This year marks four hundred years since slave traders arrived at the Virginia colony with the first captive Africans to be enslaved in what would become the US. It was the start of something that would come to define and divide America. Ghana has declared 2019 the “Year of Return” for African descendants around the globe. Our reporter, Rupa Shenoy, traveled to Ghana to look at how slavery is entangled in both the past and present lives of people there and in the African diaspora.

(A view inside of Christiansborg Castle, Ghana. Credit: Selase Kove-Seyram/The World)