Out of many people, comes one nation

Goes one of my nations' mottos. If you are reading this there is a probably chance you think I am referring to either the United States or the very multi-cultural Canada but you would be wrong. Although, the motto could work with either country it is neither country’s motto and actually belongs to Jamaica – my other homeland. I have officially two, and unofficially; there is a third. Canada is where I was born and where I currently live, but Jamaica is my adopted homeland.

Jamaica is a funny kind of place and ignites passions. You either love it or you hate it, but once visited, you are never indifferent. There is a certain kind of cache about being a Jamaican. Sometimes being a Jamaican is a curse, as when others use your nationality in vain and attempt to damn you with all the evils of the world. And then there are times when it is nothing but a blessing; like when the kindness of strangers eases your way.

I can not count the times when I have went through my outside door and joined the maddening throng on the street only to catch the sounds of a fake Jamaican accent and patois used as an every day kind of voice among groups of young people. Among African teenage boys, being Jamaican has a kind of ultra coolness and a street cred, which I suppose being Somalian or Congolese in origin does not possess – yet.

Although, any Jamaican looking at these boys knows they are not Jamaican, and not just because they lack the sing song quality or the proper pitch of their accents, which Jamaicans possess, but because the heart of Africa is still etched cleanly in their faces and in their limbs. Jamaicans, on the other hand, are a homemade soup kind of place. There is no purity of blood and limb but only heart. I remember reading that Bob Marley was the most recognized black man among all Africans people and smiling to myself because Bob’s father was a white man. Jamaicans know this and think nothing of it. So stories like this one from the BBC do not even get my eye to twitch.

Most wrestling fans have never heard of the West African country, so the wrestling body decided fight fans would be more likely to embrace a wrestler from the land of Bob Marley and reggae music. And so desperate is Sarkodie-Mensah to become wrestling's next superstar, he is willing to deny who he is.

"I was actually born in Jamaica - to be honest with a name like Kofi a lot of people assume I was born in Ghana," he says with a bad Jamaican accent, but doing his best to stay in character.

But though he denies it, his mother Elizabeth - the head of a Ghanaian-American organisation in the US - confirms that he was indeed born in Ghana, and not in Jamaica. The family only moved to the US in 1982. "I told him: 'Kofi, your cousins watch you on TV in Ghana and want to know why you don't say you're from Ghana,'" she says. "He said: 'Tell them it is business.'"

It certainly is business. After he discovered his mother had revealed his secret identity to the press, Sarkodie-Mensah banned her and the rest of his family from speaking to the media, for fear of compromising his career.

One love, and all of that.