Global conversations. The best kinds invite a challenge to your worldview. Our worlds are often more narrow than we imagine. We ascribe them a breadth that is probably neither true or even desired. Globality isn’t easy. The challenge here in Ghana, and indeed across the Continent, is too often ‘global’ does not include the Continent. Indeed, we are not considered when the term global is used.
As a self-described global Black chick who runs an Accra-based organization, I come across this notion of a global world that excludes the Continent a lot. It is frustrating, infuriating and reminds me again and again of the need for my work of Emotional Justice.
I am especially proud that I lead a Ghana-based global institute. That mattered to me, it is part of my education from my father and my mother. I don’t mean the schools they sent me to, I mean a worldview they taught me that centered this land. This is complicated because more than one thing is true at a time. I am born of a generation that lauded the independence, and self-governance of Ghana, with sexy slogans like ‘Africa for the Africans’, but sought a certain approval from the British whose colonial clutches they had wrestled themselves from – partially. It is because of this duality that notions of global conversations, and how we see ourselves, matter.
I am talking specifically here about a ‘global emotional worldview.’ A global emotional worldview is one that centers, and reckons with, the totality of your African identity. Too often to be a global citizen in Africa means to privilege spaces, experiences and a worldview that is disconnected from Africa. So, can we call ourselves ‘global’ if our nation and our continent is not part of that globality?
A global emotional worldview is the language I want to introduce to Ghana and across the Continent. It is a phrase that speaks to a healing within an African identity that has been nurtured that ‘elsewhere’ is a desirable destination for resources, ambition, talent, and success. It is a healing from a narrative that nurtures this Continent as worthy of extraction and depletion only, a resource for others wealth-creation. Such a healing means an end to being witness to economies – like that of France – whose wealth is largely due to their ongoing economic plundering of French speaking African nations.
This is about more than a fiscal economy of currency, property and produce. This is about an emotional economy of identity, untreated trauma, and healing. Such an economy also requires resources. Healing is not free, it costs in our time and in our reimagining of our world in ways we have not yet done. It requires a structure for us by us as a global African people. It requires naming that structure, and then teaching and engaging with it, so that it is useable, and understood by us as a global African people.
Let me be clear. It is not that we don’t carry deep wealth in our bones, blood, culture, tradition, and history. We are a proud people, we celebrate the soil that shapes us, that develops a mother tongue that is musical and magical, and traditions that bind us in extraordinary ways. But that’s why the emotional economy is a place of complexities, seeming contradictions, and notions of identity – healing is neither linear nor a 12-step program.
It requires something more, deeper, more complex but communicated in a comprehensible and digestible way. That’s why Emotional Justice is a structural approach to the emotional, that’s why it matters. And that’s what makes global conversations both desired and necessary.
My new book: ‘EMOTIONAL JUSTICE: a roadmap for racial healing’ explores an emotional worldview created by what I call ‘the language of whiteness’, a narrative about who we are as Black, Brown, white and Indigenous people, and about our role in the world. In it I write that, this language is a false narrative that says whiteness is the world, built the world and saves the world. It is a narrative that makes whiteness the leader and Africans the perpetual students. The language of whiteness is the thread stitched into the fabric of systems of oppression that build connection and sustain a relationship to power, centering whiteness.
Whiteness is treated as if it is the global worldview, and so global conversations still centre a notion of the world that primarily privileges them – and Africa is peripheral, a place apart.
I am excited to witness ways that this is changing. I remember teaching media at African University College of Communications. My remit was to teach global media, and I loved it when a student said they were not interested in moving outside of the Continent. Their notion of globality was to learn about media and practice journalism in the four corners of the Continent of Africa – not travel to the UK or America. Interestingly, his desire was to build an African global media that reported the world centering Africa – a wonderful idea, and a reminder that there are always – and have always been – those for whom Africa is already their center. But that individual change that must be applauded needs to expand to the structural kind, the kind that is about systems. We live in a world of systems and structures, and so with Emotional Justice, we treat the emotional as structural.
Global conversations that challenge your emotional worldview, ignite curiosity about how much more you can become, wrestle with the loss of what we have suffered, and reckon with an African grief for a history that forever transformed our continent, are crucial. Such is the work of dealing with an emotional worldview – one that navigates the totality of our identity, what shapes it, how history has impacted it, how colonialism lingers to control it, and how our own role in perpetuating what needs to be challenged and changed.
More simply put, a healed nation that does work on its emotional economy does not have an import fiscal economy. Why? Because your emotional worldview centers who you are, what you do, how you do it, and that it is invaluable, priceless, and precious. You cannot remain a landscape of extraction when racial healing is at the core of your path in life. Africa needs that kind of depth and breadth because the deadly dual oppressive systems of colonialism and enslavement – as well as that third horror of apartheid shapes a global emotional worldview. It is a deadly delusion of white superiority and black inferiority, and its consequences surround and engulf us.
Healing an emotional worldview is not easy work. We cannot PhD our way out of the untreated trauma that is still peppered all across our Continent in multiple ways. In Ghana, we are still a nation that is over certified and under-educated. We need not stay that way. Emotional Justice is a racial healing roadmap that offers us a framework and a path.
Africa is our world, and has shaped the world. Let’s choose our own healing, let’s choose us.
Join me as I launch my new book ‘EMOTIONAL JUSTICE: a roadmap for racial healing’ on Tuesday 29th November as part of Webster University Ghana’s Inaugural Global Conversations Public Reading Series, East Legon, Ghana. This event features a Dramatized Reading by Ghanaian actress Pearl Korkor Darkey, A Moderated Discussion with Francis Abban and a Book Signing. Webster’s Campus Director, Christa Sanders Bobotoya says: ‘Webster University’s Global Conversations Public Reading Series is designed to create cross-cultural engagement with the public on issues of international importance by inviting global thought leaders, activists and writers to discuss topics impacting today’s world.”
The event is free. Please register via this link:- https://www.eventbrite.com/e/inaugural-global-conversations-public-reading-series-tickets-460836583627
