Am I Ghanaian enough?

Am I Ghanaian enough? A question that I find myself returning to over and over through the years.

I am a part of a community of Ghanaians residing in Sydney, Australia. However, I’ve never truly felt like I belonged. 

My mother, brother and I moved to Sydney when I was 5. Growing up, my mother was a social butterfly, floating between church and other social groups. Infectious personality and a smile that lit up the room. You couldn’t not notice her. 

My older brother was admired and had his collective group of friends. 

And then there was me. The quiet, painfully shy introvert. I wouldn’t say I say I stood out like a sore thumb but I also effortlessly merged with the wallpaper. 

I didn’t belong to a collective friendship group, rather individuals far and few in between. 

Being a child growing up and discovering the world around you is daunting and massive. To be a black introverted female With anxiety? That’s a whole other chapter. 

Like many Ghanaian kids, I attended every social event. Some willingly others reluctantly. 

There are memories I’ll always treasure, like the hall parties that lasted till early hours of morning. Sipping orange Fanta, buffets of aromatic cuisine filling the air, aunties and uncles filling their bags with containers of food while others had dance challenges on the dance floor. 

While other memories live rent free in my head like the speeches that felt like they could conclude as the credits roll through an entire movie. Rolling your eyes as your parents kept promising you “just one more song and then we’ll go home!” Or that drawn out church departure with the assurance of “let me just say hello to my friend, quick 2 minutes!” (2 hours later) 

I wouldn’t trade any of it. 

I truly fell in-love with Ghana and being Ghanaian when I went back to the homeland in my teens. That first breath of air overwhelms me every time I recall the memory. 

The people, the culture, the food, every single memory better than the last. 

Ghana is so beautiful. I’d never felt more Ghanaian than I did being in my homeland surrounded by family and strangers, especially the animals that roamed the villages. 

I was truly heartbroken when I boarded my flight back home to Sydney. 

As I grew older, like many people life comes with its ups and downs. The downs were an unbearable pain and the ups were stupendously glorious. 

My life became study bound, personal demons and pursuit of self identity. I retreated from almost all social events.  I believe most social encounters are bound by the relationships that are created and nurtured to bloom.

I have only one such friendship within my Ghanaian community. My childhood friend Miranda, whom I will always love and holds a special place in my heart.  

I’ve wondered if not having these tight friendship circuits made me any less Ghanaian. I didn’t explicitly exclude myself from anyone and no one explicitly isolated me but natural bonds never formed. 

Was it because I was an introvert? Was it because my mother didn’t have an existing family here? I don’t have an answer for myself and I could rack my brain looking for one.

I am the mother of a beautiful 3 year old girl and my entire life is different to what it was when I was a child but the feelings of estrangement from my own community  are like recurring PSTD especially in spaces when they are supporting each other. 

Does it make me feel like I’m not Ghanaian enough to them? Absolutely. Is that a projection of my own insecurity? Possibly. 

Do you know what matters even more? How I feel. I feel Ghanaian enough. I love everything it means to be a Ghanaian and I don’t think I’m limited to my cultural identity because I feel like the other among the collective.  

As a university graduate of analytics, digital communication, sociology, anthropology (art history too) etc, it’s hard not to deconstruct aspects of my life. In sociology we call this the 3 sociological perspectives: structural functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism. 

However in anthropology, most anthropologists would define culture as the shared set of (implicit and explicit) values, ideas, concepts, and rules of behaviour that allow a social group to function and perpetuate itself. perspectives that are represented in anthropology emphasise the need to understand what humans do and how they interpret their own actions and world-views. This approach is known as cultural relativism. 

Have I lost you? Still here? Okay great!

I started to compare and contrast my community- cultural identity to differing human connections in my life and here’s what I’ve come to understand. 

The connections I’ve made differ in many ways, the commonality is me. My personality type is INFJ (introverted, intuitive, feeling, and judging) 

Those feelings of alienation are not limited to just my cultural identity, I felt in differing parts of my life however because I share cultural heritage to a community with one particular group, the emotions were heightened. 

I have made countless connections (with substance) throughout my life that are still individual, various cultures and far and few in between but man are they special. 

If someone would have told me that I would have made true and authentic friendships over the internet I wouldn’t have believed it. But I did. I have someone who I would regard as a best friend. Easily one of the greatest connections I’ve ever made from roughly 8,204 miles, who happens to be *drum roll please* Ghanaian! Are you shook? I am! I’ve never known a connection or friendship like this and it’s a strange feeling to process that it’s only happened in my adult life as a relatively young mum. But I am grateful. 

We grow up being told that we’re individual, right? But that being a part of a cultural community made as inherently connected. But how true is that?  

The term “individual” itself has an inherent duality. Meaning the smallest member of a group. An individual is therefore never isolated; she is always connected. Every one of the 7.5 billion humans on the earth has value to offer, especially now in a distributed world where moves are made through connections. This is the power of what Is regarded as “onlyness”you’re standing in a spot that only you stand in, which is a function of your history, experiences, visions and hopes, and it’s from here you offer a distinct point of view, insights and ideas. When you can grow and realise those ideas through your networks and through connectedness, you have a new lever to move the world. Onlyness is like an individual, then, in that it is born of you and also that it unites you meaningfully with others; it is the connected you.

So own your culture, it might be shared by persons within your community but not bound to them. 

You are enough.