GHANA MUST GO: The ugly history of Africa’s most famous bag [Africa Full Facts]

AFRICA'S MOST FAMOUS Bag [Africa Full Facts] 

GHANA MUST GO: The ugly history of Africa’s most famous bag

It was the bags that made up Solomon “Acquaye” Asiedu’s mind. They were cheap, ordinary bags. They had no name and came in blue and red, in big and medium sizes, all checked. They were wanted in Lagos markets with an intensity never experienced before. Nigerian traders sold out of the bags as hundreds jostled to get as many as they could to pack their things  into.

The bags had always been popular: they were big and spacious and sturdy enough for long-haul travel. But it was when people started calling them “Ghana must go” bags that the young man knew it was time to leave. The bags followed him home, as he crossed two countries to return to Ghana and, 36 years later, they still stare at him from stores on every corner — with the same cursed name. They represent a period of despair that many Ghanaians would rather forget.

The year was 1983, the day, January 17. Acquaye had just listened to Shehu Shagari, the Nigerian leader who favoured long hats, declare the expulsion of  an estimated two million undocumented migrants living in the country. Half of them were Ghanaian. “If they don’t leave, they should be arrested and tried and sent back to their homes. Illegal immigrants, under normal circumstances, should not be given any notice whatsoever,” President Shagari said. Acquaye and millions like him with no papers were told to get out within two weeks or risk jail. “If you break a law, then you have to pay for it,” said the president.

Two years before, Acquaye had arrived in Nigeria with zero cash and a hundred hopes. He had followed the road trail leading through Aflao in Ghana to Lomé in Togo and then onwards through the Seme border between Nigeria and the Republic of Benin. He wasn’t the only one, clicking his tongue at the memory. “That time everybody was going. There was money in Nigeria.”

TO be continued