In the wake of Alex Haley's television series Roots, homeland tours to ‘The Motherland’ have become increasingly popular amongst African-Americans. In search of their roots, these pilgrims often visit the slave castles at Ghana's ocean shore, the place from which their ancestors presumably left the African continent. Their ritual return through the famous Door of No Return marks their overcoming of the trauma of the Middle Passage. But when they walk down the streets of Accra, these African-Americans are often greeted with the term oburoni. This term refers to any person born overseas, but is usually understood to designate a wealthy, white person. Although the term has no bad connotations to Ghanaians, it is not hard to see why African-Americans are offended by it. Instead of emphasising kinship, the term oburoni places the African-American pilgrims in the same league as other, white tourists. To address this problem, the Ghanaian Ministry of Tourism and Diasporan Affairs suggested a new phrase to address these diasporans: Akwaaba Anyemi, a term that fuses two Ghanaian tongues, meaning ‘welcome sibling’ (p. 142). The new designation signals the willingness of the Ghanaian government to welcome the African-American returnees and to accommodate their sensibilities.

In a context in which the Ghanaian state attempts to secure the economic benefits of homeland tourism, the terms of belonging to an alleged ‘African family’ are complex. African Homecoming addresses the complexity of this diasporic longing for a Motherland among African-Americans, which it places on a par with comparable practices ranging from ‘March of the Living’ pilgrimages to Auschwitz to homeland tourism to the Scottish Highlands. The literature on these homeland tours addresses key social issues such as diaspora, identity, new eugenics, heritage, and healing. African Homecoming makes a welcome contribution to this field by focusing on the cultural contradictions of homecoming. In a context of ‘cultural intimacy’ between Africans and the diasporans, how do Ghanaians understand the practices of home-coming by their African-American ‘kin’ and how do African-Americans perceive their reception by their Ghanaian hosts?

The return of African-Americans to African soil has a long history. From the establishment of Liberia as an independent nation for freed slaves in 1847, the return of slaves of African descent to Africa has been a trope in Pan-African ideology and political action. In this book, Katharina Schramm provides an overview of ideas of the first Pan-African authors – Edward Blyden, Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Dubois – and their debates about the benefits of a return to Africa. This background information is complemented by an inventory of the early connections between Pan-African nationalists and the welcome that Ghana's first president, Kwame Nkrumah, extended to these international activists, including W. E. B. Dubois who repatriated to Ghana and whose body was interred there. These early Pan-African connections explain why Ghana has always loomed large in the African-American imagination and why the African-American homeland tourism that emerged in the 1990s was primarily directed towards Ghana rather than, for instance, the Gambia.

After two chapters on Pan-African ideology and Black Atlantic connections, African Homecoming dedicates two chapters to the castles that African-American pilgrims visit in Ghana. Focusing on the restorations of these castles – often denounced as a ‘white-washing’ of history – Schramm makes a nuanced contribution to the debate. Providing an inventory of the opinions of African Americans, white Europeans and Ghanaians, she demonstrates that their opinions are very heterogeneous and cannot be reduced to their respective subject-positions. Acknowledging the negotiations between the different stake holders in the homeland tours, two subsequent chapters analyse the conflicts and contradictions in the formulation of a common heritage in the homecoming festivals as they are regularly staged in Ghana. These chapters highlight the cross-cultural tensions in the experience of these festivals that simultaneously convey a Pan-African ideology and market Ghana as tourist destination. In this context, Pan-Africanism is increasingly used as a resource to attract diasporan investments in an attempt to establish black capitalism. Notwithstanding the shared interests between Africans and diasporans, numerous examples in this book demonstrate that the ideology of a Pan-African civilisation is hard to reconcile with the nationalist sentiments amongst Ghanaians and African-Americans.

African Homecoming focuses on the contradictions of an ideology that claims a common heritage for Africans and African-Americans, and thereby positions itself well in an established field of research. In a field that is politically highly charged, Schramm's contribution seems particularly well-balanced as it addresses the issues at stake with sensitivity. If the Pan-African ideal is ‘essentially a quest for coherence and for wholeness’ (p. 193), as Ghanaian author Kofi Anyidoho claims, then African Homecoming shows that this is first and foremost a quest to overcome a tragic history that cannot be made undone.