Tag: Africa and Africa-American relations

Appointments

Meet Ghana’s first African-American Tourism ambassador, Diallo Sumbry

By Michael Klugey
Diallo Sumbry, the founder of the Washington D.C. based The Adinkra Group, an African Cultural Edutainment Resource, and Consulting Company, and organizer of the Back2Africa Festival and Tour has been appointed as Ghana’s first African-American Tourism Ambassador by the Ghana Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture.

Mr. Sumbry will join Ghana Tourism Ambassadors including Afrobeats Star Fuse ODG, Ghanaian Rap Star, Sarkodie, Ghanaian British Singing Sensations, Reggie N Bollie, and Singer Wiyaala to transform and promote tourism as a leading sector of the economy in Ghana.

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Events

African-Americans in Ghana remember their African roots

The African American Association of Ghana celebrated their roots in Africa with an event during last Black History month.

The celebration dubbed “Black Migration: Exploring Our Roots and Beyond” focused on the 400 years anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the United States in 1619 and the next wave of returnees to their homelands took place in Accra.

This year has been recognised in Ghana as the “Year of Return”, and Ghana is the first African country to organise a concerted effort to commemorate the 400 years anniversary.

Mrs Stephanie S. Sullivan, the United States (US) Ambassador to Ghana, who launched the program said, she was proud to join the Government of Ghana and other officials to celebrate the event as it signified the bond between the two countries.

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Health

U.S. hopes to send more experts to Congo as Ebola outbreak rages
By Lena H. Sun

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hopes to send experts to Congo in the next few weeks to train international and local personnel in the fight against a raging Ebola outbreak that has killed nearly 600 people and is far from under control, the CDC director said Thursday in an interview.

Because of the worsening security situation, the CDC experts would not be based in the epicenter of the outbreak, in conflict-ridden parts of eastern Congo. Armed attacks against Ebola treatment centers in North Kivu province have increased in recent weeks. One attack took place hours before CDC Director Robert Redfield and World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus arrived last week as part of a WHO delegation to assess the situation on the ground.

Three CDC personnel are on temporary assignment about 200 miles south of the epicenter, in the city of Goma, the capital of North Kivu, Redfield said.

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Policy

Escalation in Somalia Is a Foreign Policy Failure in Progress

U.S. intervention quietly escalates in Somalia.

While the Trump administration has very visibly made and modified plans to reduce U.S. military intervention in Syria and Afghanistan, it has quietly escalated the fight in Somalia. U.S. airstrikes in the North African nation are on the rise, The New York Times reported Sunday, and that higher pace of bombardment has contributed to increased civilian displacement and all the turmoil that comes with it.

This is a foreign policy failure in progress. If the last two decades of missteps in the Middle East and North Africa have demonstrated anything, it is that secretive wars of choice are prone to mission creep and rife with unintended consequences. Rather than expand, U.S. military intervention in Somalia should be shut down before it spirals into another needless generational conflict.

The United States has had some military presence in Somalia for the better part of three decades, and the current campaign began in 2007. But U.S. strikes were few—zero to three per year—until 2015, when former President Barack Obama started an upward trend the Trump team has continued. Last year, U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) reported 47 strikes. The first two months of this year put us on track to triple that by December.

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News

US Army captain killed in Ethiopia plane crash   

By: Kathleen Curthoys

Army Capt. Antoine Lewis was one of eight Americans killed when an Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed on Sunday, news reports say.

Lewis was on the flight from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Nairobi, Kenya, when Flight 302 crashed, killing all 157 people aboard, according to aCBS report from Chicago.

Lewis was stationed in Ottawa, Canada, and he was on a vacation to Africa, his family said.

“I will say that plane went down with him doing what he wanted to do most, and that was to stretch out and embrace our mother country,” his mother, Antoinette Lewis, said in the CBS report.

His family, from the Chicago suburb of Matteson, Illinios, knew he was on the plane, tried calling him and didn’t get an answer, the report said.

Lewis, 39, had served in Afghanistan and South Korea during his military career, ABC 7 in Chicago reported. He was in Africa to do missionary work, the report said.

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Asylum, News

Her ancestors were enslaved in the U.S. Now a Trump decision could lead to her deportation to Africa.

Former American slaves were moved to Liberia in the 1800s to solve the “problem” of black and white people living alongside each other. Their descendants are facing the same journey.

Afomu Kelley was just 11 years old when she left Liberia with her mother in the early days of a civil war in 1990. She remembers standing in a crowd jostling to board an airplane to the United States for what she thought would be a six-week vacation.

Instead, the war in Liberia escalated and Kelley, now 40, never returned to the West African country. She grew up in Northern Virginia, where she finished high school early, and attended the University of Maryland. She has an American accent. Sometimes she doesn

But at the end of this month, she may be forced to return to a homeland she barely remembers.

On March 31, the program that has allowed Kelley and more than 800 other Liberian immigrants to live legally in the United States for decades will end, the result of President Trump’s decision to terminate a protection against deportation that has been in place for nearly 28 years.

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Education, Visit to Africa

Howard Business School Students Travel To Ghana As Global Business Consultants

Each year a group of students at Howard University School of Business travel abroad to put their classroom instruction to work as international business consultants to companies across the world.

Twelve students enrolled in the Global Trilateral MBA (GTMBA) program at Howard University began their travel to Accra, Ghana on Friday, March 8 for a week-long, immersive, global experience working as business consultants to two Ghanaian companies, including Chocolate Clothes, a Ghanaian fashion company whose Founder and CEO, Kwaku Bediako, has designed for international and American stars alike. .

“The mission of our program is to connect students at multiple institutions through a consulting project that allows them to work side by side as global business consultants,” says Curtis Kidd Telemaque, Ph.D., adjunct faculty member for Howard University School of Businessand one of two faculty members accompanying the students to Ghana.

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Opinion

The U.S. could end up paying dearly for Trump’s disregard for Africa

By Mark Porubcansky
As if we needed Michael Cohen’s testimony for confirmation, it has been evident for a long time that President Trump neither knows nor cares much about Africa. That could end up costing African countries and the United States dearly.

By way of explaining why he considers Trump a racist, Cohen told the House Oversight Committee last Wednesday that the president once asked him whether he “could name a country run by a black person that isn’t a ‘shithole.’” Recall that Trump also applied the “shithole” label to African and Central American countries last January. Also recall that an ill-informed presidential tweet about its land policy last year angered South Africa, and that Trump once made Africans cringe by misidentifying the country of Namibia.

Also recall that an ill-informed presidential tweet about its land policy last year angered South Africa, and that Trump once made Africans cringe by misidentifying the country of Namibia.

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Policy

US INVESTORS TO HELP BUILD AFRICA

By Bolaji Samuel

The tension between the two economic giants in the world, China and the United States (US), might have a silver lining for Africa. The administration of President Donald Trump is set to increase investment into the continent, in a bid to counter the narrative that China’s influence in Africa is rising, while the US falls off with its “America first” approach.

President Trump signed the legislation, the Better Utilization of Investments Leading to Development Act, or the BUILD Act, into law in October 2018. It combines the US Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) and other US agencies focusing on international economic development into a newly consolidated agency called the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC).

It is anticipated that the DFC will be operational in October 2019 and at that time the DFC will begin deploying US equity capital in African private equity.
The DFC expands OPIC’s budget from USD29 billion to USD60 billion and provides the DFC with the authority to make limited equity investments. Previously, OPIC was limited to debt investments.

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News

Nigerians Seek More Collaboration With African-Americans

By Sunday Isuwa

Participants at the US Embassy Black History Month event have called for more collaboration with their brothers in America especially those who can’t trace their African roots.

The programme which was with the theme: “Building Bridges between Africa and the African Diaspora,” the participants said there is no good awareness between Africans in the continent and their brothers and sisters in the Diaspora especially those in Britain, Spain, America, Caribbean and other places about their roots.

According to some of the participants, the great migration from Africa to Europe was huge but insisted if they must build a strong continent, there must be a better collaboration and relationship with the African-Americans.

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News

Comedian Kevin Hart Reaches Out To Young Nigerian Artist Who Drew Him

American comedian and actor, Kevin Hart has reached out to a young Nigerian artist who posted a drawing of him on Twitter.

The power of social media yeah?

The Kaduna-based artist, Eli Waduba Yusuf had posted the drawing two days ago, February 25, 2019, and asked users to retweet till it gets to Hart and it did.

Yusuf wrote that he is a hyperrealism pencil artist and will like to become like Arinze Egbengwu who is best known for creating hyperrealistic pencil drawings.

He wrote, on Twitter:

“My name is Eli Waduba Yusuf Am a Nigerian, based in Kaduna. Am a hyperrealism PENCIL Artist, I hope to become like . Please Retweet, let see it, thank you.”

Hart replied saying he has seen and will like to support him by paying him to do a pencil of three of his celebrity friends.

“I see it and I want to purchase it…I also want to support you and your amazing talent by giving you a fee to do a pencil drawing of 3 of my celebrity friends that I can gift it to. DM your info and let’s get to work!”

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Visit to Africa

African-American business delegation visits Ghanaian Osu community

A 16-MEMBER Black American business delegation arrived last Wednesday to a rousing traditional welcome by the Osu Traditional Stool.

The delegation was received by the Osu Alata Mantse, Nii Kwabena Bonne V, on behalf of the Osu Traditional Council.

Welcoming the delegation, Nii Bonne V said he believed that the business executives were coming back to their homeland 400 years after their ancestors had gone into captivity abroad.

The delegation is in the country at the invitation of the Ghana International Chamber of Commerce and Yoks Investments Ltd, a local private company.

Led by a business strategist and the President of the National Black MBA Association, Mr Jesse Tyson, the delegation is in the country to reconnect with their roots as part of the Year of Return.

The visit is also to afford the delegation the opportunity to explore possibilities and opportunities to connect with local businesses and also enter into partnerships with local businesses.

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Ancestry

I’m a prince’: An American pastor shocked to find he has African royal ties

It was about 4am when his phone buzzed with a message from far away. He read it once, twice, three times before he woke his wife to tell her the news.

“I’m a prince,” he whispered as she blinked herself awake. “A prince.”

Jay Speights, an interfaith pastor from Maryland, US, could hardly believe the words as he formed them in his mouth. Him? A prince? He grew up in New Jersey. He lives in an apartment. He does not even own a car.

Speights, 66, had spent much of his life wondering about his forebears, probing public records until the trail went cold. Like many black Americans who are descendants of slaves, Speights could find little written evidence of his family’s history. In April, he turned to a DNA test from Ancestry in the hope that something, somewhere might turn up.

He was identified as the distant cousin of a man named Houanlokonon Deka – a descendant of a royal line in Benin, a small nation that once housed West Africa’s biggest slave port. At the urging of a friend, he ran his DNA data through another database that looks for matches between African Americans and Africans who have taken such tests.
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News

Washington-based Adinkra Group set to kick off The 2019 Back2Africa Festival & Tour in Accra

The Adinkra Group, an African Cultural Edutainment Resource and Consulting company based in Washington, DC, is set to launch the second annual Back2Africa Festival and Tour in partnership with The Ghana Tourism Authority and the Year of Return, from 26th of February to the 8th of March 2019 with a line-up of events that focuses on arts, performances, education and service projects in Ghana’s most historic venues in Kumasi, Cape Coast and Accra.

The Back2Africa Festival’s mission is to connect people of African descent with the culture and traditions of Africa and will feature performances from artists traveling from the US including The CrossRhodes, a duo comprised of R&B/Soul Sensation Raheem Devaughn and hip hop emcee Wes Felton and Farafina Kan: The Sound Africa – an intergenerational West African Drum and dance company.

The Back2Africa Festival’s mission is to connect people of African descent with the culture and traditions of Africa and will feature performances from artists traveling from the US including The CrossRhodes, a duo comprised of R&B/Soul Sensation Raheem Devaughn and hip hop emcee Wes Felton and Farafina Kan: The Sound Africa – an intergenerational West African Drum and dance company.

“The Back2Africa Festival and Tour is important particularly as it truly represents the spirit of the Year of Return. We are a family and community on a birthright journey returning to make connections. It’s the first time to Ghana and the African continent for the majority of our group of nearly 100 travellers aged between 6 – 65 years old who are coming to enjoy Ghana but also to learn, share and exchange their talents, perspectives and energy with Ghanaian people,” shares Diallo “Daheart” Sumbry, Founder of The Adinkra Group and a life-long educator who has been travelling to Africa for over 20 years.

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Policy

From Wakanda to reality: Building mutual prosperity between African-Americans and Africa

 

By Landry Signé and Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield

This year’s Black History Month is being celebrated with a higher sense of African pride, given the unprecedented enthusiasm generated by Marvel’s “Black Panther” last year and increased conversations about a better representation of minority groups.

“Wakanda”—a fictitious, prosperous, “futuristic, powerful, and proud African nation”—salutes black culture by “shedding light on black excellence.” After the movie’s release, many in black America—and across ethnicities—and around the world are wondering how to turn this fiction into reality.

During the hype of “Black Panther,” we both were giving talks on how to unlock Africa’s potential to African-American professionals, community, and business leaders. Many of them asked us how they could help make Africa as successful as the imaginary Wakanda. In other words, where are the opportunities to develop mutually beneficial relations between Africa, African Americans, and the United States?

We propose strategies focused on three themes: tourism in Africa; trade and investment in and with Africa; and knowledge, innovation, and technology sharing to improve U.S.-Africa relations.

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