Let’s face it, you can’t go ‘back to’ somewhere you’ve never been.

You also cannot repatriate to a place you’ve never been a citizen of; but in 2005, Black Americans were trending and migrating from the United States back to Africa.

Due to the “W” presidency of the early 2000s, planeloads of African-Americans were leaving and moving to places like London, England; somewhere in Canada; Paris, and even Japan…but Ghana, an independent country since 1957, also saw a flood of African-Americans relocate there. (Okay maybe it wasn’t all “W”‘s fault, but when I met a young lady on the BART on my way to San Francisco from Antioch CA, she said she was from Brooklyn, had moved to London after Bush was selected President, and only came back to see “if” things would get better with Obama in office. That was in 2009. I wonder if she’s still here. Anyhoo…)

The True Size of Africa

Some expats thought or believed they’d just fare better amongst their own kith and kin, or thought they could go to Ghana and start new businesses with services that Americans take for granted. But why would the people in Ghana need a chiropractor, of all things?

According to AFKInsider, and The Grio, the trend of African-American expatriation to Africa has been steadily increasing since 2007. Of about 10,000 African Americans who visit Ghana, about one-third (3,000 or so) choose to stay.

How do Africans/Black people in Ghana feel about African-Americans expatriating there permanently?

Currently, nearly half of the African nations offer Dual Citizenship for their Diasporas, which includes African-Americans, Afro-Latinos, Afro-Caribbeans, and several others. There are about 60 countries on the continent of Africa, but fifty-five that are recognized by the African Union and fifty-seven that are recognized by the United Nations.

Some say we are welcome there, some say they don’t want us over there. It depends on who you ask, and what time of day it is.

Barring the fact that we here in America have seen mostly all of the media-instigated ‘ugliness’ of living in Africa, all of the internal conflicts, wars, black-on-black crime (as if white people in Africa have never so much as thought of committing a crime anywhere on that continent), why would anyone move there?

Africans tend to think Black Americans have it made and don’t understand why we are constantly making excuses and not leveraging our manifold privileges and benefits to become rich with American dollars (the obligatory “lol”).

We know it’s a matter of perspective, because if we believed everything white people tell us about Africa, we’d think the entire continent, every nation and every state in it is filled with nothing but rank filth, diseases, mud huts, people with gigantic plates in their lips and bones in their noses, and boatloads of Black people doing nothing but looting and killing each other, chopping off each other’s heads and feasting on other human beings. If we listened to all that, there has never been one single pillaging colonialist or white-on-Black criminal ever in Africa’s history.

Maybe we do take our western privileges for granted, especially since we don’t know anything else; but many places in quite a few of those African nations don’t look much different than inner-city and rural areas in the U.S.A.

Some of them, by the photos given, look like St. Louis, New Orleans, Detroit, New York City, Boston, Bergen County, NJ; San Francisco, and Los Angeles look today.

Click Here: GO THERE. Virtually first.