African American singer Ciara received citizenship from the Republic of Benin in 2025 as a descendant of enslaved Africans. The images of her ceremony at Ouidah’s slave route memorial site, “Door of No Return”, were broadcast worldwide. Surrounded by drummers and dignitaries, she held a new Beninese passport aloft, a gesture hailed as both homecoming and healing.

As a historian of Africa, the African diaspora and Ghana, I see Ciara’s citizenship as part of a broader, complex story about how African states are reengaging with their diasporas. These are the global communities of people whose ancestors were displaced through slavery, migration and colonialism.

Several African countries have offered national identity to these descendants.

For many in the global African diaspora, Ciara’s ceremony felt like justice finally taking physical form. It was a symbolic reversal of forced displacement, affirming that descendants of the enslaved can now return as citizens rather than commodities. But behind the symbolism lies a deeper set of questions about power, inequality, and the politics of belonging.

At stake is whether Africa’s experiment with citizenship based on ancestry – what might be called citizenship diplomacy – represents genuine repair for past injustices or a ploy by governments to rebrand themselves.

A new wave of diaspora citizenship

Benin enacted a new law in 2024 which offers nationality to adults who can prove they descend from people enslaved and shipped from African shores. Proof may include DNA testing, genealogical documentation, or oral testimony. Recipients must finalise the process in person within three years.

The initiative follows similar efforts elsewhere. Ghana’s “Year of Return” in 2019 granted citizenship to dozens of African Americans; Sierra Leone has extended passports to descendants using DNA verification. Rwanda and The Gambia have launched programmes to attract “repatriates”.

These policies share a powerful moral ambition: to repair the rupture of slavery and reconnect global Africans with the continent.

Yet as Africa transforms its history into diplomacy, its diplomacy runs the risk of being less about genuine reuniting and more about using identity as a marketing strategy – selling the idea of “returning home” to improve an African nation’s global image.

This tension gives rise to four key issues revealed in my research: unequal access, genealogical governance, heritage commodification, and domestic inequality.

The unequal path to return

The first tension is access. DNA tests and ancestral research are expensive. The documentation required to verify lineage privileges those with resources, education and digital literacy. Celebrities can easily navigate this process; millions of others cannot.

In fact, those whose family histories were most violently erased are least able to prove descent.

These programmes are often promoted as open arms to the world’s Black descendants. However, they rely on technologies and bureaucracies rooted in western data regimes.

As scholars have shown, genetic ancestry databases are overwhelmingly managed by companies in the United States and Europe. These companies market and sell DNA while claiming to restore identity. The proof of African belonging is, once again, mediated by foreign tools and global capital.

Genealogy as governance

This reliance on genetics and archives revives colonial ways of classifying identity. European empires once defined African subjects through blood, “tribe” and lineage. Today, the state risks reinstating similar categories.

To decide who “counts” as African, governments are outsourcing moral authority to laboratories and paperwork. Instead, they could focus on community-based verification. This uses local historical societies, oral historians and cultural institutions that recognise shared heritage without reducing it to data.

The bureaucracy of belonging threatens to eclipse the politics of solidarity.

From memory to marketing

Another layer of complexity is economic. Governments market these citizenship programmes as engines of tourism, philanthropy and investment. Ghana’s Year of Return generated millions of dollars in tourism revenue, prompting other states to follow suit.

But when heritage becomes an industry, memory risks turning into merchandise. The descendants of the enslaved become consumers of identity rather than coauthors of the continent’s future.

There is nothing wrong with diaspora investment or travel. However, reparation should not be measured in flight packages and photo opportunities.

Inequality on the ground

Citizenship by ancestry can also create new inequalities within African societies. Returnees with foreign capital might purchase prime land, establish gated enclaves, or get privileges unavailable to locals.

In Ghana, tensions have surfaced between diaspora residents and citizens over property rights and cultural authority.

If unaddressed, these disparities could reproduce the very economic divides that colonialism imposed.

Citizenship as reparation must not translate into citizenship as entitlement. The moral gesture of inclusion loses meaning when it mirrors the social exclusions of global wealth.

Confronting historical complicity

Benin deserves recognition for acknowledging its historical role in the Atlantic slave trade, when the Kingdom of Dahomey captured and sold captives to European traders. The current government has invested in memorial tourism and educational projects around Ouidah’s slave route sites.

But recognition is only the first step. Apology without transformation leaves history unhealed. A citizenship programme can value memory only if it also builds institutions that dismantle the legacies of exploitation.

These national programmes expose a broader governance gap. The African Union (AU) officially designates the diaspora as Africa’s “sixth region”, yet there is no unified policy guiding diaspora citizenship. Each nation improvises its own standards, often shaped by domestic politics or diplomatic ambitions.

The absence of coordination creates a patchwork of eligibility rules and inconsistent rights. In some states, new citizens can vote or own property; in others, their status remains largely symbolic.

A continental framework could establish shared legal, ethical and economic principles for diaspora citizenship. Coordination would protect migrants from exploitation, prevent nationality shopping, and turn symbolic gestures into coherent policy.

Beyond ancestry: towards agency

The most profound shift must be philosophical. The descendants of the enslaved do not simply seek to return to Africa. They seek to return with Africa, to participate in a collective rethinking of freedom, belonging and justice.

Drawing from my research on diaspora reconstruction and transatlantic history, I argue that reconnecting should not be a sentimental pilgrimage. It should be a political partnership. Governments can collaborate with diaspora communities to build archives and fund educational exchanges. They can also invest in cultural institutions that preserve collective histories.

In that sense, citizenship as reparation can succeed only when it becomes citizenship as responsibility. That is, a mutual pact to build societies more equitable than the world that slavery and colonialism created.

Homecoming is an unfinished conversation. It is one that begins each time the continent and its diasporas meet not as strangers or symbols, but as partners in building the world that history denied them.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Kwasi Konadu, Colgate University

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Kwasi Konadu does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.