I Made it Through The Crack

by Kwame Kyei Jumaane Ponder

My name is Jumaane K. Ponder and I am 17 years of age. I have been in Ghana for two years. My time in Ghana has been a challenge to change the deadly misconceptions that I possessed and erase my arrogant American attitude along with the ignorant mental and spiritual concepts and replace them with the characteristics of a 'man.'

I give thanks to Dr. Kwaku K.E. Attakora and Nana Akua Botwe Attakora for championing that course of my life. In this, I see my achievements as a testimony to their dedication to the struggle in taking a misguided troubled youth and attempting to guide him mentally and spiritually into a responsible male. I thank the Almighty God and all the spirits of Africa for the reformation of Jumaane K. Ponder and the creation of Kwame Kyei.

During the 15 years that I lived in America, I learned the concepts and conceptions of the street which are all centered around one main concept.: DESTRUCTION OF THE BLACK MALE It takes a lot of strength to raise up and be successful in a society plagued with that concept. The notion 'survival of the fittest still carry that notion but on a different level.

I have seen that spiritual and mental fitness is what allows you to survive. Thanks to my mother Glenda Ruth Ponder. I was given the spiritual and mental capacity to survive. Although, just having that capacity does not mean you will survive.

Having the strength to rise above it all is what ensures survival when you add it to the prior capacity. But when I left America for Ghana, my life was very much in danger. My mother had that insight to see that I was going in the wrong direction and that my end was near if my course was not changed. I suppose it is one way that God works.

I arrived in Ghana with a typical teenage America mentality, thinking that I knew all that there was to know and that I was the 'baddest' thing to ever hit the shores of Africa. During my first year, I was exposed to such intensive de-Americanization that I was literally engulfed by the culture.

But, I was ignorant and rebelled as much as possible. but those who saw something in me, kept at it. As I sank deeper and deeper into the knowledge which I was acquiring I grew more and more proud of my heritage and culture; not as a Black American or an Afro-American but as an African.

© 1998 Kwame Kyei Jumaane Ponder