2019 has been declared the Year of Return for the African Diaspora. The move is closely connected with the fact that more and more Africans are coming to understand that the Western European elite’s addiction to looting Africa as an endless supply of cheap labour and population replacement is deeply damaging to African nations. Luring away so many trained health service professionals and millions of bright and ambitious young people is the highest – and in all probability the worst – form of imperialism.
The declaration was made in Washington, D.C., in September last year. Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo 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.
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, afire with Nkrumah’s spirit.
“He wanted to be able to utilise the services and skills of African-Americans as Ghana made the transition from colonialism to independence.”
Ghana’s parliament passed a Citizenship Act in 2000 to make provision for dual citizenship, meaning that people of Ghanaian origin who have acquired citizenships abroad can take up Ghanaian citizenship if they so desire.
That same year the country enacted the Immigration Act, which provides for a “Right of Abode” for any “Person of African descent in the Diaspora” to travel to and from the country “without hindrance.”
In 2007, in its 50th year of independence, the government initiated the Joseph Project to commemorate 200 years since the abolition of slavery and to encourage Africans abroad to return.
The problem of Africa’s brain drain to Europe has got many times worse since then. The APF rejects entirely the EU liberal elite’s population-looting disguised as ‘humanitarianism’. We believe that European nations should pay and train their own young people to staff their own hospitals. Europeans should empty their own bins and flip their own burgers.
And Europeans should have their own babies to maintain their own populations, rather than luring young Africans to make the often deadly dangerous journey to Europe to become the “hewers of wood and the drawers of water” for the new EU imperialists.
