By Fèmi (Oluwafemi Kochoni) · Founder & Cultural Programs Director · Cotonou, Benin · Published 20 July 2026 · 14 min read
From the receiving end. A guide for the diaspora returning to Benin, Togo and the Bight — after the DNA test, after Ghana, after the first tears.
There are two ways to arrive at the Bight of Benin. The first is the way most of your ancestors arrived — in the hold of a ship, at the end of a walk that started somewhere inland and did not end until Salvador, or Havana, or Charleston, or Kingston. The second is the way you might arrive now — by plane, into Cotonou, on a passport that names a country your great-great-great-grandfather never heard of. This guide is for the second arrival — for returning to the Slave Coast, four hundred years after the departure. We will not pretend the first did not happen. We will not pretend the second erases it. We will try to describe what the ground looks like from here — from Cotonou, from Ouidah, from the villages of the Fon and the Ewe — for the diaspora visitor who is coming back to look.
We do not curate the slave routes. We accompany those who walk them.
Heritage & Routes is a Cotonou-based operator. We were not built to serve the diaspora tour industry that grew up around Ghana’s Year of Return. We were built to accompany serious visitors — scholars, documentary teams, extended families, individual returnees — on the ground of the Bight of Benin, at the pace and depth the ground demands. What follows is not a brochure. It is a guide. If it is useful, it is because we walk these routes weekly, with elders whose parents walked them, in villages where the trade left a specific set of memories that neither Ghana nor Nigeria hold in the same way.
The second wave — returning to the Slave Coast now
Between 2019 and 2023, Ghana welcomed something in the order of a million visitors under the Year of Return and Beyond the Return banners. That first wave did what first waves do — it broke the silence, it built the airport lines, it made the pilgrimage visible in the American, British and Caribbean press. It was necessary. It also did what first waves do — it left work behind. Much of that work now falls on the second wave — on the diaspora returning to the Slave Coast with maturity, with reading behind them, with less need for the photograph and more need for the ground — and on the destinations that first-wave visitors did not have the time or the map to reach.
The Bight of Benin — the coastline that stretches from the Volta River in Ghana to the Niger Delta in Nigeria, with Togo and Benin at its center — was the single largest departure point for enslaved Africans sent to the Americas across two centuries. More than three million people. The port of Ouidah alone accounts for over a million departures. If your ancestors were counted among the Yoruba, the Fon, the Ewe, the Aja, the Mahi, the Ashanti-bordering communities of the Volta — this coast is where the ship met the shore.
The second wave is coming back to walk it. Not for the ceremony of the naming, not for the photograph at the Door, not for the We are one T-shirt. For the ground itself. For what the descendants of those who stayed have to say about what those who left carried, and what they left behind. That is the conversation this guide is written for.
What Benin holds that Ghana does not
We will say it plainly, because visitors ask us plainly. Ghana is essential. Cape Coast Castle and Elmina Castle are indispensable stops for any serious returnee. The Ghanaian state has done more than any West African country to make the pilgrimage visible and welcoming. Nothing that follows is meant to diminish that.
A living Vodun. The religion your ancestors carried across the Atlantic — the religion that became Candomblé in Bahia, Santería in Cuba, Vodou in Haiti, Lucumí, Palo, Winti — is still practised openly here. Not folkloric. Not museum. Actual. The Fon temples of Ouidah and Abomey are where a returnee from Salvador, Havana or Port-au-Prince meets the direct source of their family religion.
A specific inland geography. The slave trail from the palace of Abomey — the capital of the Kingdom of Dahomey — down through Bopa, Allada and Ouidah to the coast is walkable, mapped, remembered. Elders in each village hold the piece of the memory that belongs to their ground. This continuous inland trail is unique among West African slave routes.
A political economy the trade shaped from within. The Kingdom of Dahomey — for reasons that historians continue to argue about — was one of the African polities most implicated in supplying the trade. To walk Abomey is to sit with the harder version of the story: the one where the story is not only what the Europeans did to us but also what we did to each other, in and against the pressure of the Atlantic economy.
Language geography. The Fon of Benin, the Ewe of Togo and Ghana’s Volta, the Yoruba of southwest Nigeria — three linguistic groups whose descendants dominate the New World African diaspora — meet on this coast. If your ancestry is Yoruba, Nigeria and Benin are where the language is still spoken as a first language. If it is Fon or Ewe, Benin and Togo are where you are.
Three thresholds of the return
Before you come
You will have read something. Maybe Lose Your Mother, maybe The Black Atlantic, maybe Homegoing, maybe your grandmother’s letters. You will have talked to family or refused to. You may have taken a DNA test that named a place you cannot pronounce yet. Before returning to the Slave Coast, do not read to prepare — read to disturb. Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother is a good starting point precisely because it refuses to make the return redemptive. Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake holds the same discipline. If you find yourself wanting the itinerary that will heal you, you are preparing for the wrong trip.
At the threshold — the first days on the ground
You will land at Cotonou at night. The air will be humid and specific. Someone from the operator will meet you at the airport and take you to the hotel — probably in silence. The first full day is deliberately slow. You will not go to Ouidah on day one. The ground is not going anywhere. The ancestors have waited four hundred years. They can wait one more day. On day two or three, you will begin the memorial walk in Ouidah — or the palace visits in Abomey. On that day, you will arrive at the Door of No Return. What happens at the Door is between you and what you brought. We do not stage it. We do not choreograph it.
After — the third threshold
The third threshold is the return home. It is the one most trips do not address. Write it before you talk about it. Read the reading list we send home with you. Let the trip settle before it becomes a story. A month after the return, we will call you. Not for feedback. For the third threshold — for what you now think, after some settling, about what you saw.
If you have done the DNA test
The commercial DNA tests — 23andMe, AncestryDNA, African Ancestry — will name a region and, sometimes, a linguistic group. The tests are useful. They are also, past that first naming, limited. What they cannot do is name your village, your ancestor, or put you in a specific room with the specific descendants of a specific family. What we can do, if the test named Benin/Togo or Nigerian Yoruba, is take you to the linguistic and cultural ground of that naming. What we cannot do is stage a false naming. Some operators offer ceremonial adoption or a king for a day ritual. We do not.
If you don’t know your line
Most African-Americans and many descendants of the Caribbean and Brazilian diasporas do not have a family naming that survived the crossing. The trade was, among other things, an erasure of the name. If you arrive without a DNA test, without a family tree, without a village, you are in the majority. The trip does not require a naming. It requires an honesty about the absence of the naming. The elders on this coast know this. Their response is not to fabricate one. Their response is to say: your ancestors came through here. That is enough of a naming to begin.
Who walks with you
The operator — from Cotonou
Heritage & Routes is directed by Fèmi (Oluwafemi Kochoni), founder and cultural programs director, born and based in Cotonou. Fèmi holds academic training from the University of Iowa (US) and Wageningen University & Research (Netherlands), and has been guiding visitors on the Bight of Benin for over a decade. He is the person who will call you back after your discovery-call request. He is also the person the elders in Ouidah, Abomey and Aného know by name — because these programs are not brokered through a chain of intermediaries. That directness is part of what you are buying, and part of what makes returning to the Slave Coast with Heritage & Routes different from booking a heritage tour through a distant reseller.
Elders
Different elders depending on the ground you walk. In Ouidah: historians of the merchant lineages, Vodun priestesses of the specific temples opened to visitors. In Abomey: royal palace historians. In Aného (Togo): Ewe elders. In Cape Coast: Ghanaian custodians of the Castle. Not folkloric performers.
Scholars
Historians and anthropologists from Université d’Abomey-Calavi, University of Lomé, IRD-Cotonou, University of Cape Coast. Several have published with Karthala, Présence Africaine, Harvard University Press, Indiana University Press, and the diaspora studies programs of Northwestern, Duke, NYU.
What we do not offer
We do not offer naming ceremonies for returnees, king-for-a-day rituals, compressed heal in five days itineraries, or the Wakanda comparison. The actual Kingdom of Dahomey was not Wakanda — it was powerful, complex, morally serious, deeply implicated. That is a better story than the fiction, and it is yours. No T-shirts. No merchandise. No group photo at the Door.
The three programs — which one for which return
Once you have read this guide, and if you decide that returning to the Slave Coast is the right next step, there are three programs we currently offer.
- The 12-day Slave Coast journey — the most complete. Best for first-time returnees who want the whole picture.
- The 7-day Vodun journey — the focused. Best for returnees who already know their line goes to Vodun/Candomblé/Santería.
- The 10-day custom journey — the built-for-you. Best for private families with a specific angle.
Questions returnees ask us
Q — Is Benin better than Ghana for roots tourism?
Not better. Different. Most serious returnees eventually go to both. If your ancestry is Yoruba, Fon, Ewe, or your family religion is Candomblé, Santería or Vodou, start with Benin. If you know your ancestry passed through a Ghanaian castle or is Akan, start with Ghana.
Q — I did a DNA test that named Benin/Togo. Now what?
Come. The trip lets you meet the ground of that naming. We cannot name your village (no operator can, honestly), but we can put you in the Fon, Yoruba or Ewe ground of the naming.
Q — Is it OK to go if I don’t know my line?
Yes. The majority of returnees do not know their line. Elders here have received hundreds of visitors without a naming.
Q — How long should a first heritage trip to Africa be?
Ten to twelve days minimum for the Bight of Benin. Seven days works if the trip is Vodun-focused.
Q — What should I read before I come?
Saidiya Hartman, Paul Gilroy, Christina Sharpe. For Dahomey: Robin Law. For Fon-Haitian Vodou continuity: Suzanne Preston Blier.
Q — Will I be treated as African-American, as African, or as something else?
As a returnee — un retourné, or the returning family. Neither pure American nor pure African.
Q — What about the fact that Africans sold Africans?
The elders know this question is coming. They do not evade it. The political economy of the trade is discussed openly in Abomey and Ouidah.
Q — Does this exist in French?
Yes — Retour sur la Côte des esclaves — un guide pour les descendants. Written natively, not translated.
You do not decide today
This guide was written to be read slowly. If it stayed with you, the next step is not to book — it is to read the Field Note on what Year of Return 2.0 looks like from Cotonou, and to sit with it for a week. If you are still with the idea in a week, then a discovery call is the natural next step.
About the author
Fèmi (Oluwafemi Kochoni) · Founder & Cultural Programs Director · Heritage & Routes · Cotonou, Benin
Fèmi directs Heritage & Routes from Cotonou. Born on the Bight of Benin, trained at the University of Iowa (US) and Wageningen University & Research (Netherlands), he has been guiding scholars, documentary teams and diaspora returnees on the Slave Coast for over a decade. His work with elders in Ouidah, Abomey and Aného sits at the intersection of memorial pedagogy, Vodun heritage transmission, and the philosophy of return.