As an African-American, Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn found herself a stranger in Africa:
Viscerally, I knew that someone related to me likely started his or her journey here centuries ago, that I had a kinship to “The Slave Coast,” where millions of Africans were sold into domestic bondage and transported to Europe and the Americas between 1665 and 1807. I had read Alex Haley’s Roots. But that was his story, and those, his people. The stories I had heard throughout my childhood were not of the kings and queens stolen from an African homeland, but of everyday warriors here who fought and died for my rights to vote; to go to school; to choose where I would live, and whom I would love. They were my father, who fought in the Vietnam War as a United States Marine (my brother, a second-generation jarhead who fought in the Persian Gulf conflict); they were my mother, the first in her family to graduate from college (me, the first in mine to earn a master’s degree). My people were architects and game-changers; innovators and writers; preachers, teachers, chefs, and hope-builders; they were black, proud, and American—like me.
Days earlier, stepping off the plane into the bustling city of Accra, never had I been surrounded by so many faces that looked like mine, and yet I felt as foreign among them as I had years earlier on a trip to Tokyo. Having African ancestry and black skin did not make me a sister but a stranger with my neat, fresh-from-the-salon, straw-curled ’fro now seeking to connect. This journey to Ghana became a rite of passage to a new consciousness of my own Americanness.
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I was born “black” in the late 1960s to my mother who, in 1940, had been born “colored”; and to my father, born “Negro” in 1944. I was in high school when Jesse Jackson proclaimed us all “African-American.” My father’s people were servants who came to the U.S. from Scotland (and the surname, Littlejohn, from the Englishman for whom they would later work); my mother’s maternal family tree traces back several generations to an Irishman and a Native American woman from an unknown tribe.
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In Africa, I am obruni, which, in the most literal terms, means “white man,” or “foreigner.” It was how I was referred to many times while in Africa. It was not meant as an insult, just an acknowledgement that I was not of that land, no matter how deeply my roots ran through it.
Someday I will to return to Ghana, for a journey that is my own, maybe on safari in the northern region, or with my parents on a holiday vacation in Accra. (Stories I’ve heard of Christmastime there sound not unlike summer break beach parties in Miami.) But not before I make that trip to Scotland and to England, where I am told I’ll also find a lot of my people.