GUYSBOROUGH – Mary Desmond – policymaker, community activist and fierce advocate for African Nova Scotian communities – is rarely, if ever, at a loss for words.
But on a quiet Friday morning recently, at her home in Upper Big Tracadie, near the line that separates Antigonish County from the Municipality of the District of Guysborough, where she serves as District 2 councillor, she struggled to speak, recalling what she had seen only weeks earlier in Ghana.
“I went there expecting to learn our history,” she said. “But, instead, I felt it.”
Felt it in the old dungeons of Cape Coast Castle, preserved as historical landmarks, perched at the edge of the world, facing west, where the ancient smell was still thick in the unmoving air.
Felt it when she had to bend to fit inside those rooms where some of her ancestors may have been warehoused hundreds of years earlier before being force-marched onto ships bound for the Americas and slavery.
She also felt it elsewhere, days later when she stood at the Nkyinkyim Museum, a memorial sculpture park east of the Ghanaian capital of Accra, where hundreds of clay heads – half-finished, blindfolded, shackled, crowned, marked, scarred, set into the earth, clustered beneath trees, submerged in shallow pools of water – stared upward. “It took us right to the bone,” Desmond said.
By “us” she meant herself, her sister Jackie Reddick and five other members of a small self-determined delegation of residents and friends – Catherine Hartling, Alicia Clyke, Tyrell Byard, Debbie Castle and David Fletcher.
They’d spent weeks organizing and raising money, pulling support from across their communities – small donations, local efforts, people chipping in where they could – to make the March 10-25 trip possible.
Mary’s longtime friend and colleague Fletcher, a Nova Scotia-based community development educator who both organized and came along, described it as less of a trip and more of a pilgrimage, shaped as much by intention as by destination. “With the group … it really had that sense to it,” he said. “Very powerful, very profound.”
For Desmond, “It’s not something you can really explain,” she said. “When we walked there, it stayed with us.”
And yet, beyond the museums and the gruesome monuments, there was something else, too.
On the ground in Ghana, local partners helped guide them through communities far from the coast where just as powerful and profound was the way they were received, welcomed, invited in, fed. In places where there was little to spare, people shared what they had without hesitation. “They didn’t have a lot,” Desmond said. “But what they had, they gave. And they gave it freely.”
In one community, they spent the better part of a day moving through schools, sitting with residents, talking, listening. “They brought us in, they sat us down, they talked to us like we were part of the community,” she said. “We went through the schools, met the kids, met the people there, and everywhere you went, people were just open. They wanted to talk. They wanted to share. They made you feel like you belonged there.”
That sense of belonging blossomed at every turn. At one point during the trip, it was formalized in a ceremony led by local traditional leaders, where Desmond and others in the group were given names in the Ashanti tradition. Desmond was called Yaa Boatemaa – loosely translated as “helper in times of need.” It fit. “I knew right away,” she said. “That’s me.”
Elsewhere, the country revealed itself in motion. Markets. Streets. Worksites. People moving. Building. Selling. Fixing. “People are working,” she said. “They’re doing what they have to do.”
Even in places she hadn’t expected, the cheerful hustle was evident. During a visit to a local medical facility, she said she was struck not by what was missing, but by what was there. At one point, that became personal. She began having trouble with her leg. “They took me in right away,” she said. “They looked at it, they treated it. There was no waiting around. You felt like they cared,” she said. “You weren’t just another person.”
She’s been home now long enough for it all to settle. Long enough for the noise of it to quiet. But not long enough for it to leave.
“It changes you,” she said. Not just how you see the past. How you see yourself. What you carry. What you’re responsible for.”
She pauses. Thinks about the people she met. The homes opened to her. The name she was given. Yaa Boatemaa. Helper in times of need.
At a time when most people are thinking about slowing down, Desmond – a great-grandmother, former nurse, chaplain and longtime advocate for seniors, who has spent more than two decades building and supporting her community, and who has been recognized with honours including the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal and the Duke of Edinburgh Award – is not finished.
“It makes you think about what you’re doing here,” she said of those 15 days in March under African skies in the shadow of both history and hope. “And what you should be doing.”
