Students perform a reenactment of the slave trade at the University of Ghana's Theatre of Arts at the Christiansborg castle, a former slave dungeon, in Accra, on June 19, 2026. The greatest tribute to those who perished in the transatlantic slave trade would be a free, prosperous and united Africa that exercises real sovereignty over its economic resources, knowledge production and cultural development, says the writer.
Image: AFP
Kim Heller
In October 2026, South Africa will host the second Africa and African Diaspora Conference under the theme "The Return to Africa". Delegates will embark on a Pilgrimage of Return by visiting former slave-trade sites in South Africa, Senegal, Ghana, Angola, Mozambique and Nigeria.
This journey carries profound symbolic significance. These are places of remembrance, mourning and historical fracture — the very sites from which African people were violently torn from their families, communities, land, livelihoods and liberty, and forced into slavery in foreign nations.
Reverend Frank Chikane, a co-convenor of the conference, has stated: "We want to mobilise the continent to deal with this damage and repair it and take Africans to the cutting edge." Returning to these historical sites has immeasurable value.
However, the politics of return must move beyond memory and ceremonial remembrance if it is to confront the unfinished business of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade, and if it is to advance the urgent project of decolonisation.
This demands reflection not only on the Africa from which African people were taken, but on the Africa to which their descendants are now being invited to return — an Africa still structured by the economic, political and epistemic architectures of colonial dispossession.
For the politics of return to function as a mechanism of historical repair and as a genuine act of decolonisation, repair will need to be material, structural and transformative. Africa cannot afford performative gestures that privilege symbolism over the dismantling of coloniality.
For "The Return to Africa" to become an exercise in reparative justice and African power, it must confront the continued reproduction of structural poverty, underdevelopment and economic subordination that remain the enduring legacies of colonial rule and dispossession.
Marcus Garvey understood this over a century ago.
His "Africa for the Africans" vision, developed through the Universal Negro Improvement Association in the early 1920s, was never a sentimental invitation to return to an ancestral homeland.
Garvey's politics of return were rooted in sovereignty. He envisaged an Africa in which African people exercised political power and economic self-determination — an Africa that controlled its own resources and determined its own future free from external domination.
He lobbied for meaningful partnership with the African diaspora as a strategic force in this liberation project.
The African Union has formally recognised the African diaspora as the continent's sixth region and designated 2021–2031 as the Decade of African Roots and Diasporas. This institutional language of continental-diaspora unity is significant, yet it remains largely empty without the infrastructural, economic and political investment required to shift power.
Ghana's experience provides a cautionary lesson.
Its 2019 Year of Return, commemorating the 400th anniversary of the transatlantic slave trade, gained international traction and motivated many descendants of enslaved Africans to reconnect with the country.
Approximately 834 people were granted Ghanaian citizenship according to the Migration Policy Institute. However, Ghana proved to be no land of milk and honey. Many returned to the diaspora because they faced limited economic opportunities, restricted access to land, bureaucratic obstacles, and deeper structural barriers that continue to define post-colonial African economies.
A serious return programme cannot rest on emotional reconnection alone. It needs concrete, sustainable programmes that benefit both returnees and those who never left and actively advance African ownership of resources, technological capacity, industrial development, and knowledge production.
Delegates at the October conference will have to confront a major dichotomy. While Africa intensifies the political language of return for the descendants of those forcibly removed through the slave trade, millions of Africans living on the continent are being driven from their homes by the very conditions that colonialism, neo-colonial architecture and uneven geo-economic power relations produce.
Desperate people cross borders and risk their lives in search of work or to escape conflict and war. The continent has become an atlas of mass displacement. There can be no celebration of the return of the diaspora while continental Africans are forced to flee their homes.
A welcome mat for the diaspora sits uneasily alongside persistent economic exclusion, an educational crisis, poor governance, insecurity, and the absence of genuine sovereignty. These conditions leave Africa's young majority marginalised.
The persistence of xenophobia and hostility towards fellow Africans exposes the fault lines in a united African people and the vision of a shared home for Africans.
For as long as Africans are treated as unwelcome in neighbouring African countries, the idea of a shared African home remains illusory. The structural forces that drive displacement and intra-continental migration are the aftershocks of colonial and neo-colonial power relations that have yet to be dismantled and of post-independent governance that has failed citizens.
Chikane has argued that Africans must ultimately control Africa's resources. He has also warned against conferences becoming ends in themselves rather than "stepping stones" towards radical change.
Historical repair is not an easy fix. There is no magic remedy.
What is required is the hard work of confrontation with the economic structures and thought processes through which wealth and power were amassed under colonialism and slavery. And which continue to perpetuate inequality and dependency today.
The greatest tribute to those who perished in the transatlantic slave trade would be a free, prosperous and united Africa that exercises real sovereignty over its economic resources, knowledge production and cultural development.
Anything less remains insufficient. Africa must become a place where its people can live with dignity rather than displacement. It needs to provide a secure, dignified and self-governed home for all its people.
The real homecoming is not the physical return of Africans to Africa. It is building a decolonised continent worth a return.
*** Kim Heller is a political analyst and author of No White Lies: Black Politics and White Power in South Africa.**
**** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Media Group.**
