“People Want That African Euphoria”

Ghana has emerged as a destination of choice for Black Americans seeking connection to the African continent, in no small part because the nation has explicitly courted the larger diaspora. What starts as a pilgrimage, though, becomes something more like home, with more and more people choosing to stay. (“Accra is not their Ibiza,” Kéchi Nne Nomu writes of these visitors. “It is a safe haven from the racial politics of America.”) And as we’ve seen in so many places around the globe, expat wealth has a way of disrupting a city’s ecosystem.

But this wave of migration has not been without friction. Since 2019, local chiefs have sold or given land to “returnees,” or people of the diaspora, sometimes without the consent of local farmers whose families previously had access to the land. In a grim twist, the beachfront property near historical slave forts has proved particularly enticing to Americans. In the town of Asebu, near Cape Coast, displaced farmers brought a lawsuit against a local chief who offered 5,000 acres of land to returnees, who were able to buy plots at lower prices than they could get in their countries of origin. (A court injunction seems to have been ignored, and construction has continued.) Building a house in Ghana might cost somewhere between $15,000 and $30,000.