This article deals with the recent homecoming of African Americans to Ghana and the resulting heritage politics, as it unfolds between the Ghanaian state on the one hand and Diasporan visitors and repatriates on the other. Through the concrete encounter with the 'motherland', homecoming ceases to be an imaginary construction, but is rather turned into a contested practice. Whereas the notion of a united 'African family' is rhetorically shared by the different protagonists of homecoming, it is nevertheless filled with various meanings that often contradict each other. Through the example of the W. E. B. DuBois Memorial Centre for Pan-African Culture, a place where the complex network of relations underlying homecoming materializes, the author analyzes this practice in the theoretical framework of a strategic use of essentialisms.