In October 2009, Cardinal Peter Turkson, then the Archbishop of Cape Coast in Ghana, came to Rome for a Synod of Bishops on Africa expecting to spend a month. Eight years later he's still here, having been named to a Vatican office at the end of that summit and now heading Pope Francis's new Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.
In effect, Turkson was deemed too valuable, by two popes in a row, to let him go home. Today he's arguably the Vatican's most important African, acting as Francis's social justice point man.
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