relationship with Make ended, and her son, Guy, was accepted to the University of Ghana.
But Angelou quickly became a part of the black expatriate community. She was an early member of the American Society of African Culture, which was inspired by Ghana’s liberation and sought to form stronger ties between African and African-American artists and intellectuals.
“I never felt that I belonged anywhere until I went to Ghana,” Angelou said in a 1975 interview. “Then parts of me relaxed that I didn’t even know I had.
My soul relaxed. Of
course, I could never
write that line. Too
purple. But that’s how
I felt.”
But while possibilities
for the future of people
of African descent in
the diaspora that
Angelou saw as that
country continued to
shake off the shackles
of colonialism
influenced her, so did
the ghosts of its past as
a trans-Atlantic slave transit port.
“Children passed tied together by ropes and chains, tears abashed, stumbling in dull exhaustion, then women, hair uncombed, bodies gritted with sand and sagging in defeat,” Angelou wrote in her 1986 memoir, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes.
“Men, muscles without memory, minds dimmed, plodding, leaving bloodied footprints in the dirt…None of them cried or yelled or bellowed. No moans came from them. They lived in a mute territory, dead to feeling or protest…
“These were the legions, sold by sisters, stolen by brothers, bought by strangers, enslaved by the greedy and betrayed by history.”
Angelou remained in Ghana until 1965. She stayed there, in part, to care for her son, who had been seriously injured in a car accident. But she continued to deploy her skills and her passions as a writer and a revolutionary, writing for the Ghanaian Times, the African Review and Radio Ghana.
She also joined a group of African-American expatriate protesters at the U.S. embassy in Ghana
on Aug. 28, 1963 – the same day as the March on Washington – to add her voice to the cause of freedom.
As the U.S. civil
rights movement gained momentum, Angelou knew it was time to return home. Yet as James Robert Saunders writes in Breaking Out of the Cage: The Autobiographical
Writings of Maya Angelou, her insights as a writer were enhanced by her ties to Africa.
That should not be surprising – because Angelou’s life, like the life of many writers, is a quest to uncover of realties that add context to their lives and to the message they want people to glean from it.
Angelou was a writer whose voice was shaped not only by traumas and triumphs in her own life – Jim Crow segregation, her rape by her mother’s boyfriend and her graduation from high school in
"While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of man’s
humanity to man."
-Maya Angelou
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