<<Print>>

Come August of 2023 -- Yah'kwame kariuki Nii Ayi Kushi Amaa Blackwell (Yahu Blackwell) will be the newly crowned Osu Noryaa Mantse -- The Development King At Large for the Osu Monarchy. The Newly crowned chieftain is building the bridge between the soil and the African diaspora.

Nii Ayi Kushi Amaa (Yahu Blackwell) paternal lineage is of the Gadangme Tribe and a descendant of King Ayi Kushi (Cush) 1510 - 1535, the King who led the GaDangmes to Ayawaso in Ghana. Yahu's maternal lineage is that of the Kikuyu people of Kenya (Anjiru Clan).

Yahu Blackwell is serial entrepreneur in the USA (Baltimore, Maryland), as well as a professional heavyweight boxing champion.

In the heart of Accra, Ghana’s capital, just a few meters from the United States embassy, lie the tombs of W. E. B. Du Bois, a great African-American civil rights leader, and his wife, Shirley. The founder of the US-based National Association for the Advancement of Colored People moved to Accra in 1961, settling in the city’s serene residential area of Labone and living there until his death in August 1963.

Mr. Du Bois’s journey to Ghana may have signaled the emergence of a profound desire among Africans in the diaspora to retrace their roots and return to the continent. Ghana was a major hub for the transatlantic slave trade from the 16th to the 19th centuries.

In Washington, D.C., in September 2018, Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo declared and formally launched the “Year of Return, Ghana 2019” for Africans in the Diaspora, giving fresh impetus to the quest to unite Africans on the continent with their brothers and sisters in the diaspora.

At that event, President Akufo-Addo said, “We know of the extraordinary achievements and contributions they [Africans in the diaspora] made to the lives of the Americans, and it is important that this symbolic year—400 years later—we commemorate their existence and their sacrifices.”

US Congress members Gwen Moore of Wisconsin and Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, diplomats and leading figures from the African-American community, attended the event. Representative Jackson Lee linked the Ghanaian government’s initiative with the passage in Congress in 2017 of the 400 Years of African-American History Commission Act. Provisions in the act include the setting up of a history commission to carry out and provide funding for activities marking the 400th anniversary of the “arrival of Africans in the English colonies at Point Comfort, Virginia, in 1619.”

Since independence in 1957, successive Ghanaian leaders have initiated policies to attract Africans abroad back to Ghana.

In his maiden independence address, then–Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah sought to frame Africa’s liberation around the concept of Africans all over the world coming back to Africa.

“Nkrumah saw the American Negro as the vanguard of the African people,” said Henry Louis Gates Jr., Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard, who first traveled to Ghana when he was 20 and fresh out of Harvard, a fire with Nkrumah’s spirit.

The newly crowned chieftain (Yahu Blackwell) carries the spirit and the vision of the ancestors who came before him.