My dear motherland

My dear motherland,
I love you. I miss you. Yet you will not have me back.

You will not have me back because I am a queer, non-binary person. You will not have me back due to religious reasons. Moral reasons.

You tell me and my community that we are forcing our ideas down your throats while you are still choking on the medicine forced down your throats by the people who shot off noses on the Sphinxes of Egypt, Brought the Akosombo Dam to us and then abandoned it and us - the people who Killed Yaa Asantewaa and the gods we knew to be ours.

Ghana, Motherland, Mother.
Characterised by your nurturing manner, your care, compassion, striving for understanding and slowness to anger and physicality. We as a people believe in love. We embody love. We are love.

So I ask you, where is this love?
Where is the compassion for human life?
Where is the defending of human rights?
Where is the humanity?

Where is that sense of community that is engrained so deeply within us that even upon recognising another Ghanaian in the street, we feel seen, loved and safe?

I ask all who listen to this to think on these questions.

Now is not the time to reenact the oppression once visited upon us by those outside of our community. Now is not the time to become deaf to the cries for justice, cries to simply be able to exist peacefully and safely among fellow country people. Now is the time to make change.

Now is the time for that unity, community and love to prevail.

Motherland. I love you. I miss you.
I want to return to you.
But I am not safe with you.

Let’s make that change.
Make it safe for us all to exist.

My name is Darkwah Kyei-Darkwah.
I am proudly LGBTQ+. Proudly Queer.
Proudly Ghanaian