RASTAFARIAN REPATRIATES AND THE NEGOTIATION OF PLACE IN GHANA

Abstract

For Africans in the Diaspora, Pan-Africanism includes identification with Africa as a spiritual, cultural, and ancestral homeland. Back-to-Africa move­ments have drawn notions of repatriation to Africa as a unitary Motherland. Yet, repatriation also lays bare the challenges that inhere between envisioning and living Pan-Africanism. Ghana became a significant site for repatriation with the rise of Kwame Nkrumah. For most Ghanaians, the tenets of Pan-Africanism are remote principles that bear little relevance in daily life, in which kinship, linguistic, ethnic, and national affiliations are primary markers of identity. This presents challenges for repatriated Rastafarians from the Carib­bean, United States, and Europe, who attempt to establish a home and a place within Ghanaian society while retaining Rastafarian ways of living and spiritual philosophies drawn from a Pan-African ethos.