Brazilian–African Diaspora in Ghana: The Tabom, Slavery, Dissonance of Memory, Identity, and Locating Home by Kwame Essien (review)

This book fills a crucial gap in ongoing discussions about reverse migrations in the African diaspora, of which the Tabom, former African slaves who after slave revolts in 1835 migrated from Brazil to the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), constitute an important part. In company with James Lorand Matory's Black Atlantic Religion (2005), this book tells a rich story of return and exchange between West Africa and Brazil.

Given land by a local Ga chief, the Tabom people settled around Jamestown, in Accra (capital of Ghana), where they engaged in trading and other agricultural ventures. Brazilian–African Diaspora in Ghana examines the history of the Tabom's movements and ties with Brazil and other diasporic communities along the West African coast, through memory, identity, and quest for home, colonization, and anticolonial struggles. It looks at how these themes have influenced and shaped the people's relationships to the Ga community in Ghana, other diasporic communities along the West African coast, and Ghana's foreign relations across the black Atlantic. These deep and ongoing relationships with other freed African slave communities who would later settle in West African countries illustrate the depth of these transatlantic movements and their implications for studies of reverse migration among diasporic communities within the black Atlantic.

Brazilian–African Diaspora in Ghana is the first book to frame the history of the Tabom as a group, even though African diasporic communities on the continent have gained extensive interest, as seen in the range of criticism in postcolonial studies, anthropology, cultural studies, history, and Caribbean, African, and African diasporic studies. Envisaging a correspondingly diverse audience, this interdisplinary project sits at the intersection of various disciplines and draws on the resources of many fields. In doing so, it can appear to risk satisfying none of them, but this book successfully balances these views, and hence it broadens its appeal and usefulness for the disciplines upon which it draws.

The major strength of this book lies in its methodology. Based on extensive fieldwork among the Tabom and their ties to Brazil and other diaspora–homeland communities along the West African coast, it employs a mixed methodology to outline a social history of the Tabom. Archival materials, complemented by intergenerational interviews of Tabom individuals, with a clear focus on the lives of individuals and families, coupled with contemporary narratives about their integration into mainstream communities in present-day Ghana, offer a nuanced and clear-eyed perspective about resettlement experiences of diaspora–homeland communities in Ghana and West Africa. Such an approach expands the frontiers of knowledge on return migration among diasporic communities, especially those whose presence in archives is wanting. This blend of sources offers a refreshing light on the complicated phenomenon of diaspora–homeland communities. In drawing on these sources and disciplines, the book successfully navigates and raises several important questions that frame the narrative associated with the journey of the Tabom.

The book demonstrates the complexity and diversity of these movements, ties, and the accompanying sources through four major areas: slavery, memory, identity, and home. These lenses undergird the main arguments in the three major parts of the book. Part one, which includes five chapters, focuses on the initial journey toward Africa. Here, Essien outlines the experiences of reverse migration on the returnees' lives, hopes, motivations, and expectations, with their encounter with colonialism and involvement in anticolonial struggles. These chapters reveal a desire to make a home, as opposed to finding a home—a perspective that changes the narrative about diaspora–homeland communities.

Essien contends that the Tabom were less influenced by an idealistic notion of a quest for home, and more by a pragmatic quest for land and resources. These migrants chose to settle in Accra primarily for the latter reasons, though ancestry played a part in their narratives of diaspora and homemaking. Hence, for them, route trumped roots. This...