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“Sweet Mother” Africa Motivates Yet Another Son
Derrick N. Ashong Empowers the World
By Linda A. Annan
Published: December 15, 2006
The young boy Buakei, Cinquè's (Djimon Hounsou) brother in Steven Spielberg's 1997 award-winning movie Amistad is now an adult, a vocalist and co-founder of the band Soulfège, as well as the media outlet ASAFO productions. Derrick N. Ashong is one of today's young African entrepreneurs with an eye for involvement. At 31, this singer/songwriter is working passionately with his fellow band members in promoting their Pan-African youth empowerment project, Sweet Mother Tour (SMT), creating tools of communication both youths and their leaders can use in discussing issues affecting the world today.
Ashong has been called a “product of many cultures and a citizen of the world;” born in Accra, Ghana, where he lived until age 4, he moved to Brooklyn, New York with his family and was introduced to a whole new world to which he quickly assimilated. By the time he was 8 he had moved again to Saudi Arabia and then to Dohar , Qatar , a small peninsular located next to the Saudi Arabian gulf. Ashong spent at least 8 additional years in the Middle East before returning to the United States to complete his last two years of high school in Voorhees , NJ , after which he attended Harvard University , Boston . By this time he had forgotten all but one of the Ghanaian languages—Ga, his father's native tongue. “I can [understand] Twi, otherwise I wouldn't be talking politics in Twi,” he laughs at this. Unfortunately, he has completely forgotten Late, his mother's lingo. “But up until I was a teenager I didn't know most Ghanaians spoke Twi and not Ga,” and then realized otherwise after visiting his mother's side of the family in Ghana . “Maybe when I was 15 or 16 I was like what?” he laughs about his surprising “discovery.”
During his traveling years, Ashong took little pinches at songwriting and performing in school—studying to play the clarinet as well as the piano. As a young boy he learned to communicate his ideas through poetry, a craft he now beautifully demonstrates through musical lyrics. While in college, he performed as an actor and a musician, and was a member of an a cappella group called Brothers in 1994; here was when he met one of his present band mates, Jonathan Grambling. Ashong was also a part of the Kuumba Singers , a choir at Harvard that sang gospel and African music. All these years of training proved to be very beneficial as they have served to strengthen the quality of the vocal harmonies of Soulfège, his band.
While pursuing an undergraduate degree in African American studies, he got a break that would spark an acting career; Ashong was offered a supporting role in Amistad, a Steven Spielberg film based on the slave revolt that occurred on a Spanish schooner, La Amistad, which was then transporting slaves from Sierra Leone to Cuba in 1839. He took many semesters off college to play his character and considers it “a great opportunity,” because of the doors it opened for him. When Ashong returned to school he wrote a musical for his senior thesis, “Songs We Can't Sing,” an exposition exploring issues of identity among Africans and African Americans which won the Hoopes prize, one of Harvard's most prestigious undergraduate awards for outstanding scholarly work.
“Songs We Can't Sing” hit close to home considering Ashong's own personal struggles with figuring out his identity. The extensive traveling during his formative years left him little time to develop his own “self.” This did not occur to him until his late teens when he began to grapple with who he was. Was he a New Yorker? A Saudi Arabian? Qatari or Ghanaian? He began to view himself differently from other African Americans after his return to America : “I realized that…I (spoke) differently, I (ate) different food, I had a different set of values to a certain degree,” he says, slightly amazed. He terms the transition to come to grips with the American side of his identity a traumatic one because of the different ways things worked. By his sophomore year in college, he decided to go to Ghana to see what it was all about. “I decided that I wanted to know more about my Ghanaian heritage because my parents were always like you're from Ghana , you're from Ghana ,” he says. He spent about five months conducting research that made him realize he could speak his native language better than he thought. “By my junior year in college I had decided that I was more comfortable in Ghana than the U.S. in some ways”… “So I was like, yeah I don't have any other identity that's like, immutable so I need to be closer to my family, to my heritage, to my culture,” he says. Ashong spent more time studying and learning about the Ghanaian culture and now feels confident giving answers about his heritage, something he could not do prior to his cultural awakening. Coming to a resolution with his identity issues apparently brought some satisfaction, “I was like, I'm obviously an African, and that was cool,” he says proudly and laughs. Now when he tells people he is a Ghanaian, it makes sense to himself, he says, and his music reflects that culture and more—a blend of High Life with Hip-hop and Reggae. He laughs and adds, “The Ghanaian culture was already so strong in my household; they speak Ga, if they don't want you to understand they'd speak in Twi…they ate gari foto and jollof rice.”
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