by Richard DABLAH_
Email: richard.dablah@gmail.com
A sign is never just a sign. It is an inscription of power, a claim to memory, a projection of identity. That is why the debate over whether the words at Kotoka International Airport should remain “Akwaaba” (Akan for “welcome”) or be replaced by “Oobakɛ” (Ga for the same) is far more than a quarrel over orthography. It is, at bottom, a struggle over the meaning of Ghana itself.
For decades, _Akwaaba_ has reigned uncontested as Ghana’s verbal handshake to the world. It adorns brochures, greets tourists, and stands as a shorthand for Ghanaian hospitality. Yet its very dominance raises a philosophical question: why should one word, born of one ethnic group, stand as the essence of us all?
Here we encounter the myth of authenticity. Too often in postcolonial Africa, we have been seduced into believing that “true” identity lies in recovering an authentic symbol, an authentic language, an authentic tradition—usually that of the dominant group. This myth suggests that to be Ghanaian is, in some deep sense, to be Akan, or at least to greet the world in Akan. But such a move is intellectually lazy. It confuses the contingent with the essential, the historical accident of cultural dominance with the philosophical foundation of the nation.
The Ga protest against Akwaaba is, therefore, not simply tribal pride. It is a refusal of this myth. It exposes the arbitrariness of elevating one tongue to stand for the whole. To demand Oobakɛ is to insist that Ghanaian identity cannot be collapsed into a single ethnic authenticity. Yet here, too, we must be careful. If Akwaaba risks imposing unity at the expense of plurality, then Oobakɛ risks substituting one parochialism for another. Authenticity, whether Akan or Ga, is still authenticity—and authenticity, in this sense, is always a trap.
The real philosophical task is not to discover the one “authentic” symbol that defines Ghana, but to invent a national identity that transcends the very logic of authenticity. Nationalism must not be the ossification of a tribal symbol writ large. It must be the conscious construction of a universalism rooted in diversity—a critical universalism, to borrow Hountondji’s posture. In this frame, Akwaaba, Oobakɛ, and Woezor (Ewe for welcome) need not compete. They can coexist, not as tribal trophies, but as fragments of a larger whole, a linguistic polyphony that says: Ghana is not reducible to one tongue, yet it refuses to splinter into many.
This is no easy balance. The temptation of authenticity is strong because it offers clarity, simplicity,and a false solidity. To insist on plurality feels untidy, unstable, and even cacophonous. But it is only through this untidy plurality that a truly national identity can emerge. The alternative is worse: a nationalism built on the fiction of a single authentic voice, which inevitably alienates all others and reduces the nation to the mask of one tribe.
Thus the airport debate is not trivial. It is the staging ground for a larger philosophical wager. Will Ghana continue to mistake one culture’s language for the national essence, perpetuating the myth of authenticity? Or will it dare to construct an identity that does not seek a single “authentic” root, but embraces its own plurality as the very condition of nationhood?
Every traveler passing beneath that sign is not just being welcomed. They are being introduced to Ghana’s self-understanding. What words greet them—whether one or many—will tell them what Ghana has chosen to be: a nation trapped in the myth of authenticity, or a nation bold enough to invent itself beyond tribe.
*E pluribus unum.*
