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ABSTRACT
A historical analysis of Ghana's dealings with the historic African Diaspora, as well as the latter's experiences in the country, mimics a pendulum swing from the realm of politics and statecraft to tourism and development. The general euphoria of Ghana's immediate post-independence era unleashed a flood of pragmatic Pan-Africanist sentiments that heavily informed the activities of the historic African Diaspora in that country. The elite and most influential of this group became a part of the powerful inner circle around Kwame Nkrumah. By the 1990s, however, the country's interactions with the Historic African Diaspora had come to hinge heavily on the legacy of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade under the exigencies of the global neoliberal economic dispensation. To this end, Ghana's many extant European castles and forts became indispensable. Consequently, an ambivalent system emerged around these history-laden monuments. In essence while the historic African Diaspora sought reconnections with their ancestral past, Ghanaian authorities saw opportunities to expand development strategies.
This chapter examines the policies and programs rolled out over time to prop up the country as an attractive place to the historic African Diaspora. Additionally, the chapter examines the extent to which explicitly declared objectives of what may be appropriately described as the "Diaspora Project" in Ghana meet or do not meet individual and collective historic African Diaspora aspirations. To what extent do these programs cast visiting historic African Diaspora as tourists? How does this image square with their genetic and historic relationship with Africa? After going through ceremonies for the acquisition of indigenous names and honorary titles, ostensibly to accentuate their deep association with Africa, the historic African Diaspora constantly suffers an outsider status in Ghana, while oblivious authorities claim increasing tourism revenue for development thus causing a latent diffusion of the same expectation among communities, towns, and villages.
The historic African Diaspora acknowledges that the continent must develop, yet its quest for filial relationships is of paramount importance. The article argues that the neoliberal imperative to make tourism a viable income-generating sector for both national and local development invariably transformed Ghana's relations with the historic African Diaspora from a potentially meaningful one to that of ambivalence fraught with frustration and unfulfilled expectation. Nevertheless, in the face of an admixture of contentment...