Say it together
Every greeting here is a wish.
While English is the official language of Ghana, there are over ninety languages and dialects. About 44% of Ghanaians speak the indigenous language, Akan. Akan has three main dialects: Fante, Asante Twi and Akwapim. Esther would greet you with Akwaaba, which means welcome.
Hear it said by someone who says it every day
These words are written and explained here, and a reader from this city is recording them. Until that recording exists there is no audio, because a machine guessing at a language it does not know is worse than silence.
Your turn
In Ghana, the day you were born is part of your name.
In West Africa, newborns are given a name for the day they were born, and grown-ups keep it for life. Kwame Nkrumah, whose park you just walked through, was Kwame because he arrived on a Saturday. Kofi Annan was Kofi because he arrived on a Friday. Tell us your birthday and you will have one too.
Any birthday works. Try a grown-up’s as well.
You were born on a .
All seven, so you can find anybody’s
We’ll do this
Six ways to make somebody belong.
Ghana welcomed a whole world home on purpose. These are six ways to do the same thing at your size. Pick at least one your class will actually carry out. It lives in your classroom and your homes.
You have been somewhere real. Now it is about you.
Ghana invited home a whole world of people it had never met, and hundreds of thousands came. Akwaaba is the first word you see there, and it is meant.
Find the person at your school who is newest, or quietest, or furthest from home. Learn to say their name the way THEY say it, not the way it is easiest for you. Then use it. If you get it wrong, ask again. Asking twice is the polite thing, not the rude one. Then come back and take your stamp.
For grown-ups
Running Accra with children
What the child should be able to do at the end
The child can welcome somebody so that they know they belong, and can tell more than one story about the same place.
What to watch together, and the questions that go with it
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's “The Danger of a Single Story”, TED, is in the lesson. Eighteen minutes. Watch it with the children rather than sending them to it.
- Adichie says the problem with a single story is not that it is untrue. What is the problem?
- What is one story people might tell about where you live that is true but not the whole truth?
- Ghana invited home people it had never met. What does it take to make somebody feel they belong?
- Who at your school is newest, and what would help them?
A note on Cape Coast Castle
Cape Coast and the slave trade are in this lesson because the Year of Return has no meaning without them, and because leaving them out would be its own single story. They sit in one clearly marked stop an adult can hold back. For K to 2, stop at Jamestown and go to the day names. For grades 3 to 5, walk the castle together and read it aloud rather than letting a child meet it alone.
If a device is not available
The day names work on paper: write the seven days and the fourteen names, and let every child find their own from a calendar. The six projects need no screen. Learning to say one person's name correctly is the whole lesson and needs nothing at all.
Where this is still open
The Twi here needs a Ghanaian reader's check before this goes to families, and Accra collaborators hold stop authority on all of it.