The house at No. 22 First Circular Road in Cantonments is quiet now. Bougainvillea spills over the perimeter wall. The grounds, as visitors often note, possess a “tranquil beauty” that seems deliberately removed from the clamor of Accra’s traffic-choked arteries.

It is here, in this unassuming bungalow, that William Edward Burghardt Du Bois spent the final two years of his life. It is here that he died, on August 27, 1963, at the age of 95. And it is here, in a marble mausoleum behind the house, that he and his wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois, are interred.

But for the thousands of African American tourists who have made pilgrimage to this site since Ghana’s 2019 Year of Return campaign, the Du Bois Centre represents something far more complex than a grave. It is the physical manifestation of a question that haunts the Black American encounter with Ghana: What does it mean to be embraced by a country that your own rejected?

“We didn’t really get to know him,” one Black American traveler, visiting the Centre with a heritage tour group, recently remarked. “He was a hero to Black America, but not necessarily to white America. And while you’re going through that museum, you get to see why.”

The observation, captured in a travel vlog from a retired military couple’s first trip to Ghana, cuts to the heart of Du Bois’ American erasure—and Ghanaian reclamation.

The Scholar and the Stateless

By the time Du Bois arrived in Accra in 1961, he had already lived several lifetimes. He was the first Black American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard. He was a founder of the NAACP and the editor of The Crisis for a quarter-century. He had published 21 books, organized five Pan-African Congresses, and established himself as the preeminent Black intellectual of the 20th century.

He was also, at 93, a man without a country.

The United States government, in the throes of Cold War anti-communist hysteria, had refused to renew his passport. Du Bois had been indicted in 1951 as an unregistered foreign agent for his peace activism; though acquitted, he remained under FBI surveillance and was effectively barred from international travel.

“Hounded by the U.S. government and marginalized by the academic and policy establishments that once welcomed him,” writes historian Zachariah Mampilly, “Du Bois was fleeing his homeland. It was a figurative exile that turned literal when the U.S. State Department refused to renew his passport, rendering him functionally stateless.”

Enter Kwame Nkrumah.

Ghana’s first president, then three years into his experiment in independent African governance, extended an invitation: Come to Accra. Direct the Encyclopedia Africana. Help us document, for the first time, the history and civilization of the African people.

Du Bois accepted. He did not renounce his American citizenship, but he became a citizen of Ghana—a symbolic act of repatriation that Nkrumah understood as both political and profoundly personal.

The Project That Remains Unfinished

The Encyclopedia Africana was Du Bois’ final intellectual obsession. Conceived as a corrective to centuries of European scholarship that denied Africa its own history, the project aimed to produce a comprehensive, multi-volume record of African life and achievement “from the standpoint of Africa and peoples of African descent”.

Du Bois drafted the proposal in Brooklyn in October 1960, outlining the terms for Ghanaian government involvement and support. He arrived in Accra the following year, set up his library in the Cantonments bungalow, and began recruiting contributors.

But the work moved slowly. Du Bois was frail. The resources were modest. And the vision was staggering in its ambition.

He died 23 months after arriving, his great project incomplete.

“He spent the next two years in Ghana, where local and international activists and thinkers embraced him warmly, but he made little progress,” Mampilly notes . The Encyclopedia Africana would not be published until 1999—and then only in a partial, pilot edition.

Yet the failure to complete the encyclopedia may be less significant than the fact that Ghana invited him to attempt it at all.

From Neglect to Reclamation

For decades after Du Bois’ death, the Cantonments bungalow existed in a state of suspended animation. Opened as a public memorial in 1985 under President Jerry John Rawlings, the Centre housed his personal library, his papers, and his grave. But funding was erratic. Maintenance was deferred. By the 2010s, visitors reported books “slowly decomposing in the heat” and a general atmosphere of benign neglect.

“It’s hard to argue that Du Bois is underrecognized,” Mampilly writes. “Despite the acclaim, however, Du Bois remains underappreciated”.

The Year of Return changed that calculus.

In 2019, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo visited New York and announced a historic partnership with the W.E.B. Du Bois Museum Foundation. The goal: transform the neglected memorial into a “state-of-the-art museum complex and world-class destination for scholars and heritage tourists”.

Designed by Sir David Adjaye—the celebrated Ghanaian-British architect behind the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington—the new complex will feature a library, reading room, event hall, outdoor auditorium, amphitheater, lecture space, and a guest house for visiting scholars. The refurbished bungalow will remain, preserved as it was when Du Bois lived and worked there.

The projected cost: between $50 million and $70 million.

“This agreement will build on the government’s ‘Year of Return’ and ‘Beyond the Return’ campaigns that encourage the return of the African diaspora from around the world,” Akufo-Addo said at the 2021 signing ceremony. He urged African Americans to “follow in the footsteps of W.E.B. Du Bois by making Africa their home and contributing to the development of the continent.”

Pilgrimage and Pedagogy

For Black American visitors, the Du Bois Centre now functions as both shrine and classroom.

Japhet Aryiku, executive director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Museum Foundation, was himself inspired at a young age by Du Bois’ writings. A Ghanaian-American with more than four decades in corporate America, Aryiku describes the redevelopment project as a form of ancestral repatriation—not of bodies, but of legacy.

“All the money that we are going to invest in here, there is no money going back anywhere,” Aryiku said at the Centre’s 40th anniversary celebration in 2025. “It is not a loan. It is a grant.”

That same year, the African American Association of Ghana marked Juneteenth with a parade from the Du Bois Centre to the Accra Tourist Information Centre—a deliberate routing that positioned Du Bois’ grave as the symbolic starting point for Black America’s emancipation commemoration.

Maurice Cheetham, vice-president of the association, emphasized the educational imperative. The goal, he said, was “to educate Ghanaians about the history and significance of Juneteenth, which is not widely known in the country.” But implicit in the event was a parallel education for African American participants: the lesson that Ghana had embraced a man America had cast out.

The Irony of Return

There is a profound irony embedded in the Du Bois pilgrimage, one that many visitors only fully grasp when they stand before his grave.

Du Bois came to Ghana because he was not welcome in the United States. He was denied a passport, surveilled by his own government, and effectively exiled from the country of his birth. He did not choose repatriation as a leisure pursuit; he chose it as a survival strategy.

Yet today, the very infrastructure of diaspora tourism—the flights, the hotels, the heritage itineraries, the naming ceremonies—depends on framing Ghana as a site of voluntary return.

“Welcome home,” the airport greeters say. “You have come back to your ancestral land.”

Du Bois never heard those words at Kotoka International Airport. When he arrived in 1961, there was no Year of Return, no Beyond the Return, no state-sponsored campaign to lure the diaspora home. There was only Nkrumah’s invitation and the quiet desperation of a 93-year-old man who had outlived his country’s tolerance.

That his final residence has now become the central pilgrimage site for the very tourism industry his exile helped inspire is not lost on those who visit.

“This trip is more than just travel,” the retired military veteran reflected in her vlog. “It was for us. It was a reconnection with our roots.”

Her husband, standing beside her at the Du Bois Centre, added:

“We didn’t know anything about him. But it’s a beautiful museum, and we got the chance to see what you’re thinking about when you’re doing those things.”

The Future of the Legacy

The new Du Bois Museum Complex is expected to open within the next three to five years, transforming what was once a neglected memorial into what the government promises will be “a premier global institution and heritage site.”

Jeffrey Du Bois Peck, the great-grandson of W.E.B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois, has pledged his commitment to preserving his ancestors’ legacy. At the 40th anniversary celebration, he stood alongside Ghanaian officials and foundation executives, a living link between the scholar who arrived in 1961 and the diaspora tourists who now arrive by the thousands.

Whether the new complex can resolve the tensions inherent in Du Bois’ story—between exile and return, between American rejection and Ghanaian embrace, between unfinished scholarship and completed pilgrimage—remains an open question.

But perhaps that is not the measure of success.

The Centre’s current condition, as described by one visitor, includes “numerous original photographs” of Du Bois alongside images of Paul Robeson, Malcolm X, Nkrumah, and Martin Luther King Jr. There are photos of his friendship with Mao Tse-Tung and his visits to China. His subterranean bath, built so the 93-year-old could enter it without difficulty, remains intact.

These are the artifacts of a life lived across continents, across movements, across the shifting boundaries of belonging and exile. They do not resolve into a single narrative. They accumulate, like the bougainvillea on the perimeter wall, covering the hard edges with persistent, flowering life.

And every Saturday, behind the house where Du Bois died, a farmers’ market operates. Vendors sell fresh local foods, products, clothes, jewelry. Tourists wander through, posing for selfies.

It is not the Encyclopedia Africana that Du Bois envisioned. But it is, perhaps, something he would have recognized: the ordinary, enduring commerce of a people reclaiming their own story.