“Return”; “reconnection” ; “coming back” (after having left or being taken away); “home.”

These words have taken on an actionable connotation in the diaspora; they can be done, achieved, and completed. “Going home,” “returning,” and “reconnecting” processes have been practiced for as long as the conditions that necessitated them have existed. From the Tabom people in the late 1800s, who returned from Brazil back to Jamestown, Ghana, to diasporans today, “we” have been maintaining, building, and rebuilding connections to places we “come from,” via practices that have varied in their success and intention.

Some return practices have had an intention of commonality, depth, and cooperation. One could look to Maya Angelou’s time in Ghana, where she learned Fante, worked and lived with numerous scholars from the US and Ghana, and spent a great deal of her career understanding overlaps between those who were taken and those who remained. Maryse Condé also wrote extensively about her time in West Africa and the similarities as well as the stark differences between herself as a Caribbean-born Black woman and the people she met, knew, and loved in West Africa, including those in Ghana, Guinea, and Côte d’Ivoire.

Return practices can also be laden with romantic spectacle, ignoring power dynamics and recreating old ones, all while trying to fill a 500-year gap and step back into something one could have only speculated about.

In 2019, the Ghanaian government commemorated the “Year of Return,” marking the 400th year since the first enslaved people from the west coast of Africa arrived in the American colony of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. Four hundred years and a transformed world later, a year-long celebration program invited those descended from slavery to return home, centered in Accra, Ghana. PR language costumed as Pan-Africanism mobilized the emotions of many, while capitalism drove everything else. The campaign succeeded in fortifying Ghana’s image as an enticing place to visit and “reconnect” to a new generation of diasporans and reaffirmed to older generations that they are still welcome.

A clear financial impact of the Year of Return still seems underreported, with Minister of Tourism Barbara Oteng Gyasi stating, but not printing, that the Year of Return resulted in a US$1.9 billion addition to the Ghanaian economy. Perhaps a certain tier of Ghanaian society benefited from such a return. Prominent figures in government and business benefited from an influx of tourism of Ghana’s descendants via patronage to hotels, restaurants, leisure and luxury goods, and resorts, as well as preferential tenders for construction, maintenance, and so on. Certain landlords, land owners, and chiefs also benefited from those looking to make their return permanent. As a result, more tourism and historical programming, more business investment, and more arts and culture events have been created.

At the end of 2022, a new music and arts festival in Ghana landed in Accra. This festival, the Black Star Line Festival (which takes its name from Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line shipping company), is the brainchild of two Chicago-raised artists and rappers, Chance the Rapper and Vic Mensa. Chance, who is Black American, and Mensa, who is Ghanaian American, curated and created their festival to be “a beacon for the total liberation of all African peoples, from the continent, to the Americas, to the islands, back to Europe and beyond.” Quite the undertaking.

The festival included a free music concert with headliners Erykah Badu, Sarkodie, Tobe Nwigwe, T Pain,  Asakaa Boys, M.anifest, and Chance and Vic, along with panel discussions with some local cultural figures and artists and an incredibly controversial keynote conversation between Chance the Rapper and Black American comedian Dave Chapelle, who had come under criticism for his flippant transphobic commentary and disingenuous “I have a trans friend so I can’t be transphobic” responses to said criticism. Chappelle’s appearance came at a time when one year prior, the Ghanaian government arrested 21 queer people and advocates for unlawful assembly in support of LGBTQ rights and Uganada had passed their outright criminalization of homosexuality.

Differences in power of passport, currency, cultural attitudes, the hegemony in education, and material conditions cannot be passed over. Our Blackness is not enough to “unify.” Historical gatherings rooted in reconnection between Africa and its diaspora have infamously excluded queer people and women in the vision of a connected Africa and its descendants.

The Year of Return and all its complexities drew mixed emotions from local Ghanaians. While mainstream press, both local and international, was largely positive and focused on the economic benefits of tourism, public critique of its effects or the general efficacy of addressing a 400-year history of slavery was and is much less visible. Critique was nestled in X (formerly Twitter) and in the lived experiences of Ghanaians who endured mildly irritating to life-threatening encounters with those looking to return. It became clear that the project of Pan-Africanism could not be executed by the vehicle of capitalism; exchange predicated on investment as a remedy to colonial extraction and colonial debt resulted in many visitors coming and going and locals experiencing immense inflation

The Ghanaian government has been incredibly friendly to Western foreigners, with many Black American celebrities doing photo ops with the president, while the cost of living, the conditions of roads, the access to clinics, or a myriad of other basic service-delivery issues persist, making Ghana very sweet for some and incredibly sour for others.

These dynamics feature in literature, such as Kobby Ben Ben’s No One Dies Yet. In the novel, the two main narrators, Kobby and Nana, are met with a group of three Black American tourists arriving for the Year of Return, all of whom are queer men. Kobby narrates through experience; he knows the type. The kind of “expat” that comes to reconnect with similar scripts of “Why did you sell us?,” “You don’t know the pain of not knowing your home,” and “I want to see the ‘real’ Accra or the ‘real’ queer scene,” all while armed with Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother for the slave castle visits. As an aspiring writer, Kobby is often subjected to rejections for his thriller novels, with publishers asking for “something more like Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing” or anything that has to do with Ghana’s colonial history. Nana welcomes the three men and also understands the language of access and money but does not critique it. Nana, unlike Kobby, is more traditional and religious and tries to sway the visitors away from queerness. Nana goes out of his way to treat the group with hospitality and diligence in hopes they may donate to his church or secure an imagined visa. The Year of Return acts as a stage to demonstrate the many versions of “us” versus “them,” in which gentrification and unequal access feature heavily. Return at what cost? Nearly everything that is already precarious.

Pan-Africanism is robust, with varying sects and historical understandings. Dr. Layla Brown notes that Pan-Africanism in practice is an objective and not strictly a philosophy, with the objective being a united but not uniform Africa. She acknowledges that there were iterations of this objective before the transatlantic slave trade, but in a contemporary setting, Pan-Africanism addresses and incorporates the creation of diaspora via the slave trade. However, masculinist interpretations tend to be forefronted in this canon of thinking and organizing. This version of Pan-Africanism that drives events like the Black Star Festival or the Year of Return falls short of the objective. The language of reconnection, unity, and exchange result in reified asymmetry.

What gets lost in the pursuit for reconnection is the question: Who is on the other side?

When looking at Black canons of film, literature, or art, one finds that while many diasporans speculate romantically about the people we were or could have been, that speculation is not mutual. You may extend a hand, but there might not be a person across that door (of no return). When the expectation of reconnection is ruptured by this reality—that others may not be searching for us in the ways we are abstractly searching for them—there is an opportunity to reconfigure our perception and see others for who they are instead of what they could be or, importantly, what answers they might hold for us.

The truth one has to face is that there are plenty of people who are not interested in the reconnection process and do not share this void of disconnection. If anything, far more people are antagonized by it.

What does reconnection offer “us”?

Who is included in the ideal “us”?

I had the privilege of time to consider and confront these questions, as I was on a one-month residency (which turned into a two-month stay in Ghana) with the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora (LOATAD). The Black Atlantic Residency hosted 12 writers over the course of three months.

As I prepared for my arrival in Ghana, I held onto Dionne Brand’s words:

“I cannot go back to where I came from. It no longer exists. It should not exist.”

I knew I was not returning. I was going to see for myself. I repeated the words like a song. However, it took me some time to learn the melody.

Within the first week of my arrival, the residency took us on a full-day trip to Assin Manso ancestral graveyard, Cape Coast Slave Castle, and Elmina Slave Castle. This trip came with anticipation and some folded-up desire for it to mean something. My family ended up in Jamaica as a result of these castles. But what I learned very quickly is that the slave castle doesn’t care that your history is tied up in it. And the tour guide has a script to stick to. And there are people who may also find that your desire to reconnect is good for business.

After I was told for the fourth time that what we were standing on was not the original floor but a mixture of human flesh, dirt, excrement, and food that has formed this thick, unwavering Black tar substance over top the bricks, I learned the melody. I was 500 years late. Where I came from doesn’t exist, and it shouldn’t exist. Something else is here. What has remained is the aesthetic—these coastal castles look just like how I assume colonizers left them. The road you take to get to Cape Coast Castle is still called Liverpool Street.

I began to shift my eyes to Accra and Ghana for what they are, rather than any should-have-could-have-would-have speculations of history and unspeakable violence. That still meant learning the history. As a resident of LOATAD, I visited the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park, W. E. B. Du Bois Memorial Centre for Pan African Culture, and the University of Ghana archives and Department of African Studies. I visited the Aburi Botanical Gardens and went on the tour that asks you to smell, taste, and touch. I read Ama Ata Aidoo and parts of Ayi Kwei Armah. I learned that the cedi comes from sedeɛ, an Akan word for cowrie shell. I watched documentaries about the African writers series that widely published African authors and canonized stories like Things Fall Apart. I went to Makola Market and purchased many secondhand things: soccer cleats, jeans, two tank tops, as well as two fake Casio watches, knock-off Nike slides, and, predictably, shea butter. It made me think about how I myself am not firsthand but an obvious result of 500 years of hands. I ate from the street, car, and tro-tro. I danced kizomba on Thursday nights. I avoided most European-fusion restaurants that seem to be very legible to tourists and drive up prices in trendy areas like Osu.

What was most impactful was getting out of Accra. After the residency, I followed our residency manager on a road trip to the northern part of Ghana. We traveled via public transport (bus, tro-tro, tricycle, or tuk tuk) to Kumasi, Tamale, Mole National Park, and Larabanga Mosque, the oldest mosque in Ghana and one of the oldest in West Africa, built in 1421.

In Kumasi, we visited the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) and sat in on a lecture with respected arts lecturer and scholar Dr. Karî’kachä Seid’ou. We also stopped by the Manhyia Palace, a museum dedicated to archiving Ashanti royalty history.

In Tamale, we visited two arts spaces as well. At Nuku Studio, the exhibit Routes of Rebellion featured the work of Jesse Weaver Shipley, alongside the work of Nii Obodai and Tjaša Rener. We also spent an afternoon at Red Clay, the sweeping arts grounds founded by Ibrahim Mahama.

In Mole, we went on a short safari and were able to see one teenage elephant. On an overnight bus playing Nollywood films, we traveled further up to Bolgatanga, Navrongo, and the Upper East Region. We bought a few fans, baskets, and hats, as the area is known well for its rattan crafts.

In Bolga, we met with Abena Offeh-Gyimah, who facilitates Beela, supported by Trax Ghana, which organizes seed exchanges and seed banks within various communities in the Upper East Region in the north of Ghana. Abena shared with us her practices of seed sovereignty and the urgent preservation and recovery of indigenous seeds and cultivation practices that are and have been rapidly eradicated at the hands of institutions like the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV). These kinds of institutions have the capacity to colonize seeds by copyrighting the “intellectual property” of varieties and thereby controlling the distribution and physical farming of specific varieties of crops. UPOV also criminalizes farmers for the usage of their own local seeds. In addition to this intervention of seed sovereignty work, Abena also co-runs a retreat, Taste of Bolga, which teaches participants about the indigenous foods of Bulga as well as preparation, cooking, harvesting, and more.

The scenery of the north had interesting mixtures of dry heat and arid land (in the month of March). Motorbike was the most common form of transport, and everyone rode them, including women, which was a pleasant sight for me coming from Cape Town, which has a less visible Black bike scene.

The Volta Region proved to be the most lush, even in the dry season. Visiting Shai Hills, I, along with the second cohort of writers in residence, climbed caves that were used by tribes for hundreds of years for living and, when necessary, fighting.

We took a boat ride on the Volta Lake and learned that it is one of the largest manmade lakes in the world and that it generates a great deal of power for the area. The history of postcolonial Ghana will also tell you that Kwame Nkrumah, when president, invested greatly in developing the northern part of the country, as the south was much more developed due to colonial extraction.

During my last weekend in Ghana, I was able to visit Keta, also in the Volta Region. Keta used to be a major town in the area, but over the past 40 years, the sea has eaten away at many of the town’s homes, schools, and buildings. It is a quiet place, but its reputation remains. I visited the town with an old friend and classmate whose mother was born and raised in the area.

While there, we visited Fort Prinzenstein, a Danish slave fort. Our tour guide, Bella, shared with us that there are 47 remaining slave castles and forts in Western Africa and 42 of them are in Ghana. He showed us around the fort, and it became familiar to me. Three dungeons: one for men, one for women, and one for torture and punishment, which had no windows and was pitch black inside. Fort Prinzenstein was different from other castles, however: there were many artifacts on display. Among these were a 300-year-old weighing scale, instruments used on those who were enslaved, and a portion of a whale’s spine—certain whales would sink the ships heading to North and South America, especially when they came close enough to shore while transporting enslaved people. In turn, the Danish developed a habit of hunting and killing whales.

After two months in Ghana, I still hadn’t quite figured out how to process bumping into such visceral enslavement history so often. I cycled through the emotions of outrage and confusion and devastation and then deeper and harder questions of longevity. In Jamestown near the Brazil House, there was an abandoned slave fort, and I asked myself, Where is the plaque? Where is the sign that says “Door of No Return”? It made me pause and ask myself why that was my interpretation of history. What will a plaque do for me or others, and what about the plaque 50 years from now? Or another 400 years? In Keta, I asked myself, Here, again? I am being met with slavery, again?

I had and still have no answers and am, instead, getting used to living with the questions and the ideas that are prompted by them.

Writing about a televised interview between Henry Louis Gates and a man from Kumasi, Dionne Brand describes their impossible connection:

“There is no answer. The Door of No Return is ajar between them.”

The door is indeed ajar between “us,” but it does not need to be spoiled or armed or disrespected or colonized further. Perhaps returning is less about imposed rituals that can reinscribe the roles of “returnee” and  “those who remained” and more about getting used to one’s own reflection, to better see one another for all the new and inherited fractures, unsolvable problems, and dignity.