Tracing History and Healing on the BOOKED Trips Ghana Experience

Our October 9-17, 2025 BOOKED Trips Ghana experience trip was an experience of historical understanding and personal connection curated around “Homegoing” by Yaa Gyasi. 

Homegoing tracks two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, born in 18th-century Ghana, whose lives diverge permanently. One story line follows Effia’s descendants through centuries of war and British rule in Ghana. The other follows Esi’s children into America, charting their journey through slavery, the Civil War, and the Great Migration, up to the present day. The book makes history real, showing how the trauma of captivity is passed down through generations.

Our trip aimed to reflect the book’s core theme: documenting centuries of pain and displacement while also finding the powerful moments of love and efforts to heal. As author Chloe Dulce Louvouezo says “Our ancestors’ bread crumbs offer information about what patterns we’re meant to heal. And just as we inherit trauma, I believe we also inherit healing”

This trip was especially timely. On October 3, 2025, Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama announced plans to submit the first formal motion to the UN demanding reparative justice for the transatlantic slave trade. By visiting, our travelers joined a lineage of Black leaders and intellectuals from Maya Angelou and Malcolm X to W.E.B. du Bois and Pauli Murray—who have made this important pilgrimage to Ghana.

Opening Dinner & Book Discussion

We started our trip off with a bag with our travelers being welcomed with traditional drummers and performers before having a multi-course private dinner in a chef’s home. We begin each BOOKED Trip with an opening dinner because food is a powerful way to celebrate culture and identity. Food the common thread that we all share – everyone has a favorite recipe, a specialty of their hometown, or a comfort food dish that makes them nostalgic.

Our opening dinner and book discussion was hosted at Chef Ruby of Food People Ghana‘s home, where she masterfully marries the rich, diverse flavors of Ghana with contemporary, global influences. The entire experience was inspired by Homegoing.

The table: 

• Cowrie shells were placed on the table because they symbolize wealth, protection, and power in trade. Europeans in the 16th century were able to use cowries to enter the African trade markets, where they used shells to buy goods, including people. This reminder was a perfect grounding for our book discussion.
• Coconut candles were placed on the table representing a recurring symbol of major turning points in the book. Coconuts appear during Effia’s first day at Cape Coast Castle where she describes the boat’s silhouettes as “long and curved like the hollowed out skin of a coconut,” in a key moment of realization for Esi when she recalls Maame “carrying a perfectly round coconut with it ever rolling off”, and later in a violent encounter where Fiifi is “slit open like a coconut.”

The menu:

• The fish and palm wine on our menu were all inspired by the following quote from Homegoing “One man tapped palm wine better than anyone else in the village, but another’s fishing nets were never empty. Cobbe’s family feasted off Effia’s burgeoning womanhood. Their bellies, their hands, were never empty.”.

The conversation was the perfect way to connect personal experience with historical fiction, offering sneak previews of how we would link the book to our on-the-ground experiences over the next nine days.

Essential Accra: History and Culture

“They had given all they had, assured that it would come back to them in the abundance of freedom.” – pg. 191, Homegoing

We journeyed through the history of Ghana’s Independence struggle with visits to Black Star Square, Independence Arch and Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park. We also got the chance to learn more about Ghanaian culture through the art of djembe drumming and supporting local makers at Accra Arts Center.

Weaving History and Tradition

“When you study history, you must always ask yourself, whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth?” – Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

Day three of our trip was all about cultural immersion. Our travelers learned their Ghanaian day names and more about the history painted in our trip book directly from a local family.

We learned about the ancient storytelling embedded in adinkra symbols and got to make our own batik-fabric with our selected symbols. Adrinka originated between the 14th and 16th century in Ghana and was originally exclusive to royalty but is now seen throughout Ghanaian clothing, logos, and architecture.

You can’t learn about a culture without learning about its food so we made waakye, a Ghanaian staple. We also learned everyday tasks such as baby wearing, carrying water in pots, and the healing properties of local plants.

We had an in-depth discussion of birth, marriage, and death rituals and generational differences in beliefs about marriage. Our experience showed us a side of Ghanaian culture that you can only experience offline.

Sandbox Sundays

It’s important to mix full days with restoration and enjoyment, so we spent our Sunday relaxing at Sandbox Beach club dancing, eating, and drinking in front of the ocean. 

Cape Coast and Assin Manso Slave River: Confronting the Past

“In my dreams I kept seeing this Castle, but I did not know why. One day, I came to these waters and I could feel the spirits of our ancestors calling to me. Some were free, and they spoke to me from the sand, but some others were trapped deep, deep, deep in the water so that I had to wade out to hear their voices… I put you in here so that if your spirit ever wandered, you would know where home was.” – Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

We began our day at Assin Manso Slave River where our enslaved ancestors took their last bath before being sold into slavery. We got the chance to make a barefoot pilgrimage to the water to honor returning to a place our ancestors never imagined they’d see again.

Next, we toured the Elmina Slave Dungeons. This is where the sisters’ stories split: one living above in the castle, the other sold into slavery below. Learning the real history here is crucial, especially when this history is challenged elsewhere. We completed the tour by walking back through the Door of No Return. We ended the day with a chakra meditation by the beach in Cape Coast and an overnight at Lemon Beach Resort. 

This day and the naming ceremony were among the travelers favorite parts of the trip.

The Naming Ceremony: Returned Family

“No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are free. But still, Yaw, you have to let yourself be free.”

There are some moments that fundamentally shift who you are. We came to Cape Coast as visitors and we left as members of the Iture village after our naming ceremony. The ceremony began with libations, calling on the ancestors to bless this naming ceremony. 

In Ghanaian naming ceremonies, an elder places 3 sips of water, symbolizing good, followed by 3 of alcohol symbolizing evil and asks us to differentiate between the two demonstrating our ability to tell the truth. The village elders gave us not just our Ghanaian day names, but our soul names—powerful name with a meanings collectively decided by elders from the village. 

We were given nyana plants for spiritual protection and mud from the coast where our ancestors were taken. The ceremony was closed with the calling of our names three times and a final closing libation blessing to the ancestors. By the end of the experience were no longer just travelers. We were returned family.

Nykinkym Museum & Closing Dinner

“What he wanted to capture with his project was a feeling of time, of having been a part of something that stretched so far back, was so impossibly large, that it was easy to forget that she, and he, and everyone else, existed in it- not apart from him, but inside of it.”

We visited the Nkyinkyim Museum, a space nestled in the farmlands of Nuhalenya-Ada in the Greater Accra region dedicated to visual archiving of African history and African Heritage. We had a griot led tour through the art space learning about the parables, rituals, symbols, and oral histories that have been passed down and continue to connect various cultures on the continent. 

The museum’s artists have created sculptures for important historical sites like The Legacy Museum in Birmingham, Alabama, and we even saw new commissions being prepared for public art spaces around the world.

We ended our trip with a celebratory at Bella Afrik, a beautiful restaurant that blends Ghanaian and Italian cuisine in a high-energy atmosphere. 

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