By the end of the book, Angelou comes to term with what scholar Dolly McPherson calls her "double-consciousness",[2] the parallels and connections between the African and American parts of her history, character, and identity.

[11] Scholar Annie Gagiano agrees that Angelou draws upon African-American musical heritage in her title of the book; as she puts it, "the spiritual promises enslaved people free exploration of the celestial territory that will compensate for the restrictions suffered in life".

[14] All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes takes place during Ghana in the 1960s, "a historical epoch in which independence from British colonial rule was still a new phenomenon".

Angelou finds a job at the University of Ghana and "falls in love"[16] with the country and with its people, who remind her of African Americans she knew in Arkansas and California.

Although Angelou is disillusioned with the nonviolent strategies of Martin Luther King Jr., she and her friends commemorate his 1963 march on Washington by organizing a parallel demonstration in Ghana.

As she had done in New York City and described in The Heart of a Woman, she plays the White Queen and tours Berlin and Venice with the company, which include Cicely Tyson, James Earl Jones, Lou Gossett Jr., and Roscoe Lee Browne.

Starting with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou made a deliberate attempt while writing her books to challenge the usual structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre.

[23] All of Angelou's autobiographies conform to the genre's standard structure: they are written by a single author, they are chronological, and they contain elements of character, technique, and theme.

[7] McPherson states that Angelou is a master of this autobiographical form, especially the "confrontation of the Black self within a society that threatens to destroy it", but departs from it in Traveling Shoes by taking the action to Africa.

[30] Journalist George Plimpton asked her in a 1998 interview if she changed the truth to improve her story; she stated, "Sometimes I make a diameter from a composite of three or four people, because the essence in only one person is not sufficiently strong to be written about".

Like the other three memoirs Gagiano discusses, Traveling Shoes can be categorized as what she calls "roots tourism", but that it is more rare and introspective because it contains "unusually strong and articulate historical accounts and sociopolitical analysis".

[37] Smithers also calls Angelou's autobiographical narratives "historically, quite extraordinary" because Black women of the diaspora did not tend to travel to Africa like she did in the early 1960s.

[28][28] Most of Angelou's anecdotes no longer focus on the famous or on her family, but on Ghanaians;[28] for example, according to Lupton, her description of her houseboy, Kojo, is her most delightful character sketch in the book.

[11] Gagiano compares this book with three other travel narratives written by female authors from the West: The Devil that Danced on the Water, by Aminatta Forna; Red Dust Road, by Jackie Kay; and Looking for Transwonderland, by Noo Saro-Wiwa.

Confrontations between Angelou and Guy are minimal, consisting of their conflict over his choice of dating a much-older woman and of his demands for autonomy after she returns from the Genet tour.

[1] Gregory D. Smithers, in his comparison of the book with two other travel narratives, Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama (1995) and The Atlantic Sound (2000) by Caryl Phillips, states that Angelou reflects on the meaning of identity among members of the African diaspora and recounts her "experiences, relationships, and collective belonging".

[61] Smithers states that the geography and history of the continent of Africa, which "loomed large in her very personal story", as well as her efforts to connect with people of African descent, is core to her quest for individual and collective belonging.

[15] Her experiences in Ghana help her come to terms with her personal and historical past, and by the end of the book she is ready to return to America with a deeper understanding of both the African and the American parts of her character.

[2] Angelou is able to recognize similarities between African and African-American culture; as Lupton puts it, the "blue songs, shouts, and gospels" she has grown up with in America "echo the rhythms of West Africa".

[62] She recognizes the connections between African and American Black cultures, including the children's games, the folklore, the spoken and non-verbal languages, the food, sensibilities, and behavior.

[note 2] As Lupton states, these and other experiences in Ghana demonstrate Angelou's maturity as a mother who is able to let go of her adult son, as a woman who is no longer dependent upon a man, and as an American who is able to "perceive the roots of her identity"[64] and how they affect her personality.

Writing about it 20 years later, in the 1980s, she also realizes that the formation of one's identity is ongoing, relational, and subjective, and that her and her fellow expatriates' image of Africa was influenced by the history of slavery and of the racism and oppression they experienced in 20th-century America.

[68] She realizes that her identity was that she was an American Black whose emotional energy was focused on the civil rights struggles in the U.S. and that her history was based there, after generations of trauma, which had failed to eradicate her fellow members of the African diaspora who resided in America.

[72] Like in the other autobiographies Gagiano compares with Traveling Shoes, Angelou says very little about the joys and difficulties of life as a member of the African diaspora in her previous home.

[74] She was able to find a small group of expatriates, humorously dubbed "the Revolutionary Returnees", who became her main source of support as she struggled with her place in African culture—"the conflicting feelings of being 'home' yet simultaneously being 'homeless,' cut off from America without tangible roots in their adopted black nation".

[76] Reviewer Jackie Gropman has stated that Angelou presents her readers with "a wealth of information and penetrating impressions of the proud, optimistic new country of Ghana".

[82] Angelou and her fellow expatriates' need to gain recognition by their ancestral homeland is painful, ambiguous, obtained at an emotional cost, and requires coming to terms with the rejection of the Ghanaians they encounter.

[91] Hagen calls Traveling Shoes "another professional, rich, full, journeyman text",[47] and sees in this volume a higher-quality of writing, especially her "often lyrical and soaring"[47] prose, than in her previous books.

[93] He also states that the importance of the theme of home, as it relates to her personal and collective identification with herself and with her fellow expatriates, makes the book "a compelling example" of how members of the African diaspora "engage in the 'imaginative rediscovery' of Africa in the hope of 'discovering' a meaningful sense of self".

Scholar John C. Gruesser found the conflicts in Traveling Shoes unresolved and the ending "too easily manufactured at the last minute to resolve the problem of the book".