in brief

2019 was the special year marked by Ghana as the Year of Return when descendants of African in diaspora were not only invited, but encouraged to come back to the Motherland, not just fto visit, but to settle down and start a new life.

Despite the challenges, the initiative has met with a fair amount of successor. More success than the Ghanaian government had planned for. Returning home is one thing. What exactly is “home” is something else. And that something else is what the government did not appear to have planned for.
But then stepped in a private individual to give his own meaning to the something else, by commandeering (albeit contested) some 5.000 hectares of land in Asebu, close to Cape Coast, and created the Pan African Village project there. Building plots are being given out for free and a new settlement community is gradually taking shape with about 750 plots already taken up.

One such returnees is Lenval Skier who claims to be have been the first to settle there in 2020. Born in 1949 and native of Jamaica, he claims to have only found true freedom in Ghana. He had lived and worked in Canada for over 40 years, but never felt he really belonged.
“We as Blacks and Native people are regarded as second-class citizens. We’ve reached a stage now where there is an option to find land and live in a country where you can be totally free.”

The United States still accounts for the bulk of those settling in the Pan African Village. 

The story is different in other parts of West Africa such as Senegal, Liberia, Nigeria, Benin, where returning diaspora have found their ways into the existing local communities and have had to adapt to the local people – learning their language and imbibing their culture.

With both structures having their benefits, the debate is centering round which of these two should be the model going forward? Does the Freetown model of Pan African Village truly make returnees feel integrated into the community? Some argue, not.