Stop Calling It a 'Homecoming.' The Diaspora Deserves Better Than a Marketing Slogan.

I want to start by saying I understand the appeal. I have felt it in my own chest — the pull toward a continent that history tore my family from, the ache to belong somewhere that isn't defined by having survived America. That longing is real. That longing is sacred.

Which is exactly why I've grown so uneasy watching it get monetized.

The business of belonging

In the years since Ghana's Year of Return, government after government has noticed something: the African diaspora's grief is bankable. Ghana has offered citizenship to hundreds of African Americans. Other nations are drafting their own diaspora-investment schemes, complete with land deals, tax incentives, and glossy videos of Black Americans in white linen touching red earth as an ancestral voiceover swells.

Some of this is genuine. Some of it is a real, moral effort to repair a real, moral wound. But some of it — and we need to be honest — is a tourism strategy wearing the costume of reconciliation.

When a government minister stands at the Door of No Return and welcomes us home in the same breath he pitches a beachfront development zone, I need us to notice the seam between the sermon and the sales deck.

What the brochures don't say

I've spent months talking to African Americans who took the leap — who bought land, relocated, invested their savings in the homecoming. Their stories are not all inspirational.

A woman I'll call Denise, a retired nurse from Baltimore, sank her pension into a plot outside Accra. Two years later she's still fighting a land dispute she didn't understand she was buying into — a customary-tenure system where the man who "sold" her the land may not have had the sole right to sell it. No brochure explained that.

A couple from Atlanta relocated their whole family, only to discover that being African American in Ghana meant being seen, permanently, as a wealthy foreigner — obroni — charged foreigner prices, held at foreigner distance. "I left America to stop being othered," the husband told me, "and got othered in a whole new language."

This is not an anti-return argument

Let me be careful here, because I know how this can be misread. I am not telling you to stay away. I am not saying the connection is false. I felt the door at Cape Coast go through me like everyone else does.

I'm saying: bring your whole mind, not just your whole heart.

• Ask who actually owns the land before you buy it, and under which system.
• Understand that citizenship offered is not the same as belonging earned.
• Know that the continent has its own struggles that did not pause to wait for you.

The dignity of a harder truth

Here is what I want for us. I want a relationship with Africa that can survive the honeymoon. A relationship built not on the fantasy of erasing four hundred years, but on the harder, better work of two peoples — the ones who left and the ones who stayed — deciding to know each other as we actually are.

The stayed have their own wounds. Colonialism did not spare them. They watched us get taken and could not stop it, and some of their own ancestors, we must say plainly, were entangled in the taking. There is grief on both shores. A homecoming slogan papers over all of it with a single sentimental afternoon.

I don't want the slogan. I want the marriage — with all the argument and disappointment and slow, real trust that any marriage requires.

So when the next government video swells with ancestral strings and welcomes you home, love the feeling. Let it move you. And then wake up the next morning and do the unglamorous work of building something true.

The diaspora is not a market. Our longing is not a product. And home — real home — was never something you could buy at the airport with a diaspora visa. It's something we're going to have to build, on both sides of the water, with our eyes wide open.