What Was Ghana's Year of Return?

In 2019, Ghana declared a “Year of Return” — an international call to the African diaspora to come home. The initiative marked 400 years since the first enslaved Africans were forced across the Atlantic Ocean in 1619. It was part cultural festival, part political program, part spiritual homecoming. Millions traveled to Ghana that year — musicians, writers, activists, and everyday families retracing histories that slavery had tried to erase.

The Year of Return wasn’t just about tourism, it was about memory. Visitors walked through the “Door of No Return” at Cape Coast Castle — where enslaved people were forced onto ships centuries ago — and stepped back through it symbolically reclaiming their ancestors’ stolen journey. Concerts, conferences, and naming ceremonies made the year a landmark in Black diasporic history. For many, it was joyous. For others, it reopened wounds that have never healed.

The Haunted Side of Homecoming

The Year of Return carried an undertone often left unspoken: history’s ghosts don’t vanish just because we invite them to dance. The violence of the slave trade lingers in families, economies, and landscapes. To truly “return” means facing that haunting.

That’s where fiction steps in. Stories can go where public speeches and tourism campaigns cannot. A work of gothic horror can embody the ghosts that polite commemoration keeps in the shadows.

Enter The Year of Return by Ivana Akotowaa Ofori

In her Nommo Award–nominated novella The Year of Return (Android Press), Ghanaian author Ivana Akotowaa Ofori imagines what happens when a journalist returning to Accra in December 2019 collides with the literal and metaphorical ghosts of slavery. It’s a sharp, unsettling gothic tale that blends contemporary life with the living weight of ancestral trauma.

Publishers Weekly praised it as “a powerful, unflinching ghost story” — a reminder that the legacies of the Middle Passage are not past tense but present, and that the work of reckoning is as personal as it is historical.

Why It Matters Now

Though the official “Year of Return” has passed, the questions it raised remain urgent. How do we remember? How do we mourn? How do we build bridges across centuries of forced separation?

Ofori’s novella refuses easy answers. Instead, it sits with the ghosts, demanding that readers feel their presence. It is both a horror story and an act of remembrance — an imaginative continuation of the Year of Return that confronts history without turning away.

Read the Novella

If you want to understand the haunted edge of Ghana’s Year of Return — beyond festivals and headlines — pick up The Year of Return. It’s available now from Android Press:

Read The Year of Return by Ivana Akotowaa Ofori

History is not silent. Its ghosts are waiting.