It’s technically not
related to BHM 2024, but The
New York Times published a story on
Black Americans moving to Africa. Expect White advertising agencies FCB/Six
Toronto and Forsman & Bodenfors to credit their 2019 Black
& Abroad campaign for inspiring the migration.
Blaxit: Tired of Racism, Black Americans Try Life in Africa
Black people make up about 14 percent of the U.S. population. Many of
them are wondering what it would be like to be part of a majority.
By
Colette Coleman
Jes’ka
Washington lives in a six-bedroom house on a hill with avocado trees and a
spectacular view, not far from the rabbit farm she runs. For less than $50,000,
Shoshana Kirya-Ziraba and her husband built a four-bedroom, two-bathroom house
on family farmland with goats, turkeys and about a thousand chickens. Mark and
Marlene Bradley now call themselves islanders and the owners of three homes
cooled by ocean breezes.
All
of them are Black Americans who found their new homes in Africa. They are
enjoying the substantially lower cost of living and, more important, they said,
the absence of the racism and discrimination they experienced in the United
States.
The
Covid pandemic and the racial reckoning in the wake of the murder of George
Floyd led some Black Americans to seek a different way of life abroad, in a
movement that some are calling Blaxit.
Those
moving to Africa are also looking for an ancestral connection. Their migration
is less about money and more about acceptance, a path that many intellectuals
and artists have taken before.
Today,
a new life in Africa is open to people of varied professions who can work
remotely. Immigration has been fueled by vocal proponents on social media and
by government programs like Sierra Leone’s path to citizenship and Ghana’s Beyond
the Return campaign; according to the Diaspora Affairs Office of Ghana, at
least 1,500 African Americans moved to the country between 2019 and 2023.
Despite the potential concerns for newcomers — including a wave of extreme
anti-L.G.B.T.Q. policies across the continent — Black Americans are still
making the trip.
Ms.
Washington, 46, of Houston, relocated to Rwanda in 2020. Mrs. Kirya-Ziraba, 40,
moved to Uganda from Texas in 2021. The Bradleys, who are in their 60s, settled
in Zanzibar in 2022.
Ashley
Cleveland, 39, a mother of two who runs a company that helps foreigners invest
in and grow their businesses in Africa, relocated from Atlanta to Dar es
Salaam, Tanzania, in 2020 and is now based in South Africa. She said she
appreciates that in much of Africa, race is “an abstract concept.”
“Seeing
Black African people on the money, on the billboards, you immediately eliminate
your Blackness,” she said. She welcomed this change for her children, who were
9 and 2 when they left the United States. Her older daughter, whose skin tone
is deep brown, was no longer “bullied because of her complexion,” she said.
‘We’re
at Home’
The
Exodus Club has been helping people in the African diaspora move to the
continent since 2017. R.J. Mahdi, 38, a consultant for the group, moved from
Ohio to Senegal 10 years ago.
Mr.
Mahdi said he had seen an increase in the number of Black Americans relocating
to Africa in the past several years. “There are 10 times as many coming now as
there were five or six years ago,” he said. By his estimate, demand for the
Exodus Club’s services has grown at least 20 percent every year since its
founding, when it had about 30 clients.
Becoming
a “repat” felt empowering to Mr. Mahdi as a Black Muslim, he said. In the
United States, about 14 percent of the population is Black, and just 2 percent
of Black Americans are Muslim. In Senegal, however, nearly everyone is Black
and Muslim. “For more reasons than one, we’re at home,” he said.
Mrs.
Kirya-Ziraba, who is Jewish, said that when she moved to Uganda to join her
husband, Israel Kirya, she went from being “a minority within a minority” to
being surrounded by those who share her race and faith. Mrs. Kirya-Ziraba, who
worked for a commercial real estate company in Texas, now runs Tikvah Chadasha
Foundation, a nonprofit supporting Ugandan women and disabled children. She and
her husband live in Mbale, a small city that is home to the Abayudaya Jewish
community, which has about 2,000 members.
In
the United States, Mrs. Kirya-Ziraba said, her identity came with
qualifications: “Other Black people try to qualify my Blackness because I’m
Jewish, and other Jews try to qualify my Judaism because I’m Black.”
In
Uganda, she no longer faces “a thousand cuts” of racism, she said. For years
she had made accommodations, big and small, to try to control other people’s
perceptions: smiling to appear nonthreatening, buying nicer clothes to avoid
being mistaken for a domestic worker, and straightening her hair to be seen as
more professional. She knew she had been acquiescing, but, she said, “I didn’t
know the extent until I didn’t have to do any of that.”
Mrs.
Kirya-Ziraba also went from a one-bedroom apartment in the States to a two-acre
family compound in Uganda. Her home is a stone’s throw from the homes of her
parents-in-law and her sister-in-law and the large chicken coop. Her in-laws
helped her husband build their house. “It’s just so nice having all of this
additional family support,” she said.
Africa
isn’t a refuge for all, though. Anti-L.G.B.T.Q. sentiment is sweeping across
the continent. In Uganda, the Anti-Homosexuality Act enacted last year punishes
gay sex with life imprisonment and in some cases death. Similar bills have been
introduced in other African countries, such as Ghana and Kenya.
Some
L.G.B.T.Q. people interviewed countered that the United States is no safe haven
either. They pointed to violence against transgender people, a growing number
of anti-L.G.B.T.Q. bills and the Human Rights Campaign’s declaration of a
“state of emergency for L.G.B.T.Q.+ Americans.” These interviewees said that
depending on what a person was looking for, and with discernment, Africa could
still be a good option for L.G.B.T.Q. people.
Davis
Mac-Iyalla, 52, an L.G.B.T.Q.-rights activist and the executive director of the
Interfaith Diversity Network of West Africa, suggested that instead of
deterring immigration, the grim trends could drive it, “if our African brothers
and sisters are coming knowing the challenge and want to join us in the
struggle.” Just as international volunteers headed to Ukraine to offer support,
he imagined, Black Americans might feel called to help in the fight for
L.G.B.T.Q. equality.
But
many people make the trans-Atlantic exodus to stop fighting. Mr. Bradley, 63,
who moved with his wife, Marlene, 69, from Los Angeles to Rwanda in 2021 before
settling in Zanzibar, said that arriving in Kigali felt like “a load off my
shoulders.”
Mr.
Bradley, who noted that he and two of his four sons had experienced fraught
encounters with the police in the United States, said he would never forget the
“lighthearted feeling” he had when approaching an armed officer in Kigali to
ask for directions. The officer greeted him with a smile.
Mrs.
Bradley also felt relieved and safer in Africa. “You don’t feel like you’re
looking over your shoulder,” she said.
The
Bradleys, who have retirement visas and live on retirement income, now reside
in a newly developed planned community on the island of Zanzibar, about two
hours by ferry from Dar es Salaam. Most residents of their development were not
born in the country.
The
community’s homes range in price from $70,000 for a 430-square-foot one-bedroom
to $750,000 for a 3,000-square-foot oceanfront villa. With the money the
Bradleys would have spent on one home in Los Angeles, they were able to buy
their three-bedroom, two-bath townhouse; an investment property; and a home for
two of their sons to eventually live in.
Ms.
Washington is still in awe of her new life in Rwanda. She works as an online
teacher with students in South Carolina and has an agricultural visa that
allows her to run a rabbit farm near her home outside Kigali.
She
shares her six-bedroom house with her 76-year-old mother. “I just never thought
that a single woman with a teaching salary would be able to live in a space
like this,” she said.
Her
home on an acre of land with avocado trees costs $500 a month and required an
initial six-month payment. Stipulations for upfront rental payments of several
months, a year or even longer are common.
The
move has given Ms. Washington more room, physically and emotionally. “One of
the things I wanted to get away from for just a little while was being a Black
woman,” she said. The expectation that she be strong — “because in America,
Black women are supposed to be strong” — exhausted her. “I just wanted a space
to be me.”
While
in the United States a $500 monthly rent may seem cheap, in Rwanda it is a
significant amount. In some cases, the large wealth gap between American
immigrants and most Africans leads to friction, but in other cases, locals
embrace the infusion of cash. Many governments court the diaspora for this
exact purpose.
Justin
Ngoga, 39, the founder of Impact Route, a company in Kigali that offers
relocation services, said that there is little tension between expatriates like
Ms. Washington and locals. Unlike Portugal and Ghana, where an influx of
foreigners drove up costs, Rwanda does not have enough newcomers to produce
such a negative economic impact, Mr. Ngoga said.
“We
are still, I think, at the stage where we need more people to come,” he said.
“We need people to come and do active retirement here. We need investors. We
need talents.”
Rashad
McCrorey, 44, acknowledged that he left his humble beginnings in the Polo
Grounds Towers, an Upper Manhattan public housing complex, far behind when he
relocated from Harlem to Ghana in 2020. “Here, we’re rich,” said Mr. McCrorey,
who published a guidebook for people moving to Africa. He said he tries to give
back: He started a scholarship fund and built a soccer field for neighborhood
children.
Standing
on his balcony in Elmina, Ghana, Mr. McCrorey recalled the injustices he said
he experienced in New York that spurred him to leave. Top of mind were the
frequent stop-and-frisks, he said, which felt like the police groping and
violating him and sometimes left him in tears. “I’d rather have the moral
dilemma of being in a higher class in the system of classism, rather than being
marginalized in the system of oppression and racism,” he said.
‘Not
for Everybody’
Some
Black Americans who move to Africa never get the resolution they sought. Adwoa
Yeboah Asantewaa Davis, 52, a therapist who moved from Washington, D.C., to
Accra, Ghana, in 2020, said that Black Americans considering the move to escape
racism should try therapy first — because the trauma of years of discrimination
will not disappear with a change of setting, and may even resurface when they
are foreigners in Africa.
“You’re
coming here and you’re expecting that everybody’s Black, so I’m going to be
OK,” Ms. Davis said. “But then you get here and then you’re being ‘othered’” —
viewed as different and separate.
The
“othering” goes both ways. Some Ghanaians feel discrimination from Black
Americans, said Ekua Otoo, 36, a Ghanaian in Accra. Black American communities
there can be insular, she said, and their businesses often prefer to hire Black
Americans, or Indians and Lebanese, for senior positions, while qualified
Ghanaians are excluded or underpaid. “If you’re leaving the U.S. to come to
Ghana thinking about ‘I’m coming to the motherland,’ at least treat us right,”
Ms. Otoo said.
And
then there’s the exodus back to the United States. Despite big plans for new
homes and businesses, many Black Americans who move to Africa do not stay.
Omosede
Eholor, 31, moved to Accra in 2015 after becoming enamored of the city while studying
abroad there. But she decided to leave in 2020 because she felt she was missing
out on life back home in New York and the big events of family and friends. And
she began to feel that the daily stresses around frequent power outages and
cultural differences were changing her for the worse, making her quick to
anger.
“How
much of yourself are you losing in the process of trying to adapt to a
culture?” Ms. Eholor said. Ghana was not going to adapt to her.
Erieka Bennett, 73, the founder of the nonprofit
Diaspora African Forum, said that Black Americans came to Ghana “in droves” in
2020 — and they are still coming. But Ms. Bennett, who has lived in Africa for
40 years, said that many Americans are not cut out for life in Africa, and she
urged those considering the move to visit first. “Africa is not for everybody,”
she said.
