‘Back-to-Africa’, ‘Double Consciousness’ and the African Diaspora: Confronting the Myth and the Reality in Ghanaian Fiction

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.