The Diaspora Returns: What Happens When You Move Back

Aisha Williams moved to Accra in 2020, during the pandemic, with two suitcases and a one-way ticket. She had visited twice before — once for a wedding, once for a conference — and both times she had felt something she struggled to name. Not nostalgia, exactly. She had never lived in Ghana. But something like recognition.

'I kept telling people I was going for a year,' she says. We are sitting in her apartment in East Legon, which she has decorated with a combination of Ghanaian textiles and furniture she shipped from Brooklyn. 'But I knew when I got on the plane that I wasn't coming back. I just wasn't ready to say it out loud.'

Williams is part of a growing wave of African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and Afro-Europeans who are relocating to Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, and other African countries. The movement has been building for years, accelerated by Ghana's 'Year of Return' campaign in 2019 and the pandemic's disruption of assumptions about where and how people could live.

The experience of return is rarely simple. The diaspora returnees arrive with expectations shaped by ancestry, imagination, and a longing that is real but not always legible to the people they are returning to. They find a continent that is not waiting for them, that has its own complicated relationship with the diaspora, that is simultaneously welcoming and indifferent.