Lifestyle
Ghana Must Go: The Bag, the Border, and the Blame (PHOTOS)
In January 1983, over a million West African migrants—mostly Ghanaians—were expelled from Nigeria in a mass deportation order that came to be remembered by three bitter words: Ghana Must Go.
At the heart of this wave was a blue-and-red chequered plastic bag. Affordable, durable, and easy to carry, it became the makeshift suitcase for desperate migrants forced to pack their lives in hours and leave the country they had called home. That bag would later become forever associated with the phrase
Ghana Must Go—a symbol of exile, xenophobia, and survival.
Nigeria, freshly rich from oil in the 1970s, had drawn thousands of West Africans—including Ghanaians—seeking work, education, and opportunity. But by the early 1980s, oil prices had crashed, unemployment soared, and crime increased. The Nigerian government, under President Shehu Shagari, blamed the economic downturn in part on the influx of undocumented foreigners and ordered their expulsion.
Ghanaians, who had once opened their borders to Nigerians fleeing the Nigerian Civil War in the late 1960s, now found themselves being trucked out in droves, sometimes in dehumanising conditions. The exodus strained Ghana’s already struggling economy, but also marked a painful shift in West African unity.
Today, Ghana Must Go is more than a bag—it is a reminder of how quickly neighbours can become strangers, and how migration, hospitality, and history are often intertwined in complicated, emotional ways.
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