a victim of trans-Atlantic slave trade or, in leman's terms, an African American.

Now, on the eve of my second (and substantially longer) trip to Ghana, West Africa I am more concerned with how being mistaken for a native will shade the adventures to come. Almost every person I've talked to about has left me with the same advice, some variation of "make sure you keep your passport on you" because "they not gonna let you leave." One of my friends who studied abroad in Tanzania told me about her struggle to gain respect from the natives who were more eager to work with and learn from white volunteers. My coordinator told me that most likely everyone is going to speak twi to me and when they find out i'm American they will want to marry me.

I don't wish to get married this trip. I do wish to be respected. and i guess it would be nice to be allowed back to America (at least until i finish school). Either way, this go round I am less naive and more "enlightened" which has done nothing but further conflict my sense of identity. I feel as Kwame Nkrumah put it "African, not because I was born there, but because Africa was born in me," and America never really felt like home. But the truth remains I am 'technically' American and that's what i'm, legally required to put when asked for my nationality (even though my common ap "identity" section definitely said 'victim of transatlantic slave trade"). And there are many Africans who feel it is disrespectful and ignorant for me to consider myself an African. Either way I stand, hyphenated, between two identities.

This is shall be interesting.