You’ve heard of Brexit? Well, Blaxit describes the exodus of Black folks from America.

ACCRA, Ghana — Before the election, some folks — including certain celebrities — talked big about up and leaving the country if Donald Trump was reelected. Now that he has been, will they do it?

Who even knows. Instead of fretting over the election results, as I initially felt like doing, I hopped on a plane heading to West Africa to meet up with some Black Americans who’ve already departed our shores for Ghana. I hadn’t planned for it to be a consolation trip. I’d naively assumed Vice President Kamala Harris would have been elected. But since we’re now all preparing for T2: Trump 2.0, The Tangerine Sequel, I decided to bury myself in work.

It turned out that a trip abroad was just what I needed. As part of a project financed, in part, by the National Association of Black Journalists, I spent two weeks connecting with African American expatriates who’ve settled in this nation of nearly 35 million people.

I attended a meeting of the country’s growing African American Association of Ghana, I explored a restaurant and other businesses run by expats, and I attended Ghana’s largest-ever citizenship ceremony in which the country welcomed 524 new citizens.

These expats, many of whom have heeded a call from Ghana’s president to “come home,” are committed and fearless — and they need to be. Ghana is a deeply impoverished and underdeveloped country. It can be a tough place to live. I don’t know that I could make the kind of leap they have. But many in the community here whom I have been getting to know tell me that any potential sacrifices are small compared to the peace of mind and sense of freedom they gain in no longer having to contend with the many challenges of being Black in America.

Among the dozens of expats I spoke with, three main factors were behind their decisions to move: worries about racism, housing concerns, and economic opportunity. Here are a few of their stories.

Jahzara Agyemang was raised by a single mother and grew up desperately poor in North Philadelphia.

Although she’d never traveled outside the city, at night she would have recurring dreams of beautiful waterfalls. Years later, on her first trip to Ghana in 2004, she spotted the twin waterfalls that resembled the one she had seen in her dreams all those years. The former Independence Blue Cross employee spent hours quietly staring at the Boti Waterfalls, located in the eastern region of the country, as its water cascaded over the rocks.

Agyemang stayed until the park closed, reflecting on something her soul already knew: She was at home. Ghana was where she was supposed to be. There were numerous details to work out — she had a school-age son, a good job in Center City, and a small shea butter and fashion design business to consider.

At first, she traveled to Ghana a few times each year, getting to know the country and understand what it would be like to live there.

“Philadelphia was becoming very violent and very crazy,” she recalled. “I used to really feel scared for my son.”

She worried what would happen if cops spotted her son with his Afro riding his skateboard at night.

“He had already been pulled over by police for absolutely no reason at all,” Agyemang recalled. “It was becoming very frustrating.”

So, in 2018, she instructed her children to pack two pieces of luggage that weighed 50 pounds each, and they were off. Today, Agyemang lives in a four-bedroom house with a garage in a gated compound that she rents for about $160 a month. “That’s why they’ll never get me to live in America again,” she said.

The daughter of a refugee from Sudan who emigrated to South Dakota, Nyamal Tutdeal learned early about what it was like to be othered.

Not only did she have to deal with the challenges of being an immigrant, but she was also Black, which carries with it a whole other host of obstacles in America.

As a child, she gravitated toward African Americans but quickly learned they weren’t always welcoming. She got called a “field negro” and other ugly names.

“I was like, ‘What does that even mean?’” recalled Tutdeal, who teaches a remote class on conflict resolution at Arcadia University in Montgomery County.

Eventually, she learned about Black history in America and the scars it left on enslaved people.

“When I was called the N-word for the first time, I didn’t know what that meant because I don’t have a history of that,” said Tutdeal, who was born in Ethiopia. “So for me, it was like navigating racism and colorism at the same time.”

Tutdeal traveled to Ghana for the first time for her birthday in 2021 and spent seven days exploring Cape Coast and visiting the infamous slave dungeons, where enslaved Africans were held before being shipped to the Americas.

She felt such a profound connection to the country and its people that she decided to make it her home. Tutdeal returned to the United States and began making arrangements to leave. By January 2022, she was back in Ghana. “I didn’t think twice about it because I was ready. I was honestly done being Black in America,” she said. “I told a friend of mine, ‘Girl, I don’t know how your family did it for 400 years, but for me, 25 was enough.’”

McCleod Kolleh was just 12 years old when she immigrated to the United States in 1997 with her family from war-torn Liberia. They settled in a comfortable home in Yeadon, and in 2015, she officially became an American citizen and obtained her first passport.

After Ghana’s government called on Black Americans to visit the West African country in 2019 — 400 years after the first slave ships set sail across the Atlantic — Kolleh booked a trip. She was instantly smitten with the country and its people. “I felt at home. I felt welcome. Everyone looked like me,” she recalled. “So it was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I want to be here.’”

Kolleh returned to America, but a bit of her heart stayed behind as she calculated how to make that happen. Then, George Floyd was killed by the police in May 2020. “Right before then, there was Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, and then George Floyd,” Kolleh recalled. “It was just a lot of tension.”

Like other Black mothers around the country, she reminded her son to be extra cautious. “I would tell him, ‘Even though you’re little, they’re still looking at you as a Black little boy.’”

Meanwhile, she never forgot how she felt in Ghana. When the borders opened up, she packed up her two children and went back. “I don’t want to say I didn’t feel safe in America, but it was a different kind of safety [in Ghana]. I had peace of mind. I didn’t have to worry about if my son was roaming the street if somebody was going to think, ‘Oh, he’s up to no good.’ There he can roam freely. Everyone was like family. It’s a community. We were embraced. We were welcomed.”

When Maya Gilliam was running Ma’ati Spa on Main Street in Winston Salem, N.C., she felt hassled by local law enforcement as well as bureaucratic red tape. It all proved to be too much for the Howard University grad. Eventually, she sold her properties and started over in Ghana.

“I felt harassed in Winston Salem. The cops came down my alleyway, plain-clothed, guns pulled,” Gilliam told me, adding that she was placed in handcuffs. “They bust in guns drawn. I had PTSD from that for at least a year or two.” She put the incident in her rearview mirror once she had settled in Accra, Ghana’s capital city.

At first, she started with an Airbnb, but then began using one of the rooms for her Ma’ati Spa Ghana location in Accra. Initially, she went back and forth every month, taking her son back to the States to be with his father. But now, Ghana is her home.

Altogether now, she has three locations for her business, catering mainly to American tourists who are greeted with foot washes with calabash bowls, aromatherapy, shoulder massages, and tea. She’s not having any of the hassles she was dogged with in her native North Carolina. “We don’t get any pushback here in Ghana,” she told me. “As long as you pay your taxes, you are fine.” Today, she has a thriving business and is well-known. Gilliam is settled in for the long haul. “When I first came to Ghana, I felt celebrated. Not tolerated but celebrated.”

Tucked away on a dirt road in West Legon, a suburb of Accra, Wanida Lewis runs Crescendo Foods, which is billed as Africa’s first food innovation hub.

“It is our training space. It also serves as our event pop-up space, as well. We also have people who cowork here during the day,” the former Philly resident said as she welcomed me into a spacious building decorated with furniture made by local artisans that she rents for less than $500 a month.

I got to see firsthand how Lewis, who has a doctorate in food science, is living out her passion, which is creating sustainable agricultural policies and also teaching classes on topics such as food safety and product marketing.

Her journey began in 2018 while working with the U.S. State Department and creating workshops for African women in Ethiopia, South Africa, and Ghana.

“They loved the work that I did so much that they asked me to come back and live [in Ghana] in 2018,” she told me. That’s also when she started traveling around the continent.

Lewis, 41, had always wanted to live abroad — she’d just never dreamed she’d wind up making a home in West Africa. She loves the warm weather, abundance of fresh produce, slower pace of life, and challenge of learning a new culture (although English is the official language, there are nearly a dozen government-sponsored languages). She cautions that the country isn’t for everybody.

“A lot of people come here with expectations thinking that, ‘I’ll be welcomed with open arms,’ but they don’t realize that colonialism has done a number on everybody,” she said.

This column is the third 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.