As a writer, I find it so frustrating that I often can’t settle on the right words for it: how I feel whenever the plane’s wheels touch down in Accra. I’ve regularly travelled to Ghana from the UK, where I was born, since I was young. It’s the place of my ancestors and I love it there. It’s noisy, it’s tropical, it’s thrusting and hustling. It’s magically unpredictable and so shiningly beautiful, from its sweeping coastlines to its teeming forests. Since childhood, it’s somewhere that has been, for me, a source of excitement, discovery – and immense pride.

Perhaps the best description of my response on arriving at Kotoka International Airport is that it is bodily. Friends say I’m romanticising, but as I step onto the tarmac, into familiarly humid air, the changes in me are immediate: my shoulders melt, my chest expands. There’s often a prickle in the corner of my eyes. My body recognises that it is, as my mum might say, home.

Being Ghanaian, I’ve often said, is my superpower. This is more than a neat soundbite. It is a truth. We have, in Ghana, a long history of iconoclasm and revolt. One of our national heroes is Yaa Asantewaa. She mounted a fierce resistance to British rule in 1900. Famously, Kwame Nkrumah led the country to independence from Britain – the first nation in Africa to achieve it – in 1957. Connecting with this anti-imperial past, recognising it as part of my history, can be emboldening when I feel unsteadied