I say those two sentences with pride, but also with a heaviness that is difficult to explain. Somewhere between those identities is an ocean, and that ocean carries memory. It carries the memory of people who crossed it unwillingly, people who did not pack bags, apply for visas, or choose another country in search of opportunity.

They were captured, sold, chained, transported, renamed, separated from family, and turned into property. Generations later, their descendants became Americans, Jamaicans, Haitians, Barbadians, Trinidadians, Brazilians, Cubans, Colombians, and many other peoples scattered across the world. People like me.

So when I hear the word reparations, I do not hear it only as an American descendant of people who were taken. I also hear it as a Ghanaian citizen living on the continent from which people were taken. That leaves me with a question I cannot shake: where exactly do people like me stand in the reparations conversation?

Am I one of the people being repaired, or am I now part of a country seeking repair? Am I diaspora? Am I African? Am I both? And if I am both, why does it sometimes feel as though history, politics, and even our own people want us to choose? Before we argue about who deserves reparations and what form they should take, perhaps we need to answer a harder question: what exactly are we trying to repair? If we cannot name the wound honestly, how can we possibly know what healing should look like?

At least 12.5 million Africans were forcibly displaced through the transatlantic slave trade. That number is so large that it can become abstract, but none of those people were abstractions. Each had a language, a family, a community, a memory, and a place where somebody knew their name. Imagine one girl taken from a village somewhere in Africa.

She knew which foods meant celebration, which songs meant mourning, and which elders carried the stories of her people. Then she was taken. Perhaps she survived the march to the coast, confinement, the ship, and enslavement.

But survival did not mean nothing was stolen. Generations later, one of her descendants may stand at Cape Coast Castle or Elmina Castle looking through a Door of No Return, knowing that somewhere in the story is an ancestor whose name has been lost. What amount of money restores that name? What is the value of a language erased from a family line? What is the financial equivalent of not knowing the village where your ancestors once belonged?

Those questions make it impossible for me to believe reparations can be reduced to a check. Money belongs in the conversation because labor was stolen, wealth was accumulated, institutions profited, governments benefited, and economies were built through systems that treated African bodies as commodities. Compensation matters.

Debt relief matters. Investment matters. Land and access to capital matter. But the damage was never only economic, so the repair cannot be only economic. Reparations must also concern restitution, education, cultural restoration, historical truth, institutional reform, citizenship, mobility, acknowledgement, and the dismantling of systems that allow old patterns of exploitation to survive under new names.

This is no longer a conversation taking place only among activists and historians. In 2026, Ghana stood at the center of a significant international effort to advance reparatory justice. The Next Steps Conference in Accra followed the adoption of United Nations Resolution A/RES/80/250 and sought to turn international recognition into a practical roadmap.

The emerging conversation extends beyond financial compensation to cultural restitution, truth-telling, legal pathways, education, stronger relationships between Africa and its diaspora, and other forms of repair. The African Union itself has framed the cause as justice for both Africans and people of African descent. That language matters. It recognises that the injury did not happen only to African states. It happened to African people, including those whose descendants now live beyond the continent.

That matters to me because I returned. I did not simply visit Africa, take photographs beside a castle wall, and leave. I became a citizen of Ghana. There is something profound about holding a passport from the continent when your ancestors were once transported across the Atlantic as cargo. Citizenship can feel like an answer to a question history left unresolved.

Ghana has granted citizenship to members of the African diaspora in recent years, creating a symbolic and legal pathway back to a continent from which so many were forcibly separated. There is power in a country saying to descendants of those who were taken, “You can belong here again.” But I keep wondering: what happens after the citizenship ceremony?

What happens after Akwaaba, after the photographs, after the speeches about homecoming? What does home mean if citizenship exists on paper but belonging remains conditional in everyday life? Diaspora Africans have returned to Ghana and other African countries and built businesses, purchased homes, created jobs, founded organisations, supported communities, and tried to build permanent lives.

Yet some have also discovered that the word diaspora can quietly become another word for money. Prices shift. Expectations change. Relationships change. You are brother or sister until money enters the room, and suddenly you are the American, the foreigner, the returnee, or the person assumed to have dollars.

That is uncomfortable to say because criticism of our own communities is sometimes treated as betrayal. It is not. Loving Africa should not require romanticizing Africa. If we demand that Europe, the United States, and former colonial powers confront exploitation, then we must be willing to confront exploitation among ourselves.

We cannot call the diaspora home and then treat returning people as financial opportunities. We cannot celebrate citizenship while allowing people to feel that belonging still carries a price tag. If reparations are about repair, then part of that repair must involve rebuilding trust between continental Africans and the descendants of those who were scattered.

But the diaspora must accept accountability too. Returning to Africa does not make us experts on Africa. African ancestry does not automatically give us an understanding of Ghanaian, Nigerian, Senegalese, Kenyan, or any other African culture. We can arrive carrying romantic ideas, comparing everything to America or Europe, and sometimes carrying assumptions of superiority without realising it.

A foreign passport does not make us more knowledgeable, more civilised, or more entitled to shape communities we are only beginning to understand. If continental Africans must examine how the diaspora is treated, then those of us returning must examine how we arrive, how we listen, and whether we are truly prepared to become part of the societies we claim as home. Accountability cannot face in only one direction.

Historical accountability requires the same honesty. Africans participated in the capture and sale of other Africans during the slave trade, and that should not be hidden. But neither should that fact be used to erase the enormous racialized commercial system constructed and expanded across the Atlantic by European empires.

African participation does not erase the laws that turned African people and their descendants into inheritable property. It does not erase the plantations, shipping networks, governments, businesses, and financial institutions that profited. It does not erase colonialism. We should be mature enough to hold several truths at once without using one truth to silence another.

And we must remember something else, our history did not begin in chains. Long before Europeans entered this chapter of our story, African societies were governing, trading, farming, teaching, creating, worshiping, fighting, building, and thinking.

They had political systems, intellectual traditions, commerce, agriculture, spirituality, architecture, art, conflict, ambition, and complexity. Precolonial Africa was not perfect, because no human society has ever been perfect, but Africa did not become visible when Europe arrived. Understanding reparations therefore requires understanding not only what was inflicted upon African people, but what existed before those systems disrupted, extracted from, and reshaped African life.

That same honesty is necessary when we look at the period after colonial rule. The flags changed. The anthems changed. Governors left. Independence came. But did every structure of extraction leave with them?

Across Africa, we still have to ask who owns the mines, who processes the minerals, who controls the technology, who writes the infrastructure contracts, who holds the debt, who owns the patents, and who captures the greatest share of the value. Europe has its interests. The United States has its interests. China has become one of Africa's major economic partners.

The issue is not whether Africa should trade with the world. Of course we should. The question is whether we are negotiating from strength or simply changing the nationality of the external partner while preserving the same structure of dependency.

When will we stop lying in everybody else's bed while refusing to build seriously with our own? When will African capital finance African ideas? When will African governments trust African scholars, engineers, entrepreneurs, farmers, scientists, and innovators enough to invest in their knowledge? When will trade among African countries become as urgent as attracting foreign investment? Partnership is necessary, but partnership should not require surrendering ownership, control, and long-term value. Reparations cannot only ask what happened centuries ago. They must also force us to ask what structures from that history remain alive today.

Our museums offer a painful example of what repair can mean. British forces removed important royal objects from the Asante Kingdom during nineteenth-century conflicts, and some of those objects eventually entered British museum collections.

In 2024, significant Asante objects held by the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum returned to the Manhyia Palace Museum in Kumasi under loan arrangements. There is something unsettling about that sentence. How does an institution acquire the moral authority to lend a people something taken from them during military conquest? How do you take my grandmother's necklace, keep it for generations, catalogue it under your institution's name, and then tell me I may borrow it?

Some things should simply be returned. There should be no applause for giving back something that was never morally yours. Yet our responsibility cannot end with demanding restitution. When artifacts come home, are our institutions prepared to preserve them? Are museums funded? Are conservators trained?

Are our children taught why these objects matter? Are our languages, oral histories, and cultural knowledge receiving the same urgency as physical objects? Accountability means saying to those who took, “Return what is ours,” while having the courage to ask ourselves, “Are we prepared to honor what comes home?”

Then there is the question that continues to trouble me: who exactly are reparations for? Are they for Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Benin, Congo, and other African nations? Are they for Jamaica, Barbados, Haiti, and the wider Caribbean? Are they for Black Americans, Afro-Brazilians, Afro-Colombians, and other descendants of enslaved Africans throughout the Americas?

What about Africans whose ancestors experienced colonialism but not transatlantic enslavement? What about people whose identities cross several of these categories? Do I stand in the American line because I was born in America? Do I stand in the Ghanaian line because I am a Ghanaian citizen? Do I stand in the diaspora line because my history crossed the Atlantic? Why should I have to choose a line at all?

The African Union speaks of reparations for Africans and people of African descent. If the language includes the diaspora, then the decision-making structures must include the diaspora too. Not as symbolic participants invited to tell painful stories while someone else makes the decisions, but as people helping define the harm, shape the institutions, and determine what meaningful repair should look like.

And if reparations funds are eventually created, we need to ask difficult questions before the money arrives, not after it disappears. Who controls the funds? Who audits them? Who decides which countries, institutions, communities, or people benefit? How will ordinary people know where the money went?

Those are not cynical questions. They are reparations questions. There is no justice without transparency, and there is no repair if money intended to address generations of exploitation disappears into another system of corruption. I do not want us to win reparations from the world and lose them to ourselves. I do not want beautifully branded funds surrounded by conferences, speeches, expensive hotels, and photographs of important people shaking hands while communities are still asking years later what happened to the money.

If we demand accountability from former colonial powers, we must demand it from African governments. If we demand transparency from European museums, we must demand it from African institutions. The standard cannot change depending on who holds the power.

Perhaps one of the greatest injuries of this history is that African people were taught to stop recognizing ourselves in one another. Some Black Americans look at continental Africans through the inherited pain of the slave trade. Some continental Africans look at Black Americans and see foreigners.

Some Caribbean descendants look toward Africa as an ancestral home but arrive unsure whether that home will recognise them. Some Africans imagine everyone in the diaspora is wealthy. Some in the diaspora imagine Africa as a romantic homeland that should immediately feel familiar. We stereotype one another, misunderstand one another, compete over suffering, and argue about who is really African.

That is the part that weighs heavily on me. After the ships, plantations, colonialism, segregation, apartheid, independence movements, civil rights struggles, Pan-African congresses, the Year of Return, Beyond the Return, and now an international reparations movement, are we still going to allow division to finish the work oppression started? Justice for a Jamaican does not steal justice from a Ghanaian.

Justice for Ghana does not cancel justice for Black Americans. Repairing Haiti does not require forgetting Congo. Acknowledging what colonialism did to Africa does not erase what slavery did to the diaspora. Our experiences are not identical, but neither are they disconnected.

This is why reparations must include reconnection. Not sentimental reconnection that sounds beautiful in speeches, but honest reconnection that can survive disagreement. A diaspora African should be able to say, “I came home and sometimes I was exploited,” without being accused of attacking Africa.

A Ghanaian should be able to say, “Some of you return and behave as though your American passport makes you superior,” without being accused of rejecting the diaspora. We should be able to tell one another the truth and still remain family.

Maybe reparations look like a returning person walking through Accra without having their Blackness welcomed while their foreign accent is priced. Maybe they look like diaspora citizens understanding that citizenship carries responsibilities as well as rights. Maybe they look like continental Africans recognizing that descendants of enslaved Africans did not simply abandon Africa; Africa was taken from them.

And maybe they require the diaspora to understand that Africa did not remain frozen in the year our ancestors disappeared. Africa continued living, changing, struggling, creating, surviving, and becoming. Homecoming requires humility from the person returning and genuine belonging from the people opening the door.

I also struggle with how often African greatness is discussed in the future tense. We speak about Agenda 2063 and “The Africa We Want,” and long-term vision has value, but I am alive in 2026. Our children need functioning schools now. Our farmers need markets now.

Our entrepreneurs need capital now. Our innovators need investment now. Our artifacts need to come home now. Our countries need stronger trade with one another now. Our diaspora needs meaningful pathways to belonging now. Our governments need transparency now. Our history needs truthful teaching now. Our people need each other now. Why must African greatness always be scheduled for another generation?

So what are reparations? They are financial because wealth was stolen. They are cultural because identity was disrupted. They are educational because history was distorted. They are economic because extraction shaped entire systems. They are institutional because inequality became embedded in law and governance.

They are physical because objects, land, archives, and human remains were taken. They are psychological because generations of African-descended people were taught to despise their skin, hair, names, languages, and sometimes one another. And they are relational because one of the greatest things taken from us was our connection to each other.

Yes, I want reparations. But I do not want a check written so the world can say the account has been settled. It has not. I want the artifacts back. I want the archives opened. I want the truth in the textbooks. I want economic repair and institutional reform.

I want meaningful citizenship pathways and real belonging. I want accountability and transparency. I want to know where every dollar intended for reparatory justice goes. I want the people whose ancestors carried these wounds to have a meaningful role in defining the healing.

I am American. I am Ghanaian. I am diaspora. I am African. I refuse to cut myself into smaller pieces simply to fit comfortably inside somebody else's definition of reparations. My existence carries both the wound and the possibility of repair. My ancestors crossed an ocean because somebody decided African bodies could become property.

Generations later, I crossed that ocean in the opposite direction and became a citizen. There is power in that, but the story cannot end with my passport. The question is whether citizenship becomes belonging, whether return becomes relationship, whether apology becomes accountability, whether restitution becomes actual return, whether compensation becomes transformation, and whether the diaspora is finally allowed to sit at the table rather than being discussed from the podium.

That is the reparations conversation I want, one rooted in responsibility rather than performance, one brave enough to confront both yesterday and today, and one that does not create another hierarchy of African suffering. The ships scattered us. Slavery wounded us. Colonialism divided us. Racism renamed us. Borders separated us. Economic systems exploited us. And sometimes, painfully, we learned to reproduce some of those patterns among ourselves. That does not have to be our ending.

We are still here, on the continent, throughout the Caribbean, across the Americas, in Europe, and everywhere African people were scattered. We are still creating, questioning, returning, surviving, and becoming. Perhaps reparations at their fullest are not only about receiving something from those who harmed us. Perhaps they are also about recovering something they never had the right to take: our ability to recognize ourselves in one another. We are the knowledge. We are the power. We are the today, and we are the future. Not only in 2063. Today. September 7, 2026.

I am no longer asking whether I belong in the reparations conversation. I do. So do the people who remained, the people who were taken, the people who returned, and the people still trying to find their way home. If reparations truly mean repair, then nobody gets to repair Africa while leaving her scattered children outside the room, and nobody gets to repair the diaspora while pretending Africa herself was not wounded.

There can be no complete repair without both, no honest reparations movement without accountability, no meaningful homecoming without belonging, and no African future worth celebrating if we build it by leaving pieces of Africa behind.

One people. One Africa. Not because history made our experiences identical, but because after everything history has done to separate us, refusing to remain divided may be one of the most meaningful forms of repair we have left.