Jes\u2019ka 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 1,000 chickens. Mark and Marlene Bradley now call themselves islanders and the owners of three homes cooled by ocean breezes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The COVID-19 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. It\u2019s a movement that some are calling Blaxit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s path to citizenship and Ghana\u2019s 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 \u2014 including a wave of extreme anti-LGBTQ policies across the continent \u2014 Black Americans are still making the trip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Washington, 46, of Houston, relocated to Rwanda in 2020. Kirya-Ziraba, 40, moved to Uganda from Texas in 2021. The Bradleys, who are in their 60s, settled in Zanzibar in 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201can abstract concept.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSeeing Black African people on the money, on the billboards, you immediately eliminate your Blackness,\u201d 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 \u201cbullied because of her complexion.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2018We\u2019re at Home\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mahdi said he had seen an increase in the number of Black Americans relocating to Africa in the past several years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere are 10 times as many coming now as there were five or six years ago,\u201d he said. By his estimate, demand for the Exodus Club\u2019s services has grown at least 20% every year since its founding, when it had about 30 clients.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Becoming a \u201crepat\u201d felt empowering to Mahdi as a Black Muslim, he said. In the United States, about 14% of the population is Black, and just 2% of Black Americans are Muslim. In Senegal, however, nearly everyone is Black and Muslim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cFor more reasons than one, we\u2019re at home,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kirya-Ziraba, who is Jewish, said that when she moved to Uganda to join her husband, Israel Kirya, she went from being \u201ca minority within a minority\u201d to being surrounded by those who share her race and faith. Kirya-Ziraba, who worked for a commercial real estate company in Texas, now runs the 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the United States, Kirya-Ziraba said, her identity came with qualifications: \u201cOther Black people try to qualify my Blackness because I\u2019m Jewish, and other Jews try to qualify my Judaism because I\u2019m Black.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Uganda, she no longer faces \u201ca thousand cuts\u201d of racism, she said. For years she had made accommodations, big and small, to try to control other people\u2019s 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, \u201cI didn\u2019t know the extent until I didn\u2019t have to do any of that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kirya-Ziraba also went from a one-bedroom apartment in the States to a 2-acre family compound in Uganda. Her home is a stone\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s just so nice having all of this additional family support,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Africa isn\u2019t a refuge for all, though. Anti-LGBTQ 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some LGBTQ people interviewed countered that the United States is no safe haven either. They pointed to violence against transgender people, a growing number of anti-LGBTQ bills and the Human Rights Campaign\u2019s declaration of a \u201cstate of emergency for LGBTQ+ Americans.\u201d These interviewees said that depending on what a person was looking for, and with discernment, Africa could still be a good option for LGBTQ people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Davis Mac-Iyalla, 52, an LGBTQ 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, \u201cif our African brothers and sisters are coming knowing the challenge and want to join us in the struggle.\u201d Just as international volunteers headed to Ukraine to offer support, he imagined, Black Americans might feel called to help in the fight for LGBTQ equality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Feeling Relieved<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Many people make the trans-Atlantic exodus to stop fighting. Mark 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 \u201ca load off my shoulders.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bradley, who noted that he and two of his four sons had experienced fraught encounters with police in the United States, said he would never forget the \u201clighthearted feeling\u201d he had when approaching an armed officer in Kigali to ask for directions. The officer greeted him with a smile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marlene Bradley also felt relieved and safer in Africa. \u201cYou don\u2019t feel like you\u2019re looking over your shoulder,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Bradleys, who have retirement visas and live on retirement income, now reside in a new 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The community\u2019s homes range 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 town house; an investment property; and a home for two of their sons to eventually live in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She shares her six-bedroom house with her 76-year-old mother.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI just never thought that a single woman with a teaching salary would be able to live in a space like this,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her home on 1 acre 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The move has given Washington more room, physically and emotionally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOne of the things I wanted to get away from for just a little while was being a Black woman,\u201d she said. The expectation that she be strong \u2014 \u201cbecause in America, Black women are supposed to be strong\u201d \u2014 exhausted her. \u201cI just wanted a space to be me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n While in the United States $500 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Justin Ngoga, 39, the founder of Impact Route, a company in Kigali that offers relocation services, said there is little tension between expatriates like 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, Ngoga said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe are still, I think, at the stage where we need more people to come,\u201d he said. \u201cWe need people to come and do active retirement here. We need investors. We need talents.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rashad McCrorey, 44, acknowledged that he left his humble beginnings in the Polo Grounds Towers, a New York City public housing complex, far behind when he moved from Harlem to Ghana in 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHere, we\u2019re rich,\u201d said 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Standing on his balcony in Elmina, Ghana, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI\u2019d 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018Not for Everybody\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 Black Americans considering the move to escape racism should try therapy first \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou\u2019re coming here and you\u2019re expecting that everybody\u2019s Black, so I\u2019m going to be OK,\u201d Davis said. \u201cBut then you get here and then you\u2019re being \u2018othered\u2019\u201d \u2014 viewed as different and separate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The \u201cothering\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIf you\u2019re leaving the U.S. to come to Ghana thinking about \u2018I\u2019m coming to the motherland,\u2019 at least treat us right,\u201d Otoo said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then there\u2019s the exodus back to the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite big plans for new homes and businesses, many Black Americans who move to Africa do not stay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Omosede Eholor, 31, moved to Ghana in 2015 after becoming enamored of Accra 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow much of yourself are you losing in the process of trying to adapt to a culture?\u201d Eholor said. Ghana was not going to adapt to her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Erieka Bennett, 73, the founder of the nonprofit Diaspora African Forum, said Black Americans came to Ghana \u201cin droves\u201d in 2020 \u2014 and they are still coming. But 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAfrica is not for everybody,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jes\u2019ka 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 1,000 chickens. Mark and Marlene Bradley now call […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38614,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,2,36],"tags":[7,30,38],"class_list":{"0":"post-38613","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture","8":"category-featured","9":"category-lifestyle","10":"tag-apie-project","11":"tag-culture","12":"tag-lifestyle"},"yoast_head":"\n