Raising African Children in the West: The London Son Sent Home to Accra
Ghanaian parents abroad who fear their children are losing the culture often send them home to Accra to find it, and what carries identity across an ocean turns out to be smaller and more personal than a year in a city.
Everyone in Accra knows the London child. He lands at Kotoka in December with a backpack and an accent, greets his grandmother with a wave from across the room and calls his uncle by his first name. He eats jollof and fried chicken and very little else. His cousins copy his accent behind his back, and by the end of the holiday an aunt says out loud what his parents have been thinking since the plane landed: leave him here for a year and he will learn.
Some families laugh it off and fly home. Some do exactly what the aunt said.
Lamisi Alhassan did it on a Sunday in early January. At 4:40 p.m. she sat at her sister's dining table in West Legon, writing her son's name in black marker on the collar labels of 5 school shirts. Imran was 13, born in Lewisham, south London, and due at a private junior high school in Dome at 7:30 the next morning. His blue British passport lay on the table beside the marker. Through the open door to the veranda she could hear him on a call to a friend in Lewisham, where the clock also read 4:40.
Lamisi, 42, a pharmacist in Croydon, had made the decision in October. Her father, 78, had called from Tamale on WhatsApp and asked Imran, in Dagbani, which class he was in. Imran smiled at the screen and turned to his mother to translate.
Ghana's Ministry of Foreign Affairs estimates that between 1.5 million and 3 million Ghanaians live abroad. The Ghana Statistical Service, reporting on migration from the 2021 census, found that children under 15 and adults over 65 together made up only 4.0% of the emigrants it counted. The census counts people who left Ghana. A boy born in Lewisham never left anywhere, so he appears in no Ghanaian migration table, and his parents are left to decide on their own what makes him Ghanaian.
That decision is being made in homes across London, Houston and Toronto, and it reaches back into Accra every December. It is a question about what a culture needs in order to pass from parent to child, and about why so many parents abroad, frightened by what they see slipping, reach for the oldest remedy in the family: send the child home.
Lamisi had done what a working mother in Croydon could do. The culture she was trying to pass on was built to be taught by a crowd. In the Tamale house where she grew up, a child who greeted an elder carelessly was corrected by whoever stood nearest: a grandmother, an aunt, a neighbour, the older cousin sent out to buy bread. Language was taught the same way, through 20 adults speaking it at once, none of whom thought of it as a lesson.
In Croydon the crowd had shrunk to 2. Lamisi worked shifts at the pharmacy. Her husband, Mahmud Sulemana, drove trains on the London Underground and left the house before 5 a.m. on early weeks. Between them they had the hours for homework, football boots and dinner. Correction, language and the slow training in how to stand before an elder needed time neither of them had, and so Ghana in their house became a set of objects: jollof on Sundays, a flag at a cousin's graduation, a wedding in Tamale watched on a phone.
The remedy has a long history running in the opposite direction. For generations, West African families sent children to Britain to be educated, and the prize was a British certificate and a British accent. Pamela Kea and Katrin Maier, studying families in London and Lagos for a 2017 paper in Comparative Studies in Society and History, found British-Nigerian parents now sending children the other way, to secondary schools in Nigeria, and read the practice as a middle-class strategy that quietly demotes Britain from the only place worth being schooled. The direction has turned. The hope behind it has stayed the same: parents want a school to finish a job the household could not.
The Accra that receives these children has moved too. Lamisi left in 2009. In her sister's house, Sakina Alhassan, 46, a lecturer at the University of Ghana, speaks to her own daughter, Hafsa, 16, mostly in English, and Hafsa speaks to her friends in a mix of English, Twi and slang borrowed from videos made in Atlanta and Lagos. The home that parents abroad send their children to is often the city they remember from the year they left, and the city has kept changing since then. The classroom waiting for Imran in Dome held Accra 13-year-olds who knew his music and wanted his accent, a long way from the Accra of 2009.
A 2020 study by Emma Abotsi in Globalisation, Societies and Education followed 4 London-based British-Ghanaian teenagers at boarding schools in southern Ghana and found that they changed their schools and their Ghanaian classmates even as the schools changed them. The traffic runs both ways, and the parents who send a child to be fixed rarely plan for the child to do some of the fixing.
The case for sending children home is strong, nonetheless. Immersion works. A year among cousins can teach a language that 10 years of Saturday classes in Croydon will not. Many Ghanaians now in their 40s who were sent back as teenagers speak of that year with gratitude, and some describe it as the year they stopped feeling like visitors at family funerals.
Across a decade and more than 2,500 counselling sessions, a different pattern shows up in diaspora marriages. Couples who argue about whether their children are Ghanaian enough are often arguing about their own departure: the funerals missed, the parents ageing on WhatsApp, the guilt of a life built somewhere else. The child's accent becomes the place where that grief can be discussed. The children who carry their Ghanaian side into adulthood tend to be the ones with a particular person in Ghana who knows them, expects their call and notices when it does not come, a grandmother who asks about exams or an aunt who remembers the name of a best friend. Culture reaches a child through people who expect something of him. A city can supply the cousins and the classroom, and the expecting still has to come from someone who knows his name.
On Monday at 6:50 a.m., Sakina reversed out of the driveway with Imran in the passenger seat in his labelled shirt, and Lamisi sat in the back. Halfway to Dome, Imran asked his aunt how to greet his grandfather properly in Dagbani. He tried it 3 times and got the tone wrong twice. Sakina corrected him without taking her eyes off the road.
Lamisi flew back to London on Tuesday. She had no way of knowing whether a year in Accra would hold, or who Imran would be at 30. She knew the name of the person who would correct him every evening until July, at a dining table in West Legon, and her father's number was now saved in his phone. PG Sebastian
When raising children between Accra and a city abroad turns into an argument about who is Ghanaian enough, Marriage Chat by Steps to Forever offers a private place for both parents to talk about what sits underneath it: the leaving, the guilt and the family back home. Come alone or come as a couple.
Free to begin. app.stepstoforever.org
Comments