She came to Accra planning to stay a short while. Maya Angelou arrived in Ghana in 1962, after her son Guy was badly injured in a car accident soon after they reached the country. She stayed for several years, and her time in Nkrumah’s Ghana became one of the most important chapters of her life.
The returnees
In the early 1960s, Ghana attracted African Americans who saw in Kwame Nkrumah’s independent nation a home free from American racism. Writers, activists and professionals moved to Accra. They included W.E.B. Du Bois, who died there in 1963, and many younger people inspired by Pan-Africanism.
Work in Accra
Angelou worked at the University of Ghana’s Institute of African Studies as an administrator. She also worked as a writer and editor in journalism, and she acted in theatre. She learned Fante and was drawn deeply into Ghanaian life.
Malcolm X
In 1964, Malcolm X visited Ghana after his pilgrimage to Mecca. Angelou and other African Americans in Accra helped organise his visit and introduced him to Ghanaian officials and intellectuals. Their friendship grew, and she later returned to the United States intending to work with him. He was assassinated in February 1965.
Belonging and not belonging
Angelou wrote honestly about the complicated feeling of being an African American in Africa. She felt at home and also foreign. Some Ghanaians welcomed her as a returning sister, while others saw her as an American. These tensions are at the heart of her writing about Ghana.
All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes
Her autobiography All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, published in 1986, covers her years in Ghana. It is the fifth volume of her series of memoirs, which began with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in 1969.
After Ghana
Angelou became one of America’s best-known writers and speakers. She read her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1993. She died in 2014.
Her legacy in Ghana
Many Ghanaians know Angelou mainly as a famous American poet. Her Ghana years tie her to a generation of African Americans who saw Accra as the capital of a free Black world. Today’s diaspora “return” movement, including Ghana’s Year of Return in 2019, follows a path she and others walked in the 1960s.
