Writer DeNeen Brown at the former site of Fort Kongenstein in Ada Foah, Ghana, where enslaved Africans were traded before being shipped off the continent. Picture: DeNeen Brown
DeNeen Brown
The mouth of the Volta River in Ghana seems to be swelling with the stories of my people. The river runs black and thick, finally dumping its fresh water into the Atlantic Ocean.
I believe this river carried enslaved African ancestors to waiting boats before making the transatlantic voyage as “human cargo” to South America, the Caribbean islands and other parts of North America hundreds of years ago. As many as 15 million Africans were packed in the belly of slave ships. It is estimated that up to 2 million died.
My ancestors, though I do not know them, must have survived that gruesome voyage, only to have to endure the barbarity of enslavement in the Americas. As with many people in the African diaspora – scattered by the evil of the slave trade, disconnected from our language, song, culture and people – I am not exactly sure where my ancestors are from. Still, I know that my distant ancestors are from this continent.
In December 2021, I reconnected with the continent, to explore Ghana as a potential place to live and plant new roots. America seemed to be splintering, with state laws banning the teaching of critical race theory – historical truths – and constant warnings about real dangers to democracy and the possibility of a new civil war. Eleven months earlier, I had watched as insurrectionists attacked the US Capitol on January 6, trampling through a building built by enslaved black people. Someone erected a gallows and noose outside. Others carried a Confederate flag, a symbol of entrenched racism. The fight for racial justice seemed to be failing.
Democracy appeared to be imploding, and the country seemed to be increasingly dangerous for black people – although racist terror in American history is not a new phenomenon. As a reporter for more than 35 years, I watched, researched and wrote with a sense of journalistic distance while consuming the emotions of every tragedy of black people being shot dead while going about their days.
We couldn’t walk the streets, drive, study, go to the grocery store or sleep without fear of getting killed.
One night in Ghana, my driver made a U-turn in traffic and was stopped by a police officer. My stomach dropped. I was terrified. I watched as the driver got out of the car and walked toward the officer. The driver motioned to the officer, talking with his hands, explaining he was lost and apologising for making the U-turn. The officer listened. After a pause, the officer said: “I forgive you. Go about your way.”
I want this kind of freedom: to live in a country where traffic stops end peacefully. I want the ability to move among people who look like me. I know no place is perfect. But I want to live in a country where racism is not a constant threat. Which is why I have decided to eventually leave America.
I am not alone in the country of my birth: there is no official tally of African Americans who have recently chosen to leave, but anecdotally there has been a surge of interest.
For many, the death of George Floyd in 2020 led to “a groundswell of black people in America who want to go to Africa”, said Greg Carr, a professor of Africana studies and former chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. “(The US) is a perpetual field of violence.”
The US State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs says it does not keep track of the number of Americans who have moved out of the country.
But online, one can find growing communities that are sharing stories of what they sometimes call the Blaxit: Black Exit.
People have been making this choice since before the pandemic and George Floyd and the upheavals of the Trump era. Mark Blanton, 53, a former US Secret Service agent, and his wife, LaTasha Blanton, 44, a doctor of physical therapy, decided to move from their home in Virginia to South Africa after visiting in 2011.
“We saw beautiful homes, luxury homes,” LaTasha told me of her first visit. “We saw black people holding positions.” It made her think of all the work she had put into her career in the US without ever really feeling as though she had quite arrived. In America, she recalls, “I checked all the boxes they asked me to check: go to school, get a degree and at the end you would have a life where you don’t have to worry as much. But it was never that.”
In 2018, they moved to “live out the rest of our days around people who think like us, look like us and feel the same way we feel about our accomplishments,” said LaTasha. “When I first arrived in South Africa, that is when I realised I was living.”
Mark and LaTasha now own the Johannesburg-based Real South Africa tourism company which introduces visitors to life in the country. They have seen an increase in the number of people booking tours. For many, the trip is an experience that shifts their inner core. Whenever Mark has to travel to the US, he sobs on his return flight to South Africa. “It’s the feeling of freedom. A lot of African Americans are figuring this thing out. That is the biggest draw. They are getting their freedom.”
At “The Washington Post”, I covered protests across the country in the wake of police shootings and mass shootings of black people. In 2015, I reported on the fatal shootings of nine black people by Dylann Roof in the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston.
I was assigned to attend seven of the nine funerals, including the funeral of the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, where President Barack Obama famously sang “Amazing Grace” a cappella. I tried to connect history to the tragedy. I drove past the old Confederate plantations. I visited the Old Slave Mart Museum, which was the first port for thousands of Africans at the height of the slave trade. I interviewed black people and white people. No one could say what drove this self-proclaimed racist to open fire on nine black people praying in a church.
Later that year, I interviewed Scott Shepherd, a former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi now calling himself a “reformed racist”.
“The plan for a race war is definitely still there,” Shepherd said. “They want to start another civil war. It’s people like Roof who have grown impatient waiting for the war. They break off and start shooting black people.” He warned me then to tell my “black friends” to prepare for the war. That we should stock up on food and ammunition. Better yet, he said, perhaps we should leave America.
“They don’t like you because they hate themselves,” Shepherd said of his former allies. What struck me about this interview was his searing honesty; no white person had ever directly explained the depths of racism to me.
Black intellectuals, philosophers and leaders have long debated whether African Americans should go or stay.
Malcolm X believed the only true solution for black people was separatism. “Not only does America have a very serious problem, but our people have a very serious problem. America’s problem is us,” he said in 1963. “We’re her problem. The only reason she has a problem is she doesn’t want us here.”
In 1969, Black Power advocate Kwame Ture, formerly known as Stokely Carmichael, moved to Guinea with his new wife, Miriam Makeba, the South African-born singer who would become known as Mama Africa. After they married, Makeba’s performances were blacklisted in the US. “Speaking about South African apartheid was fine, but they were suddenly afraid I might speak about American apartheid, although I never did,” she said.
To those who are unfamiliar with the history of racist terror in the US, the argument for departure made by black intellectuals may sound the same as the insults long hurled by white supremacists, telling black people to “go back to where they came from”. But the root of those instructions are disparate, incongruent. The white supremacists’ demand that we leave is rooted in hate and racism. The black intellectuals’ case to leave is rooted in the need to protect our existence, to find peace and true freedom, to preserve ourselves, our sanity and our lives.
Unless the majority of the population becomes actively involved in fighting against racism, little will change.
Personally, I want freedom and joy. For once in my life, I want to know what it feels like to not be judged as a black person walking through predominantly white institutions, constantly feeling like I have to jump higher, run faster, be better.
After my trip to Ghana, I started preparing for a life outside the US. I've been getting things in order and saving my money. When I feel solid, I will take the leap.
I know America is the land of opportunity. I respect it. I send it gratitude for my life, my education and my career. But I want something more.
When I told my mother, she said: “I’m happy for you if that is what you want to do. If I had a choice to move, I would too. I’m tired of all this bulls***. I'm tired of all this racism. And it’s getting worse.”
My son, an engineer in his 20s, after years of conversation, told me he would move too. That was enough for me to smile and start packing.
Racism is like being hit with an invisible two-by-four: you can’t see the board, but the impact is the same. It hurts. I am returning to Africa, to the black rivers calling my name. - The Washington Post
The Independent on Saturday