Hold the Fort!/Look My People, Folk of Ghana

by Paul J. Scheips

Look My People, Folk of Ghana

Remote though Nebraska of the 1890s was from Ghana of the 1950s, "Hold the Fort" managed to bridge the continents and the centuries to give its music and some of its words to the Ghanaian song of independence. Missionaries, it seems, had carried the original gospel song to Africa in the decade of its composition.^[119] Teddy Schwartz learned the African song from Joe Lamotey, a Ghanaian social worker at the New York Guild for the Jewish Blind, and translated it into English:

Look my people, folk of Ghana,
See our banner high.
Here they come, our loyal soldiers,
Victory is nigh.

Oh, my people, folk of Ghana,
Raise your mighty voice,
Let us greet our new-found freedom,
Ghaneans rejoice!^[120]