Thirteen years ago, I was hired to host a reality show award ceremony—not my usual gig, but I took it because it was in Ghana, and I’d somehow never been to Africa. Sometimes, you have these grand dreams about what will happen when you travel to a place, but I truly had no idea how hard it would hit me at the very second my foot touched that soil.
I’d heard stories from people who’d gone to Africa about how it changes your life, and the minute I got off the plane, I was hit with emotions I just didn’t expect. So much had been bottled up in me—probably for my whole life—from growing up watching Roots to having family who lived through the Jim Crow era (my father was the youngest of 16 siblings on a farm in Little Rock, Arkansas) to having family linked directly to the slave trade. Sometime before the trip, I’d gotten my DNA tested and traced back to a village in Cameroon; knowing that, and knowing what my family had been through stateside, it was all there when the plane touched down.
I have a very hard time explaining how it felt. Before I even saw the people, the nature, the country itself, literally the way the ground received me put me into an emotional state I was not prepared for. Initially, I guess I just felt the life-force energy of the country: every color, smell, sound. No blue was ever as blue; no red was ever as red. It was just an overwhelming sensory thing for me. And when I met people, more often than not, the first words out of their mouths were, “Welcome home, brother.” You know how they say we all have a twin someplace? Well, here I saw the African Will Smith, the African Viola Davis, the African Soulja Boy. Someone who looked like me, someone who looked like my brother—all these familiar faces from home, halfway around the world. It was this feeling of being welcomed back home.
Over the trip, this feeling deepened and intensified, but nowhere more than at two actual slave dungeons, called Elmina Castle and Cape Coast Castle. These were the main depots that held people captured from all over Africa for the slave trade before they were shipped off to the Americas. The first dungeon we visited was Elmina, a 15th-century castle that underwent many different incarnations over the years—from a police station to a school to a museum. This is where I learned most of the history, and it was more of an intellectual experience. Cape Coast was different: It wasn’t as altered by the intervening centuries.
Cape Coast was a slave dungeon. You felt that. They have a place there called the Door of No Return, because, before these Africans were put on ships bound for the Americans, this door was the last time that they saw home—and the Door of No Return is an actual door. It’s still there: this massive castle archway with a heavy bolted door opening straight onto a beach walkway down to the water. It was the last thing these Africans saw before they were led down to boats and lost in the Middle Passage. For me, a descendant of these Africans, to be able to go through the actual Door of No Return was totally overwhelming. It drove home how resilient and how strong of a people we are, that, centuries later, a great-great-grandchild of the people captured, tortured, and forced through this door could return, could walk back through the same door and see their homeland. Unfortunately, back then I didn’t have this T-shirt that a New Orleans–based artist friend made for me, and which I wore on Blackish, that reads “I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams.” I wear that constantly to remind me of the people that I come from, and the people that I’m a part of.
I’ve been back to Africa seven times since that initial trip—to Ghana, South Africa, Morocco, some more than once—but that first time, walking back through that Door of No Return, was life-changing. I couldn’t stop crying, and it wasn’t anything that anybody said or did. It was just me walking through that door, knowing the history. That’s what made it so emotional. Nothing needed to be said; we understood it. We understood that we are our ancestors’ wildest dreams.
