“You Are Always Welcome Home”: Examining the Longue Durée of Black Diasporic Return Migration to Accra, Ghana in the Era of the Year of Return (2019-2026)

Abstract

This dissertation examines contemporary Black diasporic return migration to Ghana’s capital city, Accra, with an emphasis on how the different actors involved – the Ghanaian government, Ghanaian locals (or nationals), and continental and historical diasporans (or returnees) – relate to historical memory of slavery and colonialism, nostalgia (for the future as well as the past), and experience complex continental-diasporic intimacies amid an ongoing economic crisis in Ghana. Long before it transitioned from the British Gold Coast colony to an independent nation, the contemporary country of Ghana was a prominent site of return for diasporans in the Black Atlantic World, and since achieving independence in 1957, Ghana has employed diaspora outreach and engagement as a strategy for nation-building and economic development. Through ethnographic research—semi-structured interviews, participant observation, archival research, analysis of social media discourse and diaspora engagement-oriented content production—and cross-disciplinary engagement with the extensive body of literature on (return) migration, diasporism, (corporeal, imaginative, and communicative) mobilities, this dissertation strives to understand better how these cross-border movements produced by government initiatives such as the Joseph Project (2007); Year of Return (2019); Beyond the Return (2020-present); the Black Star Experience (2024-present); and the annual festive season romp known Detty December or December in Ghana; impact the different actors pushed into fraught encounters in Accra and in social media contact zones like Twitter | X, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Towards constructing a flexible and dynamic taxonomy of returnees to Accra in the late 2010s and early 2020s, this dissertation identifies three categories: 1) serendipitious homecomers, 2) romantic returnees, and 3) vindicationist dreamers. It also examines the concurrent japa, or economic flight, from Ghana as the government invites both continental and historical diasporans to return, and delves into how government-led return migration often stokes existing economic and affective tensions within southern Ghana’s existing socio-economic hierarchies. A core aim of this dissertation project was to examine how Ghanaian locals Ghanaians perceive and negotiate the presence of continental and historical diasporan returnees – the political, economic, and affective impact on their lives— and give attention to how they use social media platforms, especially technoscapes such #BlackTwitter and #GhanaTwitter, to interject into a discourse that has typically occurred between the political class and diasporans, and often neglected the working and lower-middle-class Ghanaians living with the material outcomes of these initiatives, participating in diaspora wars that often generate a confounding blend of tension and tenderness, a dynamic of (mis)recognition that exemplifies Black transnational life and migration in 21st century.