Drawn by heritage, safety, and “African euphoria,” a growing wave of Black Americans is settling in Ghana, reshaping Accra’s landscape, intensifying housing pressures, and forcing a reckoning over land, belonging, and power between returnees and Ghanaians.

A Homecoming Written in Two Hands

For Christa Núñez, a Cornell Ph.D. student and mother of three, the decision to book five one-way tickets to Ghana on Inauguration Day was both a political act and a personal escape. Donald Trump’s election, California’s wildfires creeping closer to her former home, and a yearning to raise her family in a majority-Black country converged into a single choice: leave the United States and try to build a life in Accra.​

In Ghana, Núñez is surrounded by echoes of the past and the promise of a different future. She researches Black land politics on a Fulbright, attends the sister church of her Ithaca congregation, and sends her children to an international school in affluent East Legon, where swim team, pizza nights, and rooftop hangs mirror their old life “minus the farm.”​

The Long Arc of Return

Ghana has courted the Black diaspora for decades, beginning with Kwame Nkrumah’s post-independence invitations to figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, who was granted a state home, staff, vehicles, and citizenship before receiving a state funeral in 1963. In 2019, the Year of Return marked 400 years since the first enslaved Africans were brought to Virginia, drawing more than a million international visitors and reframing Ghana as a “birthright journey home for the global African family.”​

That invitation has turned symbolic kinship into concrete migration. Celebrities, politicians, and everyday Black Americans now make pilgrimages to Accra; a smaller, determined group like Núñez and her friend Davi Mozie come and decide to stay, looking for what one longtime resident calls “peace of mind” away from American racism.​

Safe Haven, New Tensions

For many returnees, Accra is not an exotic playground but a refuge, a place where they can dance until 9 a.m. during Detty December without fearing police bullets or early last call. Shannan “Nana Akosua” Magee, who arrived on a Fulbright in 2003 and now leads the African-American Association of Ghana, describes an “extreme paradigm shift” in daily safety and freedom, from club culture to the way police handled a late-night checkpoint by making sure she was safe rather than seeing her as a threat.​

Yet this safety comes with an uneasy awareness of privilege. In West Legon, Akosua pays $350 a month for a sprawling five-bedroom house—what might be a week’s rent in New York can buy a year’s housing in Accra—which sharpens the divide between returnees who arrive with dollars and locals squeezed by rising costs.​

Land, Ancestors, and Dispossession

Nowhere is the tension more visible than along Ghana’s historic coastline near Elmina and Cape Coast, where tourists trace the route of enslaved ancestors through dungeons whose walls still hold their scratch marks. Guides like Mr. Morris point out that these are now “some of the best lands,” coveted by Black Americans seeking property steps from the very forts where their forebears were shipped across the Atlantic.​

Local chiefs have sold or gifted large swaths of land to “returnees,” sometimes without consulting the farmers whose families worked those plots for generations. In Asebu, near Cape Coast, displaced farmers have sued a chief who offered 5,000 acres to diaspora buyers, and construction has continued despite a court injunction, illustrating how the dream of return can reproduce a painful pattern of dispossession—this time with Black buyers on both sides.​

Building Wakandas on the Beach

Real-estate players have moved quickly to monetize diasporic longing. Hanna Atiase’s firm, E. Wells Realty & Consultancy, specializes in coastal land and high-end rentals in Accra’s prime neighborhoods; roughly 90 percent of her clients come from the Black diaspora or are international buyers.​

Marketing materials imagine futuristic beachfront condo towers and developments like Wakanda-One City of Return, modeled on Black Panther’s fictional utopia, promising buyers not just property but a slice of heritage. Prices are listed in dollars, with studio apartments around $160,000 and land plots starting at $30,000, even as many young Ghanaians struggle to secure basic housing.​

When Home Becomes Unaffordable

In Accra, a housing crisis is unfolding in the shadows of this boom. Neo-soul artist Ama Asantewa Diaka has watched her rent climb repeatedly and insists that Black American presence is not the root cause; she points instead to developers and landlords profiteering off demand while investing little in public infrastructure.​

Researcher Yaw Atuobi describes lakefront spaces in their suburb of Ashaley Botwe being swallowed up by private developments, cutting off community access. Even as some locals protest projects like Pan-African villages in places such as Asebu, the economic benefits of tourism and foreign capital create a “tunnel vision,” leaving opposition fragmented and often ineffective.​

Outsiders at Home

For returnees, the emotional calculus is complicated. Núñez speaks of “grappling with that concept of being in Africa and seeing myself as coming home but also being a foreigner,” recognizing that feeling like an outsider is familiar from the United States but now carries different stakes.​

She and Mozie resist labels like “tourist” or even “migrant” and aim instead for full integration, splitting their time between a farm in Ithaca and a future home outside Accra while insisting that any land they acquire must align with their ethics around dispossession. Their lives blend the ordinary—cheering Ghana in a World Cup qualifier, scouting new restaurants, planning trips to the Volta Region—with the extraordinary weight of applying for citizenship in a country they call both homeland and new frontier.​

The Price of Belonging

Akosua says people come to Ghana “running away from something” or “looking for something,” and often both. That dual movement—escape and pursuit—captures the paradox of this moment: the same dollars that buy returnees relief from American racism can price Ghanaians out of their own neighborhoods.​

The story unfolding in Accra and along Ghana’s coast is not simply one of gentrifiers and the gentrified; it is a negotiation over the meaning of home when those returning and those receiving them are all Black, yet divided by passports, purchasing power, and history. In that negotiation lies a hard question for this new diaspora wave: can a homecoming heal historic wounds without opening new ones on the same land.

Source: NY Magazine | Intelligencer
Date: July 2, 2025