Africa: Why Do We Reserve Our Shoulders To Carry Only Foreigners?

In a colorful ceremony on 28 August 2026, Chinese businessman Zheng Xiangming, chairman of Greenhouse International Development Group Ghana Limited, was enstooled as a traditional development chief in Ghana, given the stool name Hiowe Golaka Noryam Matse Nene Asumahtsu I, and carried shoulder-high during the ceremony in Greater Accra. Ghana’s Chief of Staff reportedly congratulated and commended the new chief on his enstoolment at a ceremony linked to the company’s large agricultural and forestry investment.

Ghanaian traditional institutions, like all living institutions, have mechanisms for recognizing service, so nothing is inherently wrong or sinister about honoring a foreign resident who contributes to a community.

By all accounts, Mr. Xiangming ticked all the positives.

A development chief (Nkosuhene in Akan) is a ceremonial title bestowed on the deserving, and it does not possess the sovereign authority of a paramount chief or king.

But as it is our wont on this blog, we do not hide behind technical vocabulary. The image remains unmistakable: a Chinese national is lifted into African majesty by African hands, while many of those same hands, or hands very much like them, have been raised in anger against an Igbo cultural leader who was accused of trying to install an illegitimate “kingdom” on Ghanaian soil.

No one contests whether the Republic of Ghana has the right to regulate chieftaincy within its territory; every state does. The question is why the language of sovereignty becomes a moral principle when the claimant is Nigerian, or an African, but a flexible courtesy when the honored foreigner is Chinese, European, Arab, or American.

Our question is why an African migrant is said to be trespassing on Ghanaian identity, while a foreign investor with loads of money is welcomed into its ceremonial interior? Another important question is: Why does blackness in Black Africa automatically become suspicious the moment it crosses a border, while foreign capital is treated as proof of good character?

This is not merely hypocrisy; it’s the afterlife of colonial conquest lodged in the African imagination.

We must ask why foreigners can be symbolically adopted into local authority when their presence is associated with investment, employment, or development, while, unfortunately, Africans from neighboring countries are more readily treated as cultural threats even if they come with the same skills and capital.

The contradiction became especially visible in the controversy surrounding Eze Chukwudi Jude Ihenetu, who was ceremonially enstooled as Eze Ndi Igbo Ghana in 2012. Eze Ihenetu is noted for his entrepreneurship and largesse of heart. He is a well-regarded prominent migrant who has planted deep roots in Ghana and has made immense contributions to his community, until suddenly, in 2025, the Ga Traditional Council and the Ningo Traditional Council rejected claims associated with an “Igbo Kingdom” or “Igbo Village” in Ghana, insisting that the title had no legal recognition within Ghana’s chieftaincy system.

Forgotten in the hullabaloo is the simple fact that his Igbo people decided to honor him with a chieftaincy title. He didn’t claim any sovereignty in Ghana.

As we constantly maintain on this blog, Ghana, like every sovereign state, is entitled to defend its constitutional and customary order, but the spectacle is difficult to ignore: while African cultural expression is interrogated as an invasion, foreign economic power is often absorbed into the language of partnership, modernity, and national progress.

We are at a loss to understand the kind of psychological disorder that produces this selective vigilance in us Africans.

We can’t consider it madness in the clinical sense, but it’s a political and historical pathology: internalized racial hierarchy.

For Africa, the greatest tragedy is not that colonialism merely seized African land and labor; it’s that it reorganized the African scale of value. It taught Africans to associate the foreign with authority, the European with civilization, the Arab and Asian with ancient prestige, and the black neighbor with disorder, competition, and danger.

Prophet Frantz Fanon understood that colonial domination enters the mind through language, education, religion, employment, dress, and others' gaze.

As he so succinctly put it, the colonized person is, tragically, compelled to seek recognition and validation from a world that has already defined him as inferior. Later scholars call it internalized racism: the absorption of negative judgments about one’s own group until discrimination against that group begins to feel like common sense.

The colonized were not only ruled; they were trained to desire the ruler's symbols and to despise the evidence of their own equal humanity.

That is how a black society can, without a sense of irony or shame, decorate a foreign businessman with African titles while viewing a fellow African migrant as an intruder. It is how the African passport becomes an object of suspicion at African airports, while the white or Asian passport is handled with ceremonial efficiency. It is how Africans denounce racism in Europe and America, then reproduce its operating principles at home: a hierarchy of bodies, accents, passports, currencies, and presumed worth.

In concrete terms, this humiliation has a material dimension. While Eze Ihenetu is viewed as an Individual, the Chinese investor does not arrive as merely one man. He arrives, in the host society's colonized imagination, backed by money, corporations, diplomatic networks, and the possibility of jobs.

In this pathology, Mr. Xiangming is welcomed as opportunity, and Eze Ihenetu is processed as a problem.

The bow is then renamed hospitality.
As we have pleaded ad nauseam on this blog, Africans must stop pretending that every foreigner is a benefactor and every African migrant is a threat. Foreign investment can create jobs, but it can also raise questions about land, labor, environmental protection, technology transfer, and who truly benefits.

Even Ghana’s Chief of Staff, while praising the Greenhouse investment, called for local skills, responsible land management, and meaningful Ghanaian participation. Minister Zenator Rawlings repeated the same message at a recent event in Accra.

That is the correct standard: not racial adoration, not racial suspicion, but transparent rules applied consistently.

We call for an end to double standards.
If the rules say that foreign nationals cannot exercise Ghanaian chieftaincy authority anywhere in the country, that rule must be clear, explicit, universal, and non-discriminatory.

If indigeneity matters, it must matter before money enters the room.

The deepest scandal we see here is not that a Chinese man was carried on an African shoulder; it’s that too many Africans have been taught to believe those shoulders were naturally made to carry only foreigners.

How many Ghanaians will step forward to carry a Nigerian or anyone with their skin color?

Until we Africans confront that false belief, independence will remain a flag and anthem ceremony performed over our colonized imagination. We will keep demanding respect from the world while reserving contempt for one another. We will keep calling our kneeling hospitality. And we will keep mistaking the foreigner’s approval for our own worth.

Blog: https://femiakogun.substack.com