Ghana Life: Population Transfers

Sometime during the mid-1970s a prominent Nigerian academic was invited by the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana, to give an important public lecture in the Great Hall of the University. The packed audience of students, academics and visitors from the town were treated to a stimulating talk that began with a question. The professor asked his audience: if the entire population of the USA was told to pack only a single suitcase and move to Africa, and the entire population of Africa was asked to do the same and move to the USA, what would be the situation in another ten years? The view of the overwhelming majority was that Africa would become the USA and the USA would become Africa.
The professor's question was purely speculative and a full discussion would require qualifying in a number of ways. In essence, the eminent visitor was saying that human communities preferred to retain the culture they know, and that this factor was more powerful than material factors. Individual Africans might choose to move to the USA for a better life in purely material terms, but if they moved en masse they would inevitably choose to live in the way of their ancestors, preserving their traditional and religious institutions and social structures. The Nigerian professor might also have been hinting that this proclivity was incompatible with the Western capitalist system, little of which would remain once the USA was fully populated with Africans.
It is not for a European author to speak for Americans but certainly many Europeans would like to live permanently in Africa if it was permitted. They would enjoy its warmer climate and the opportunity of developing its rich natural resources. They find it hard to understand why so many Africans wish to leave the comfort and relaxed challenges of life in Africa for the rigours and dull routine of Europe's perpetual winters. Of course, most Africans hope to return home with their plunder to enjoy an affluent retirement, but not all prosper overseas, and many of those who do are forced to leave their children in the lands where they have grown up and in which they have citizenship from birth.
Anthropologists tell us that human beings have evolved to adapt to the conditions of our environments. Thus Africans have dark pigmented skins to protect them from the intense tropical sunshine while Europeans have pale skins to draw every last molecule of vitamin D from the sun's pale slanting beams. Yet at the psychological level things are different. Many Europeans prefer the warmth and freedom of the tropical climate while Africans brave snow and ice with astonishing robustness. Though not on the total scale postulated by the Nigerian professor, there is much to be said for population transfer in both directions, and many may regret that political reality permits flow in only one.

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