‘Back-to-Africa’, ‘Double Consciousness’ and the African Diaspora: Confronting the Myth and the Reality in Ghanaian Fiction
Date
2012
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Publisher
Legon Journal of the Humanities, University of Ghana
Abstract
One of the most persistent debates about Black consciousness and
Pan-Africanism has been on the attitudes of diasporans to Africa and
of Africans to (returning) diasporans. This article critically examines
the issue of the eternal connections between the continent of Africa
and people of African descent in three Ghanaian works of fiction—Kofi
Awoonor’s Comes the Voyager at Last, David Oddoye’s The Return and
Ayi Kwei Armah’s Osiris Rising—and comes to the conclusion that the
(re)connection between continental Africa and the African Diaspora is
beset and mediated by formidable geo-political, cultural and historical
barriers and, therefore, still in a state of flux.