Word is Bond Takes Young Black Leaders to Ghana

Before traveling to Ghana this month, college sophomore Jahad Hudson didn’t realize that slaves bound for the Atlantic were held in European forts all along what was then called the Gold Coast. 

Word is Bond ambassadors gather in Assin Manso, known as the slave river, where millions of Africans crossed before being forced onto slave ships. “I didn’t even know there were dungeons slaves were held in – I thought they were just getting put on boats,” Hudson told The Skanner.

Many of those dungeons remain, and seeing them firsthand stoked the business and management major’s creative purpose.

“I have a clothing brand I’m trying to develop called Hidden Truths,” he said. “It’s just like the trip to Ghana, Hidden Truths is trying to teach people stuff they might not know of, like the Cape Coast,” where the British established large holding prisons for slaves.

Hudson was one of eight young men to participate in this year’s Blackstar Homecoming Expedition, organized by Portland nonprofit Word is Bond. The organization is a leadership incubator for young Black men between the ages of 15 and 19.

“It’s essential for our young men,” founder Lakayana Drury told The Skanner. “I founded it from my own experience of just lack of direction and really understanding what it is, who it is I’m supposed to be as a Black man. And so we’re told all these things, you have African roots…me personally, my dad is from South Sudan so I know directly. Even so, growing up without him, it was like, where does Africa fit in with who I’m supposed to be? So through our programming, young Black men discover who they are and learn leadership skills. The trip to Ghana is the final program of our organization. It’s kind of a culmination of all the pieces, and by having young men go back home, it’s not just me telling you, you get to learn it first hand. You get to see it, you get to make the connections.”

“It was eye-opening and rejuvenating,” cohort member Sema’J Wade told The Skanner. “Before I went on the trip I was in my head, really stuck on work, trying to move out – I was real quiet. But after the trip I felt like I had my energy back. Once I got there I felt like I had my energy back.”

Right To Return

Last year’s inaugural trip to Ghana was chronicled in the documentary The Black Stars, directed by Jefferson High graduate Twixx Williams and executive produced by Drury. It is likely this year’s trip will lead to a sequel.

Drury had intended for such expeditions to be a part of Word is Bond from the time it was established in 2017.

“We chose Ghana because, first and foremost, of its connection to the transatlantic slave trade and African Americans, so there’s just so much history,” he said. “There’s multiple slave dungeons in Ghana, so we visited those and saw a lot of the DNA and ancestry traces all the way back there. It made a very logical first choice.

“And Ghana itself, out of all the countries especially in West Africa, has really owned the ‘right to return’ kind of narrative, and has created offices within their government to welcome people back, and then you add that with the fact they speak English. Also the political stability of the country too. When you add all those factors in, Ghana stands out.”

In fact, Ghana marked 2019 as the Year of the Return, marking the 400th anniversary since the first slave ships were sent out to the Americas. 

“In Ghana, the Office of Diaspora Affairs works around engaging Black people around the world in returning,” Drury said.

Ghana was also the forced point of departure for the millions of Africans abducted into slavery and a grueling journey on the Atlantic.

Word is Bond ambassadors visited the Cape Coast Castle, long used as a slave dungeon, on July 4 of this year.
Europeans originally attracted to the abundance of gold in the region increasingly found profit in the slave trade, and by the late 17th century Ghana became a major outpost for selling Africans who had been imprisoned during battle, or who had been abducted.

Many structures built or used to house slaves before they were forced onto ships remain, like Elmina Castle, which was built by Portuguese forces in the 15th century. A year ago, archaeologists uncovered what is believed to be the oldest English slave fort in Africa, Fort Kormantine, in Ghana.

Returning to the setting of so much ancestral suffering was meaningful for the young men, many of whom have difficulty tracing their lineage. Hudson said the farthest he can go back on one side of his family is to the great-grandmother who moved to Portland from Arkansas.

“The only thing I really knew about my lineage was slightly what parts were in me,” Wade said, “but that was on ancestry.com, they show you a million different types of bloodlines. But that didn’t really help me – I wanted to know the straight path of where I would have been from.”

Reclaiming Joy

The Word is Bond cohort spent two weeks traveling throughout Ghana, staying together at hotels as they visited rural villages and schools and met with both the minister of education and the minister of diaspora affairs. They also dined at two different homes – in both cases, Wade marveled at how Ghanaians they had just met were eager to invite them in and even teach them how to make regional dishes.

“I feel like Mr. Drury really prepared us for the journey, meeting every Sunday with our group and talking about everything that’s happening in Ghana,” Hudson said. “Our whole group was very much informed with everything that was happening, and just researching every Sunday for two to three months before we left. We had a great knowledge about it before we came and we already knew what we were getting ourselves into.”

Drury took care to emotionally prepare the group for the trip.

“I try not to put too much pressure on them,” he said. “Everybody’s already telling you ‘This experience is going to transform your life!’ And it will. It may happen right away, or it may be a couple years down the road. We talked a lot about that.

"A lot of them felt the most happy they’d been in a long time, the most at peace.

"I saw them smiling more. I had one young man, he was really depressed before he was here, and then he was telling me, ‘I had to call like 10 of my friends up and just apologize for how I’ve been acting the last few years because I was in such a funk.’

“You can see those immediate effects. You can help them by asking: ‘How do you plan on taking this energy that you’re feeling and translate it without trying to build the moment up so there’s so much pressure? Let’s take it in baby steps.’ Don’t feel like you have to come home and become a vegan and change your name to an African name and go into the forest. So I try to give them some space and also the guidelines to do what it is that they want to do.”

Like Hudson, Wade plans to return to Africa, with Ghana as a starting point. He wants to bring friends. He wants to give others the chance to discover what he did.

“We went to a slave river,” Wade said. “They gave us the option to take off our shoes and walk barefoot, just like our ancestors had to. Everybody in my group took off their shoes, and that was very powerful to me. Then we got down to the bottom of the water at the river, and our guide was telling us how they used that exact river to try to clean the slaves – the slaves were trying to wash off each other. But (the slave traders) thought they were planning something, so they separated them and started using leaves to wash them. It was cutting them up and bruising them. So me and my friend Trevell, we said, ‘We’re going to wash each other off, because they didn’t get a chance to wash each other off.’ And we did. That was the most powerful thing to me, right there.”

For more information about Word is Bond, visit www.mywordisbond.org.