<p>West Africa can also be sub-Saharan Africa, and Ghana is definitely not considered part of North Africa.</p>
<p>Anyway I’m African American myself and I don’t think those scholarships are intended only for descendants of slaves (which would be impossible to prove anyway - many black Americans might be descendants of free blacks or slaveowners themselves). They are instead intended to remedy systemic, institutionalized racism that affects black Americans regardless of their nation of origin, both historically and presently. A black Ghanaian immigrant to the U.S. in the 1980s is likely to have faced a lot of discrimination and prejudice (both institutional and potentially personal) and their child is also likely to feel the results of that discrimination and prejudice, as well as face it themselves.</p>
<p>Besides, most black Americans don’t know where we come from anyway. For all I know my great-grandparents could’ve immigrated here from the West Indies themselves. Broken bloodlines make it difficult to trace ancestry sometimes…</p>