I was researching a story on YouTube, when, out of the blue, I came across a short ceremony at Man­hyia Palace, in Kumasi, held by Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, Asantehene, to welcome the Vice-President of Colombia, to Asante.

The Otumfuo has been doing a yeoman’s job in recent months, popularizing Asante culture in “hidden” African cultural outposts, such as the West Indies and Suri­nam. Mema no ayikoo! [I doff my hat to him!]

Now, I didn’t know much about Colombia; certainly, I didn’t know that it had a beautiful black woman as its Vice President.

Asante's DNA is amazingly strong, for the woman I saw in the video could just have been straight out of Kejetia to greet her King at Manhyia! Everything about her showed that in spite of the fact that her ancestors were kidnapped from our shores and taken to Co­lombia hundreds of years ago, her DNA was intact! Except that she now spoke Spanish. Hmmm!

But that didn’t seem to matter. The intellect she betrayed was solid Asante: she affirmed that her peo­ple in Colombia wanted passion­ately to reconnect with their folks in Ghana, for, (she wittily demon­strated) “In Colombia, whenever we want to say that we are ‘strong’, we say “We are Asantes!”