I never wanted to travel. At no point in my life did I feel like something was missing because I wasn’t travelling. Maybe I secretly wanted to see the world but it never seemed like an attainable goal, so I quickly forgot about it. I’ve always been clear about one thing however; I wanted to go to Ghana. My Ghana love story begins with Ghanaian professor and world-renowned poet, Atukwei Okai. I met Prof. Okai at the Durban University of Technology when he was a guest at the Poetry Africa Festival. Our small class was told that we were going to have a guest poet come and present to us. None of us knew what to expect. When the time came, Professor Okai walked into the room and filled the room. He was a big man, with a booming voice. He wore a Ghanaian traditional garment and it was beautiful. He spoke about his beloved country and independence and I fell in love. He recited some poetry and I will never forget the poem called “Unwind Me, Woman, Unwind Me Well”. After that day I vowed to read up on everything Ghana. This is where my dream to visit Ghana was born.

Fast forward to August 2018; I finally managed to travel to Ghana. A very good friend of mine sent me a message telling me about a friend of hers who had started a travel company and had a group tour to Ghana. This was it! My chance to go to Ghana! I paid a deposit to the company and saved up some money for the trip. The day of the trip finally came and I was incredibly nervous but excited at the same time. This was my first time travelling outside of South Africa, the first time on a flight that was longer than two hours and I was doing it alone. Fortunately, I was going to join a group tour in Ghana.
I remember the moment we landed in Ghana. I was filled with so much anticipation. I had imagined this moment for about sixteen years. I had played it and replayed it so many times, but when it happened it felt like nothing I had ever experienced before. I was sitting next to a kind gentleman who had been chatting with me for over an hour. By the time we landed, I had told him my whole Ghana story. So, before we landed he told to look out the window and see Accra. To be honest I didn’t see much because my eyes were filled with tears. I was finally here. I was finally in Ghana.

• 

• 

• 

I didn’t even feel the long customs queues. I was just happy to be there. I was standing there watching people and making up stories about why they were in Ghana. A businessman coming for a meeting, a student doing some volunteering in Ghana, a man coming to meet up with a woman he met online. The stories just kept coming. I must have spent over an hour in those queues but it was all worth it because I was finally in Ghana.
I’ve written a lot about Ghana and the activities I enjoyed while I was there, but there two places that have stuck with me. The Cape Coast Castle was one of them. This is the castle that was used to keep Africans before they were sent to the Americas to become slaves. I had read about this place but nothing could prepare me for the moment I stood in the room that kept the male slaves before they were packed into those ships. I allowed myself to cry and grieve them; the ones that lived and the ones that died.
The second place was the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park. Before arriving in Ghana I didn’t know that Nkrumah’s remains were in a mausoleum at the memorial park. This was a life-changing moment for me. I felt an even stronger connection to the people of Ghana. African renaissance has always been an ideal that interested me and Nkrumah’s speeches were an inspiration to me. But standing there in front of the famous bronze Nkrumah statue, everything fell into place. That part I cannot put into actual words because of its spiritual enormity. As an African woman born in Southern Africa, I have no known links to West Africa, but being in Ghana felt like coming home.

I went on to spend a few more days in Ghana and had the time of my life. My heart was satisfied with Ghana. It was everything I expected and so much more. The history was probably my biggest drawcard. But as I came back home, I knew that something had changed in me. My life was never going to be the same again.
And sure enough, I was just restless and unsatisfied with my life. I wanted more and my job and my life back home didn’t make sense. I was fortunate enough to be able to travel to Namibia eight months later. That didn’t help; in fact, it made things even worse. Now I just had to travel. I have since travelled to the Netherlands and France and I am still hoping to travel, even more, to feed the wanderlust. I have Ghana to thank for that.