Ghana wants Black Americans to ‘come home.’ Many are accepting the invitation. I went to find out why.

ACCRA, Ghana — Four days after Donald Trump was reelected president, I boarded a British Airways flight headed to Ghana, West Africa.

I was stressed and anxious. For three months, I dared to dream that maybe America had evolved enough to finally elect a female president. Vice President Kamala Harris would have made history as the nation’s first woman in the office, but also the first female of color to make it that far.

But America being … well, America, it just wasn’t to be. When the polls closed, the nation had decided that it wanted to reinstate the former president, who has been convicted of felony crimes and found liable for sexual abuse; who wants to cut off federal funding for schools that teach the true history of slavery, and who plans to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.

The thought of watching Trump prepare to get sworn back into an office on the steps of the U.S. Capitol — the same building that his followers desecrated on Jan. 6, 2021 after Trump lost the 2020 election — sickened me. I thought that this was a perfect time to put the United States in my rearview mirror for a while.

Apparently, a lot of other Americans feel the same way — only many of them are considering making it a permanent departure.

Since the election, social media has been buzzing as those who are disappointed with Trump’s win — and are legitimately concerned for their well-being given his caustic rhetoric and stated intention to exact “retribution” on his political foes — are considering leaving the United States for at least the next four years.

CNN reported that a village in rural Italy is selling houses for about $1 to lure disaffected Americans. Even before the votes were counted, a Jewish friend who was concerned about rising antisemitism told me she had secured a German passport just in case she needs to flee the country.

Meanwhile, Ghana was calling my name. My trip here was an attempt to learn more about Americans who’ve already made the decision to move to Africa, and those who were still considering doing so. I chose this beautiful nation of 35 million people on the northern edge of the Gulf of Guinea because its leaders issued a passionate appeal to people like me: In 2018, Ghana’s president, Nana Akufo-Addo, traveled to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., and invited descendants of the transatlantic slave trade to “come home.”

Akufo-Addo designated 2019 as “The Year of the Return,” an initiative timed to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Jamestown, Va.

It was so successful, tourism officials created Beyond the Return, a decade-long effort to encourage people from throughout the African diaspora to return to the continent. During my stay, I’ve interviewed scores of Black Americans and attended a ceremony on Tuesday during which 524 people took their oaths of allegiance and became citizens of Ghana.

I also came to quickly understand Ghana’s allure. Shortly after I stepped off the plane in Accra, the nation’s capital city, I felt hope when I spotted a large sign with the word Akwaaba, meaning welcome. Once outside, I looked up at the moon and said a silent prayer of thanksgiving.

My ancestors had been shipped into bondage from somewhere on this continent, never to return. I thought about my late parents, grandparents, and my paternal great-grandfather, Robert Armstrong, and all that they had endured in the segregated South.

I knew they would be proud that I had made this trip, but also curious. Like most Black Americans, we don’t know which nations our earliest ancestors called home — only that they were likely dragged through Ghana along with millions of others and held in one of its slave dungeons before being shipped to the Americas.

The idea of Black Americans “repatriating” to Africa is centuries old. W.E.B. Du Bois, who wrote his landmark sociological study The Philadelphia Negro and numerous other books, is the most famous Black American expat of modern times. A leader in the pan-African movement, Du Bois moved to Ghana at the age of 93, in 1961, at the request of the country’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, to work on the Encyclopedia Africana. One of our first stops in Accra was at the bungalow where Du Bois lived, which is now a museum and meeting spot.

I was surprised by how many American accents I heard in Accra. They were doctors, lawyers, retired schoolteachers, counselors, and other walks of life. One was a Fulbright scholar who had taught in Philly before settling in Accra. I encountered them in hotel elevators and lounging poolside.

Estimates are that as many as 1,500 Black American expats have moved into the country since 2020. The venerable African American Association of Ghana has more than 300 paid members. Many of them use the phrase “Blaxit” — a play off of “Brexit,” a word used to describe Britain’s exit from the European Union in 2020 — to refer the exodus of Black Americans to Africa.

When I spoke with the group’s members during my visit, over and over they told me that racism was a key factor in their decision to leave America. Here in this deeply impoverished nation, expats have found the peace and contentment that eluded them in the United States.

They feel free here in a way they never felt back in the States.

They don’t worry about police traffic stops gone awry or being othered because of their skin color.

Unless I brought up national politics, they mostly talked about other things.

The longer I was with them, the less I fretted about Trump.

I began speaking slower.

I spent less time doom scrolling.

My jaw unclenched.

One day, while lingering over lunch at Mabel’s Table, an African American owned restaurant in Cape Coast, it occurred to me that I was about to have to face another dreary Philadelphia winter. The weather that day — as it had been every day I was in Ghana — was spectacular.

I watched the waves break over the rocks as I sampled a local specialty called “red red” — black-eyed peas in tomato sauce — and rice, and thought about how familiar it tasted.

I felt at peace.

I felt at home.

This column is the first installment of “Blaxit” — a series by The Inquirer’s Jenice Armstrong about Black American expatriates who have moved to the African continent. Travel for the series was funded in part by the National Association of Black Journalists.