Accra, Ghana – Ashley Haruna by no means meant to remain in Ghana. However the whole lot modified for the 28-year-old well being coach when she stood dealing with a darkish cell contained in the stone partitions of Cape Coast Fortress. Because the tour information defined that lots of the enslaved individuals who’d as soon as been held there had ended up in Haiti, Haruna says she “felt one thing”.
Having grown up in the US to Haitian dad and mom, she realised “my ancestors might’ve handed by means of right here. This place. This floor.
“I wasn’t on the lookout for that,” she displays. “But it surely discovered me.”
The sensation it stirred inside her solely grew when she returned house to Ohio. After a number of months, together with her household’s reluctant approval, she returned to Ghana – for good.
That was in December 2021, and Haruna was following within the footsteps of many different African Individuals who had sought to reconnect with the nation that will as soon as have been house to their ancestors.
Within the Fifties, Ghana’s first prime minister and president, Kwame Nkrumah, championed the diaspora’s return as a part of his Pan-African dream and nation-building efforts. Through the US civil rights motion, he invited Black American activists, together with W E B Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Julian Bond, to relocate to Ghana. Within the Sixties, De Bois moved there, as did author Maya Angelou.
Ghanaian leaders proceed to encourage the African diaspora to reconnect and relocate. In 2019, the “Yr of Return”, marking 400 years for the reason that first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia, greater than 200 individuals from the US and the Caribbean obtained Ghanaian citizenship. In 2024, as a part of the federal government’s “Past the Return” initiative – the identical programme that inspired Haruna to maneuver to Ghana – 524 African diasporans have been granted citizenship.
However, as Haruna found, constructing a brand new life in Ghana comes with challenges.
Villa Diaspora
Her first condominium was situated two hours north of Accra, within the mountainous Japanese Area, and whereas Haruna had imagined herself integrating right into a local people, she as an alternative discovered isolation. With no grocery shops close by and nobody to assist reply her questions – like function a fuel range or what to do when the water stops working – she discovered herself feeling alone and annoyed.
She recalled a YouTube video she’d seen whereas nonetheless within the US about a spot known as Villa Diaspora – a co-living area the place the proprietor, herself a “returnee”, as African Individuals relocating to Ghana seek advice from themselves, helps others navigate their new lives within the nation. Haruna dug by means of her browser historical past till she discovered the video. Every week later, she moved into the villa in an upscale suburb of Accra.
Within the heat communal dwelling space and kitchen she shared with two different African-American tenants, she realized navigate the sensible and cultural challenges of determining her new house – from getting an identification card to studying to say “please” earlier than each sentence.
When Haruna was injured in a automobile accident, it was the villa’s proprietor, Michelle Konadu, 37, and the neighborhood of former tenants who helped her. The villa turned her lifeline. Like the opposite tenants – who have a tendency to remain for between three and 9 months – Haruna moved out of the villa after some time, however it’s nonetheless Konadu she calls when she wants assist.
‘They need therapeutic’
Konadu is aware of the sensation of being caught between worlds. Born and raised in New York Metropolis to Ghanaian dad and mom, her household condominium was a touchdown place for visiting kinfolk, distant cousins and mates of mates. “We have been at all times housing somebody,” she says.
It wasn’t till she visited Ghana for a funeral in 2015 that she first contemplated leaving the quick tempo of New York for the sluggish circulation of Ghana. At first, she thought it will really feel like house, however she says she usually felt like an outsider. “Too American to be in Ghanaian areas. However too Ghanaian for America,” she explains.
A cousin named Alfred softened her touchdown by educating her navigate markets, hail a trotro (a neighborhood minibus taxi), and perceive the unstated etiquette of greeting elders and by no means utilizing the left hand to make gestures in the direction of anyone.
With out his steerage, she says, she might need left and by no means returned.
Recognising that not each returnee has their very own Alfred, Konadu determined to assist. In 2017, she opened Villa Diaspora, a three-bedroom co-living compound alongside her bigger household house in Kwabenya. She invitations the tenants she hosts into the on a regular basis lifetime of her neighbourhood and introduces them to middle-income Accra. Past offering lodging, she helps returnees discover colleges, consults on land purchases, and connects them with social teams and sports activities golf equipment.
Her objective is straightforward: to assist individuals belong by offering “an already-made neighborhood”.
“Most of them come right here with a soul mission,” Konadu explains. “They need therapeutic. Or reconnection. Or only a contemporary begin. For a lot of, coming to Africa has been a lifelong dream. However the individuals they meet may not perceive that.”
Her household struggled to know why she moved again when their dream had been to go away. However now different households are relieved to know that their family members will spend their first months in Ghana surrounded by individuals on an identical journey. After 10 years in Ghana, Konadu believes that if individuals can stay together with her, they’ll stay among the many wider neighborhood.
She factors to the Brazilian “Tabom” neighborhood in Jamestown, Accra, which she sees as an ideal instance of a well-integrated returned diaspora group. As descendants of previously enslaved Africans who returned from Brazil within the nineteenth century, they settled among the many Ga individuals, intermarried, realized the language, and constructed lives that blended their Afro-Brazilian heritage inside the Ga social construction. Over the generations, their names – De Souza, Silva, Nelson – have change into a part of the Jamestown story. Konadu expects the identical will occur with the newer returnees and that the African-American tradition will stay sturdy however exist inside the construction of the bigger Ghanaian society.
Haruna understands that integration takes time, and he or she acknowledges that returnees like her have privileges that others in Ghana don’t. Lighter pores and skin and an American accent usually open doorways in ways in which by no means occurred again within the US, giving her preferential therapy corresponding to quicker service in eating places, locals prepared to supply assist, and usually having the ability to make issues occur quicker, like conferences with authorities.
“It’s uncomfortable as a self-aware individual to note that I’ve privilege, one thing that’s the complete reverse of what’s occurring in the US. I’m nonetheless wrapping my head round all of it,” she says.
“I’m Ghanaian. I’m additionally a returnee,” Konadu says. “We’ve at all times been linked: Ghana and its diasporans. This isn’t new, however the ‘Yr of Return’ made issues extra seen.”
This elevated visibility – and the clustering of returnees in particular settlements, together with rising prices – has brought on some friction.
‘The Ghana they received’t see’
Anthony Amponsah Religion runs a enterprise renting out automobiles and driving shoppers round Ghana, together with returnees navigating the nation for the primary time. He credit them with permitting him to go to locations he had by no means been to earlier than, such because the Nzulezu stilt village and the middle-belt waterfalls. “Earlier than, I by no means bought to go anyplace. Now, I’ve seen the entire of Ghana,” says the 32-year-old.
On these journeys, Amponsah has witnessed his African-American shoppers’ emotional visits to coastal slave castles and memorials, however he has additionally seen friction up shut. Whereas wealthier neighbourhoods, the place returnees usually settle, take pleasure in steady electrical energy, paved roads, and entry to supermarkets and cafes, in others, water is available in cycles and primary companies require improvisation. Returnees complain about energy cuts or heavy site visitors, whereas locals shrug them off as a part of every day life. He recollects a consumer insisting he was being overcharged as a result of “Ghana must be low-cost”.
Earlier this yr, Amponsah awoke one night time to seek out his mattress floating in a room flooded with water. “That’s the Ghana they received’t see,” he says. “It doesn’t flood within the areas the place returnees keep.”
He’s annoyed by the rising price of housing, which he attributes to returnees’ willingness to pay extra. “To them, it’s not costly,” he says. “They arrive from locations the place they earn extra. However I blame the federal government. Why aren’t we getting those self same alternatives?”
In 2019, he paid 120 cedis ($10-12) a month for a small studio; he now pays 450 cedis ($42-44).
“The price of dwelling is rising by the second. It makes discovering a spot scary,” says Amponsah. He would like to be nearer to his clients, a lot of whom stay not less than an hour away, however he can’t afford to maneuver.
‘A city from scratch’
Many new arrivals really feel responsible about their financial and social privileges, however some Ghanaians carry an usually unstated burden tied to their ancestors’ function within the transatlantic slave commerce, main some chiefs to supply land to returnees as atonement.
Throughout Ghana, not less than two diaspora settlements, Fihankra and Pan African Village emerged that approach, whereas different returnee-focused residential tasks, together with gated communities, are beneath development.
Daybreak Dickson, an entrepreneur and investor, is constructing a home for herself within the African-American settlement often known as Pan African Village. She moved to Ghana in 2022, after envisaging a life outdoors the US in a spot the place she wasn’t “the minority”.
The 46-year-old says she didn’t intend to hunt out a diaspora-only neighborhood. Dickson, who traces her ancestry to the Akan individuals in Ghana and Ivory Coast, was struck by the sense of familiarity, heat and vitality among the many Ghanaians she met. However when she began trying to purchase land, she found that different returnees have been shopping for round Asebu city within the coastal Central Area, the place a conventional chief had carved out some 20,000 plots for diasporans.
“For me, it was the joy that I bought to be a part of constructing a city from scratch,” Dickson explains.
She purchased land after which based an organization that helps different African Individuals purchase and construct houses. Dickson is using sustainable rammed earth expertise to assemble homes for 35 returnees in addition to roads, a college, a church and boreholes, and is coaching locals to grasp this constructing approach.
The neighborhood, nonetheless, has not been with out controversy.
In 2023, a household challenged the choice to allocate land they claimed was their ancestral property as a part of the village. Improvement has continued regardless of a excessive court docket injunction ordering that development be halted, and a few 150 farmers who relied on this land say they’ve misplaced their livelihoods.
Dickson says the land she has helped buy just isn’t contested, and if farmers are utilizing it, she negotiates shared-crop agreements or fee.
Elsewhere, new diaspora tasks are beneath approach and have come beneath scrutiny.
Sanbra Metropolis (“Return Metropolis”) is a 300-acre personal actual property growth outdoors Accra. The deliberate eco-friendly gated neighborhood brought on a backlash over preliminary studies that the federal government was behind an unique returnee enclave with homes beginning at $180,000, which is out of attain for many Ghanaians. Sanbra Metropolis founders have stated the challenge is a collaboration between African-American and Ghanaian builders, not a authorities initiative, and Ghanaians could be welcomed.
In different situations, Dickson says she has seen African Individuals scamming their very own, promoting homes hours away from Accra as in the event that they’re “quarter-hour from the airport,” or charging inconceivable costs.
A Pan-African refuge and a neighborhood hub
The very first deliberate diaspora neighborhood within the nation was Fihankra, on the outskirts of Akwamufie city in Ghana’s southeastern Japanese Area.
In 1994, the chief within the Akwamu Conventional Space supplied land as a present to diasporans prepared to resettle in Ghana. Fihankra is a Twi phrase that loosely interprets as, “Whenever you left this place, no goodbyes have been bid.” It symbolises diasporans’ painful separation from their ancestral house.
As soon as promoted as a Pan-African refuge, Fihankra is now largely abandoned and marked by scandal.
Harriet Kaufman, 69, a retired nurse and an Afro-Caribbean from New York, first heard about Fihankra when she and her husband have been dwelling in London within the late Nineteen Nineties.
By the point they arrived in Ghana in 1998, rumours have been swirling that Fihankra turned away Jamaicans and Nigerians, reserving land solely for African-American traders and charged inflated costs and rents. So the couple discovered land on their very own, and slowly constructed a house quarter-hour away from Fihankra.
Over time, some diasporans at Fihankra began calling themselves the royal household, prompting the minister in control of chieftaincy to take authorized motion towards them for impersonation. Then, in 2015, two feminine African-American residents have been murdered in an tried theft. Quickly after, the small neighborhood was largely deserted.
Right now, solely two individuals stay in Fihankra, says Kaufman.
The Kaufmans’ house, in the meantime, named Black Star African Lion and located on hills overlooking the Volta River, has grown right into a local people hub with a babies’s library, cafe, bar, music studio, guesthouse and prenatal care enterprise.
‘I’m lucky’
The neighborhood took years to develop, and Kaufman is struck by how simply returnees appear to reach at the moment. When she first got here to Ghana, she and her husband rented from a household in Accra and it took them a number of years to seek out land and construct the primary constructing. There have been no smartphones, and no electrical energy within the space. There was no Instagram to glamourise the journey or actual property brokers curating “Africa” from afar. In her opinion, social media has made return look straightforward, even luxurious.
“I assume it was a special time than now. Once we got here, my husband and I sat outdoors and stared on the stars at night time for leisure,” she says. “Right now, all these influencers are posting about Ghana on Instagram, and other people suppose it’s simply straightforward and good villas by the river.”
Kaufman believes this contributes to perceptions that returnees are privileged.
In any case these years, when she often sells bananas from her backyard within the native market, she is obtainable costs beneath what suppliers would usually settle for. She says she remains to be seen as somebody who already has greater than sufficient and shouldn’t be searching for revenue. Kaufman says she will get it, and considers herself privileged to stay as she does in Ghana.
As more moderen arrivals construct new lives in native communities or select to be surrounded by different diasporans, many returnees face integration challenges.
“I do know that the majority of my ancestors dreamed of returning to Africa, and I’m lucky sufficient to have that probability,” Haruna says, admitting she nonetheless seems like an outsider. “[But] I’ll at all times say I moved right here, not that I’m from right here.”
