By Fèmi (Oluwafemi Kochoni) · Founder & Cultural Programs Director · Cotonou, Benin · Published 20 July 2026 · 8 min read
Operator notes on the second wave of diaspora return — five years after Ghana’s first — from the coast that sent more people across the Atlantic than any other.
What the second wave brings that the first did not
A woman I will not name — she asked that I not — arrived in Cotonou in March 2026 with two adult children. Her line, she told me on the discovery call, had been traced by AncestryDNA to Nigeria/Benin. She had been to Cape Coast in 2019 with her congregation. She had bought the T-shirt in Accra. She had wept at the Door. She had returned home, and she had spent five years thinking about what came next.
This time, she said in our first hour together, on the veranda of a hotel in Cotonou, watching the light come off the lagoon, I do not want the T-shirt. I want the ground.
That is what Year of Return 2.0 looks like, from where we stand.
Between 2019 and 2023, Ghana’s Year of Return and Beyond the Return campaigns delivered something Africa’s tourism ministries had chased for decades — a million-plus diaspora visitors, mostly African-American, mostly first-time, mostly Cape Coast and Elmina. The campaign was necessary and it did what necessary campaigns do: it broke the silence, it made the pilgrimage visible in the American, British and Caribbean press, it filled the airport lines. It was the first wave.
The second wave is different in kind, not just in volume. The visitors who arrive on our veranda in 2026 have often been to Ghana already. Or they have read Lose Your Mother, or watched the 1619 podcast, or done the DNA test, or attended a symposium at Howard or NYU where the conversation moved past the T-shirt and into what to do about the fact that the T-shirt is not enough. They arrive with reading behind them. They arrive with questions the first wave did not have time to ask. They arrive, often, with a suspicion that the ceremony they need is not the one packaged for them by the state-tourism campaign of any West African country — and that this second thing they are looking for might sit closer to Ouidah than to Cape Coast, closer to Abomey than to Elmina, closer to a Fon village elder than to a hotel welcome dinner.
This is what makes the second wave a different phenomenon. It is not larger. It is more prepared.
Three shifts we see from the ground
Shift 1 — Less pilgrimage, more preparation
The first wave came to pilgrimage. The second wave comes to work. What we see in the discovery calls now: returnees who have read Saidiya Hartman before arrival, who have a bibliography in their notes, who arrive with three questions ready for the Ouidah elder (not one, not zero — three, precise). The trip is no longer the beginning of the encounter with Africa. It is the middle. The reading and the DNA test are the beginning; the trip is where the questions built at home get tested against the ground; the return home is where the answers get worked.
Practical consequence for us: we have doubled the length of the pre-trip briefing pack. We recommend two to three months of reading before departure, not two weeks. We hold a longer pre-trip call — 60 to 90 minutes, not 30. Groups arrive already knowing the difference between Fon and Ewe, between the Kingdom of Dahomey and the Kingdom of Benin (Nigeria’s — not to be confused), between Vodun in Ouidah and Vodou in Port-au-Prince. That prior knowledge lets us go deeper on the days themselves. The trip is denser because the preparation is heavier.
Shift 2 — Less spectacle, more conversation
The Cape Coast experience of 2019 was, by design, moving: the walk into the dungeon, the door, the choreographed silence, the closing ceremony. Nothing about that was wrong. It was necessary work. But for the second-wave visitor, arriving in Ouidah after having done Cape Coast, spectacle is not the missing piece. Conversation is. What they want is not to be moved again; it is to sit with an elder and ask a question that has been sitting in their chest for six years.
Practical consequence for us: we design fewer set-piece moments and more conversations. A morning in the palace at Abomey is not a guided tour; it is a two-hour discussion with a royal historian about the political economy of the trade — including the parts where the Dahomean state was implicated, which is the conversation Cape Coast could not stage in the same way. An afternoon at the Fondation Zinsou in Cotonou is a walk-through with a curator who has published on the artists of the diaspora and knows the returnee is not looking for an African art introduction but for something more specific. Meals are longer. Silences are held longer. The tempo is slower than a first-wave itinerary because the tempo of the visitor is different.
Shift 3 — Less Ghana-only, more Benin-Togo (and back to Ghana on the second trip)
The first wave was Ghana-centric because that is where the campaign was built. The second wave is more comparative. Many returnees come to Benin after Ghana precisely to see what the Bight of Benin holds that the Gold Coast does not — a living Vodun that Cape Coast cannot show (because Akan spirituality is a different tradition and does not travel to Bahia and Havana in the same way), a continuous inland trail from Abomey to Ouidah that shows the trade as an inland-to-coastal system rather than a coastal fort story alone, and a specific Fon-Yoruba-Ewe geography that maps onto the languages and religions carried into the New World with unusual precision.
Practical consequence for us: we build custom Benin-and-Togo programs for returnees who have done Ghana, and we design them with Ghana already having happened in mind. The 12-day Slave Coast program we offer covers Benin, Togo and Ghana precisely to weave them together for the first-time visitor who wants the whole picture. The 7-day Vodun program stays in Benin and Togo because it is Vodun-focused and Ghana does not add to it. The 10-day custom is where most second-wave returnees land, because they know what they want and they want it tailored.
What we do differently now
The second wave has changed how we work. Six concrete things:
One — We stopped photographing at the Door. Not because photography is wrong; because the second-wave visitor does not need us to hand them the photograph. They want the moment. If they want to photograph it themselves, they know how. Our role is to be present, not to document. On the Ouidah beach at the arch, our staff step twenty paces back.
Two — We rewrote the reading list. The old brief pack recommended a general West Africa reader; the new pack is specific to the Bight of Benin, to the Fon and Yoruba lineages, to Vodun-Candomblé-Santería continuities, and to the specific literature of the return — Hartman, Gilroy, Sharpe, plus Blier on Vodun, plus Law on Ouidah, plus the diaspora studies work coming out of NYU, Howard, Northwestern and Duke.
Three — We changed who does the elders’ conversations. The first-wave elder in Ouidah gave the same conversation to every group: a version of the memorial tour. The second-wave conversation is calibrated per group by the elder, based on what our pre-trip pack tells them about the group’s angle. A group of literature scholars gets a different Ouidah than a group of Vodun practitioners from Bahia.
Four — We built a third-threshold call. One month after the return, Femi calls each visitor. Not for feedback. For the third threshold — for what they now think, after some settling, about what they saw. This did not exist in our practice five years ago. It exists now because second-wave returnees kept telling us the return home was where the trip actually happened.
Five — We turn down some visitors. More than we used to. When a discovery call reveals that the visitor is looking for the first-wave experience — the T-shirt, the ceremony, the photograph — we tell them, honestly, that they should book Ghana. Not because Ghana is inferior: because that is what Ghana is designed to deliver, and pretending we can deliver the same thing better would waste their trip.
Six — We stopped selling the Wakanda story. No one on our team has ever said the Kingdom of Dahomey was Wakanda and we would not. The actual Kingdom of Dahomey is a heavier, more implicated, more morally serious story than the Marvel fiction, and the second-wave visitor is ready for that heavier story. It is a better story anyway.
What we still do not do
The list of things we do not do is the same list as five years ago, but for slightly different reasons. Second-wave returnees ask us to reconsider some of them. We do not.
We do not stage naming ceremonies for returnees. If the second-wave visitor wants a naming, we can introduce them to a specific Vodun temple with the specific understanding that initiation is a multi-year commitment — and we then step out of the transaction, because it is not ours to broker.
We do not sell king-for-a-day rituals, even when American operator partners request them.
We do not compress the trip below ten days for a returnee’s first Bight of Benin visit. The ground does not compress and neither does the ceremony; a five-day do the highlights Slave Coast tour serves neither the visitor nor the elders.
We do not do group photos at the Door. We do not sell Year of Return 2.0 T-shirts. There is no merchandise.
The refusals are not moral posturing. They are what we have learned five years in — the trip works better without these things.
If you are reading this in 2027 or 2028
This Field Note was written in July 2026, from Cotonou, looking back at five years of receiving the second wave. If you are reading it later, the wave has moved on again. There will be a third phase — probably marked by more returnees from the Caribbean francophone diaspora (Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe), from Brazilian afro communities (Salvador de Bahia, Recife), from Colombian and Ecuadorian afro-descendant groups whose lineages passed through this coast without ever having been named in the American conversation about return. That third phase will ask different things of us.
The point of this note is that the return is not finished. It has phases. Each phase asks the operators, the elders, and the ground itself to adjust. The first wave broke the silence. The second wave is doing the harder, quieter work of what comes after the silence breaks. The third wave, when it comes, will have work of its own.
If you are a returnee thinking about coming — from the US, from the UK, from Salvador, from Fort-de-France, from Nairobi where the pan-African conversation is different again — read this as one operator’s honest read of the current phase, and know that we will read your discovery call with the same honesty when the time comes.
This Field Note accompanies our diaspora guide, Returning to the Slave Coast — a longer text that lays out the historical and practical frame that the observations above sit inside.
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. He is the person who calls you back after your discovery-call request.