Book Discussion on Saturday, August 1, 2015, 2:00 P.M., San Leandro Main Library

Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi

Novelists have become very coy about sharing their biographical information on their official websites, maybe because they want the story to be the one they wrote and not the one about them. So once again I have been forced to turn to Wikipedia as a last resort. The usual caveats apply.

Taiye Selasi was born November 2, 1979, in London, England, the first of twin sisters (Taiye and Kehinde) and grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts. She received a BA in American Studies from Yale and a Master's in International Relations from Nuffield College, Oxford. Ms. Selasi's mother is a prominent pediatrician in Ghana and the Baltimore area, her father a surgeon practicing in Saudi Arabia, and her twin sister a rehabilitation medicine specialist practicing in the Boston area. Selasi didn't meet her father until she was 12 years old. In the video below, she talks about Ghana Must Go and challenging preconceptions about Africa and Africans.

The Makola Market in the center of Accra, Ghana

Skyline of Lagos, Nigeria

Why "Ghana Must Go"?

At the end of the book, Fola is given a memento of her late husband
packed in a "Ghana Must Go" bag. I had to look up what that meant, and I found it in the blog of a young woman named Anne Chia.

As Ms. Selasi mentioned briefly in her book, in 1983, Nigeria's President Shagari announced that within a few weeks all immigrants without the proper documentation would be ordered to leave Nigeria. This order affected about a million Ghanaian residents and about another million from other West African countries. The immigrants facing expulsion were forced to pack up whatever they could into whatever luggage they could find, and the most ubiquitous bag used for this purpose was a large, deep, inexpensive checkered tote bag, which Anne Chia describes in her blog post thus:

It is quite popular worldwide and is used for laundry and to store beddings or even as holiday excess luggage in many countries in the world. But specifically, in Germany it is “Tuekenkoffer”, which means the Turkish suitcase. In the United States of America, it is called the “Chinatown tote”. In Guyana, it is the “Guyanese Samsonite”. In Ghana and Nigeria, where the bags are celebrities and the most recognisable signature of “movement” it is known simply as the “Ghana must go” bag.

The typical checkered pattern has since also taken on the name of "Ghana Must Go" and has been incorporated into African-influenced fashion design.

The other day, I saw a video clip of Mika Brzezinski and noticed that she was wearing what looked kind of like a "Ghana Must Go" shirt. I wonder if she knew it.