Who Owns Memory? · Migration, Displacement, Minorities & Belonging
The bag that outlived its memory
You have probably seen it at a market, a bus station or an airport carousel. It is cheap, light and strong, and it holds more than it looks able to.
Across West Africa, people call it Ghana Must Go. The bag is easy to recognise. The name is harder to explain. Why does an ordinary carrier bag bear the name of one country and an order to leave?
RecordWhat historians and institutions document.
TestimonyWhat people say in their own words.
InterpretationWhat this story argues from that evidence.
RecordThe bag itself has no single home. The historian Samuel Fury Childs Daly describes it as one of the woven plastic bags, often printed in plaid, that people across the Global South use to carry clothes, produce and trade goods.1
The name is far more specific. Daly traces it to Nigeria’s expulsion of Ghanaians in 1983. After that deportation the bags became known as “Ghana-Must-Go”, first in Nigerian Pidgin and then across West Africa.1 Leicester Museums, which holds an artwork based on the bag, notes that the name began as a derogatory one.4
InterpretationThe object was already in use and already ordinary. The event gave it a new name.
RecordNigeria’s oil economy boomed in the 1970s and drew workers from across the region. By the end of the decade the boom had turned to bust. Daly writes that Nigerian politicians deflected attention from their own mismanagement by blaming Ghanaians for taking Nigerian jobs.1
On 17 January 1983, the Minister of Internal Affairs, Alhaji Ali Baba, announced on television that unskilled migrants had to leave the country by the end of the month.1 The government expected that most people would comply without being forced. In Daly’s words, “they would deport themselves.”1
The numbers are disputed. Ghana’s High Commission estimated that about one million Ghanaians were deported. Daly judges the true figure to be lower, though still in the hundreds of thousands.1
This was one episode in a longer exchange. Ghana had expelled Nigerians and other migrants under its Aliens Compliance Order of November 1969, and Nigeria ordered a second, smaller expulsion in May 1985.1,5
RecordTwo weeks is not long to close down a life. The road home ran west through two other countries, Benin and Togo. Research by the MIDEQ migration project describes the bags as what deported migrants used to carry their personal belongings.2
TestimonyThe journalist Shola Lawal spoke to Ghanaians who made that journey. One of them, Solomon Asiedu, had been working in Lagos. He told her:
“I was not ready to leave.”
RecordLawal also reports that Ghana’s own government closed its border with Togo for a time, leaving vehicles backed up along the road to Lagos and people stranded in the heat without water.5
One voice cannot stand for everyone. MIDEQ’s interviews with Ghanaians who lived in Nigeria in 1983 also recorded positive feelings towards Nigerians, and traced the expulsion to an anti-migrant narrative led by the state.2
InterpretationNothing about the bag changed in 1983. It was the same woven plastic, the same check, the same zip. What changed was the word people used for it. Since then, each time someone asks for a Ghana Must Go in a market, the order of January 1983 is spoken again, whether or not the speaker knows it.
That is how an everyday object comes to carry collective memory. The memory is held in the name, in daily use, and in the hands of people who never set out to commemorate anything.
RecordSome people have chosen to remember on purpose. In 2023, the Migration Advocacy Centre Ghana, MIDEQ researchers and local artists marked the fortieth anniversary with an exhibition built around the bags, and with a documentary film, Omo Ghana, Man For Chop.2,3 One participant said:
“This is a very good programme that is going to cast our minds back to our heritage, what we went through …”
In Britain, the Ghanaian-born artist Anthony Amoako-Attah remade the bag in screen-printed glass and called it Take Me Home.4
RecordThe check has also left the market for the studio and the runway. Louis Vuitton showed a plaid laundry tote under Marc Jacobs for spring/summer 2007.6,7 Aisha Ayensu, founder of the label Christie Brown, referenced the pattern throughout its autumn/winter 2025 collection.6
TestimonyPeople who work with the pattern do not describe a wound that has simply healed. The visual artist Òbìnna Òbíòmà says the print captures a duality:
“… it holds the memory of displacement while also celebrating movement, identity, and renewal.”
The stylist Marian Kwei says that for some it is a painful reminder of the 1983 expulsion.6 The designer Papa Oppong, quoted in the Cape Times, puts the claim differently: “We’re asserting that our utilitarian objects are worthy of design innovation on our own terms.”7
InterpretationThe bag’s meaning is being reshaped. A name that began as an insult is now also worn with pride. Whether that reclaims the story or leaves it behind depends on who is doing the remaking, and on whether the history travels with the pattern.
RecordThe bag is still everywhere, and so is its name.
The history behind the name has travelled less well. Daly observes:
“Few people today connect the bags to the historical event that gave them this name, even though it was not very long ago.”
InterpretationThis is the limit of what an object can remember for us. A name can outlast the knowledge of what it once meant. For many people who use it now, “Ghana Must Go” is simply what the bag is called.
A bag cannot tell its own story. It can only keep a name ready for someone to ask about.
So who owns this memory? The people who were told to go, and who are growing old? The two countries that expelled each other’s citizens? The designers who have put the check on a runway? Or anyone who carries one home from the market?
The next time you see the bag, say its name, and then ask what it meant in January 1983.
All sources were accessed on 5 October 2026.
This story contains seven media items.
Both photographs are real photographs used under open licences from Wikimedia Commons. They show markets in 2010 and 2013, not the events of 1983. No AI-generated images are used. The artworks, collections, exhibition and film mentioned in the text are cited and linked, not reproduced.
No interviews were conducted for this project. The photographs were cropped so that no identifiable person appears. The words quoted are short excerpts from published sources and are credited to those sources.
Every graphic has a text description or is built from readable text. The page can be used with a keyboard and a screen reader, works on a phone, follows your device’s light or dark setting, reduces motion if your device asks for that, and does not rely on colour alone to carry meaning.
Author: Doris Anderson. The concept, title, central question, argument, story structure, choice of sources, design direction, editorial decisions and final approval of this story are the author’s own.
An AI assistant (Claude, by Anthropic) was used as a tool under the author’s direction: to help locate sources, to support drafting and editing, and to build the diagrams (map, timeline and graphics) and the web page to the author’s specifications. No images were generated with AI. The author reviewed and revised the result, checked the text and quotations against the sources listed above, and is responsible for the content.
Made by Doris Anderson for Who Owns Memory?, a digital public history project, in the thematic group Migration, Displacement, Minorities & Belonging. The story asks how an everyday object becomes a carrier of collective memory, and what happens when the object stays recognisable while the history behind it fades.
