Accra, Ghana – Ashley Haruna never intended to stay in Ghana. But everything changed for the 28-year-old health coach when she stood facing a dark cell inside the stone walls of Cape Coast Castle. As the tour guide explained that many of the enslaved people who’d once been held there had ended up in Haiti, Haruna says she “felt something”.
Having grown up in the United States to Haitian parents, she realised “my ancestors could’ve passed through here. This place. This ground.
“I wasn’t looking for that,” she reflects. “But it found me.”
The feeling it stirred within her only grew when she returned home to Ohio. After a few months, with her family’s reluctant approval, she returned to Ghana – for good.
That was in December 2021, and Haruna was following in the footsteps of many other African Americans who had sought to reconnect with the country that may once have been home to their ancestors.
In the 1950s, Ghana’s first prime minister and president, Kwame Nkrumah, championed the diaspora’s return as part of his Pan-African dream and nation-building efforts. During the US civil rights movement, he invited Black American activists, including W E B Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Julian Bond, to relocate to Ghana. In the 1960s, De Bois moved there, as did writer Maya Angelou.
Ghanaian leaders continue to encourage the African diaspora to reconnect and relocate. In 2019, the “Year of Return”, marking 400 years since the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia, more than 200 people from the US and the Caribbean received Ghanaian citizenship. In 2024, as part of the government’s “Beyond the Return” initiative – the same programme that encouraged Haruna to move to Ghana – 524 African diasporans were granted citizenship.
But, as Haruna discovered, building a new life in Ghana comes with challenges.
Villa Diaspora
Her first apartment was located two hours north of Accra, in the mountainous Eastern Region, and while Haruna had imagined herself integrating into a local community, she instead found isolation. With no grocery stores nearby and no one to help answer her questions – like how to operate a gas stove or what to do when the water stops running – she found herself feeling alone and frustrated.
She recalled a YouTube video she’d seen while still in the US about a place called Villa Diaspora – a co-living space where the owner, herself a “returnee”, as African Americans relocating to Ghana refer to themselves, helps others navigate their new lives in the country. Haruna dug through her browser history until she found the video. A week later, she moved into the villa in an upscale suburb of Accra.
In the warm communal living area and kitchen she shared with two other African-American tenants, she learned how to navigate the practical and cultural challenges of figuring out her new home – from getting an identification card to learning to say “please” before every sentence.
When Haruna was injured in a car accident, it was the villa’s owner, Michelle Konadu, 37, and the community of former tenants who helped her. The villa became her lifeline. Like the other tenants – who tend to stay for between three and nine months – Haruna moved out of the villa after a while, but it is still Konadu she calls when she needs help.
‘They want healing’
Konadu knows the feeling of being caught between worlds. Born and raised in New York City to Ghanaian parents, her family apartment was a landing place for visiting relatives, distant cousins and friends of friends. “We were always housing someone,” she says.
It wasn’t until she visited Ghana for a funeral in 2015 that she first contemplated leaving the fast pace of New York for the slow flow of Ghana. At first, she thought it would feel like home, but she says she often felt like an outsider. “Too American to be in Ghanaian spaces. But too Ghanaian for America,” she explains.
A cousin named Alfred softened her landing by teaching her how to navigate markets, hail a trotro (a local minibus taxi), and understand the unspoken etiquette of greeting elders and never using the left hand to make gestures towards anybody.
Without his guidance, she says, she might have left and never returned.
Recognising that not every returnee has their own Alfred, Konadu decided to help. In 2017, she opened Villa Diaspora, a three-bedroom co-living compound alongside her larger family home in Kwabenya. She invites the tenants she hosts into the everyday life of her neighbourhood and introduces them to middle-income Accra. Beyond providing accommodation, she helps returnees find schools, consults on land purchases, and connects them with social groups and sports clubs.
Her goal is simple: to help people belong by providing “an already-made community”.
“Most of them come here with a soul mission,” Konadu explains. “They want healing. Or reconnection. Or just a fresh start. For many, coming to Africa has been a lifelong dream. But the people they meet might not understand that.”
Her family struggled to understand why she moved back when their dream had been to leave. But now other families are relieved to know that their loved ones will spend their first months in Ghana surrounded by people on a similar journey. After 10 years in Ghana, Konadu believes that if people can live with her, they can live among the wider community.
She points to the Brazilian “Tabom” community in Jamestown, Accra, which she sees as a perfect example of a well-integrated returned diaspora group. As descendants of formerly enslaved Africans who returned from Brazil in the 19th century, they settled among the Ga people, intermarried, learned the language, and built lives that blended their Afro-Brazilian heritage within the Ga social structure. Over the generations, their names – De Souza, Silva, Nelson – have become part of the Jamestown story. Konadu expects the same will happen with the newer returnees and that the African-American culture will remain strong but exist within the structure of the larger Ghanaian society.
Haruna understands that integration takes time, and she acknowledges that returnees like her have privileges that others in Ghana don’t. Lighter skin and an American accent often open doors in ways that never happened back in the US, giving her preferential treatment such as faster service in restaurants, locals ready to offer help, and generally being able to make things happen faster, like meetings with authorities.
“It is uncomfortable as a self-aware person to notice that I have privilege, something that is the total opposite of what is happening in the United States. I am still wrapping my head around all of it,” she says.
“I’m Ghanaian. I’m also a returnee,” Konadu says. “We’ve always been connected: Ghana and its diasporans. This isn’t new, but the ‘Year of Return’ made things more visible.”
This increased visibility – and the clustering of returnees in specific settlements, along with rising costs – has caused some friction.
‘The Ghana they won’t see’
Anthony Amponsah Faith runs a business renting out cars and driving clients around Ghana, including returnees navigating the country for the first time. He credits them with allowing him to visit places he had never been to before, such as the Nzulezu stilt village and the middle-belt waterfalls. “Before, I never got to go anywhere. Now, I’ve seen the whole of Ghana,” says the 32-year-old.
On these trips, Amponsah has witnessed his African-American clients’ emotional visits to coastal slave castles and memorials, but he has also seen friction up close. While wealthier neighbourhoods, where returnees often settle, enjoy continuous electricity, paved roads, and access to supermarkets and cafes, in others, water comes in cycles and basic services require improvisation. Returnees complain about power cuts or heavy traffic, while locals shrug them off as part of daily life. He recalls a client insisting he was being overcharged because “Ghana should be cheap”.
Earlier this year, Amponsah awoke one night to find his mattress floating in a room flooded with water. “That’s the Ghana they won’t see,” he says. “It doesn’t flood in the areas where returnees stay.”
He is frustrated by the rising cost of housing, which he attributes to returnees’ willingness to pay more. “To them, it’s not expensive,” he says. “They come from places where they earn more. But I blame the government. Why aren’t we getting those same opportunities?”
In 2019, he paid 120 cedis ($10-12) a month for a small studio; he now pays 450 cedis ($42-44).
“The cost of living is rising by the second. It makes finding a place scary,” says Amponsah. He would prefer to be closer to his customers, many of whom live at least an hour away, but he can’t afford to move.
‘A town from scratch’
Many new arrivals feel guilty about their economic and social privileges, but some Ghanaians carry an often unspoken burden tied to their ancestors’ role in the transatlantic slave trade, leading some chiefs to offer land to returnees as atonement.
Across Ghana, at least two diaspora settlements, Fihankra and Pan African Village emerged that way, while other returnee-focused residential projects, including gated communities, are under construction.
Dawn Dickson, an entrepreneur and investor, is building a house for herself in the African-American settlement known as Pan African Village. She moved to Ghana in 2022, after envisaging a life outside the US in a place where she wasn’t “the minority”.
The 46-year-old says she didn’t intend to seek out a diaspora-only community. Dickson, who traces her ancestry to the Akan people in Ghana and Ivory Coast, was struck by the sense of familiarity, warmth and energy among the Ghanaians she met. But when she started looking to buy land, she discovered that other returnees were buying around Asebu town in the coastal Central Region, where a traditional leader had carved out some 20,000 plots for diasporans.
“For me, it was the excitement that I got to be part of building a town from scratch,” Dickson explains.
She bought land and then founded a company that helps other African Americans buy and build homes. Dickson is employing sustainable rammed earth technology to construct houses for 35 returnees as well as roads, a school, a church and boreholes, and is training locals to master this building technique.
The community, however, has not been without controversy.
In 2023, a family challenged the decision to allocate land they claimed was their ancestral property as part of the village. Development has continued despite a high court injunction ordering that construction be halted, and some 150 farmers who relied on this land say they have lost their livelihoods.
Dickson says the land she has helped purchase is not contested, and if farmers are using it, she negotiates shared-crop agreements or payment.
Elsewhere, new diaspora projects are under way and have come under scrutiny.
Sanbra City (“Return City”) is a 300-acre private real estate development outside Accra. The planned eco-friendly gated community caused a backlash over initial reports that the government was behind an exclusive returnee enclave with houses starting at $180,000, which is out of reach for most Ghanaians. Sanbra City founders have said the project is a collaboration between African-American and Ghanaian developers, not a government initiative, and Ghanaians would be welcomed.
In other instances, Dickson says she has seen African Americans scamming their own, advertising houses hours away from Accra as if they’re “15 minutes from the airport,” or charging impossible prices.
A Pan-African refuge and a community hub
The very first planned diaspora community in the country was Fihankra, on the outskirts of Akwamufie town in Ghana’s southeastern Eastern Region.
In 1994, the chief in the Akwamu Traditional Area offered land as a gift to diasporans willing to resettle in Ghana. Fihankra is a Twi phrase that loosely translates as, “When you left this place, no goodbyes were bid.” It symbolises diasporans’ painful separation from their ancestral home.
Once promoted as a Pan-African refuge, Fihankra is now largely deserted 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 were living in London in the late 1990s.
By the time they arrived in Ghana in 1998, rumours were swirling that Fihankra turned away Jamaicans and Nigerians, reserving land solely for African-American investors and charged inflated prices and rents. So the couple found land on their own, and slowly built a home 15 minutes away from Fihankra.
Over time, some diasporans at Fihankra started calling themselves the royal family, prompting the minister in charge of chieftaincy to take legal action against them for impersonation. Then, in 2015, two female African-American residents were murdered in an attempted robbery. Soon after, the small community was largely abandoned.
Today, only two people live in Fihankra, says Kaufman.
The Kaufmans’ home, meanwhile, named Black Star African Lion and situated on hills overlooking the Volta River, has grown into a local community hub with a small children’s library, cafe, bar, music studio, guesthouse and prenatal care business.
‘I am fortunate’
The community took years to develop, and Kaufman is struck by how easily returnees seem to arrive today. When she first came to Ghana, she and her husband rented from a family in Accra and it took them several years to find land and build the first building. There were no smartphones, and no electricity in the area. There was no Instagram to glamourise the journey or real estate agents curating “Africa” from afar. In her opinion, social media has made return look easy, even luxurious.
“I guess it was a different time than now. When we came, my husband and I sat outside and stared at the stars at night for entertainment,” she says. “Today, all these influencers are posting about Ghana on Instagram, and people think it is just easy and nice villas by the river.”
Kaufman believes this contributes to perceptions that returnees are privileged.
After all these years, when she occasionally sells bananas from her garden in the local market, she is offered prices below what suppliers would typically accept. She says she is still seen as someone who already has more than enough and shouldn’t be seeking profit. Kaufman says she gets it, and considers herself privileged to live as she does in Ghana.
As more recent arrivals build new lives in local communities or choose to be surrounded by other diasporans, many returnees face integration challenges.
“I know that most of my ancestors dreamed of returning to Africa, and I am fortunate enough to have that chance,” Haruna says, admitting she still feels like an outsider. “[But] I will always say I moved here, not that I am from here.”
