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On January 20, Christa Núñez, a 51-year-old Cornell Ph.D. student and mother of three, booked five one-way tickets to Ghana. “It just happened to be Inauguration Day,” Núñez told me. It was a humid March afternoon, and we were sitting on the rooftop of her friend and fellow recent expat Davi Mozie’s Airbnb in the Osu neighborhood of Accra. “When Trump won, it became a very important date for me,” she said. “I needed to take my family out. I did not want to be present in the country while people were celebrating that.”

Núñez is no stranger to dramatic relocations, often for political reasons. For 11 years, she lived in California, but “the fires kept getting closer and closer to our home.” She and her husband bought a farm in Ithaca in 2017, and during the pandemic, she started a temporary outdoor school there with her “sister-friend” Mozie, a 57-year-old veteran originally from the Bronx. They had been planning to create a travel program that would bring Black children on trips to the African continent when Núñez got a Fulbright scholarship to research Black land politics. She chose to do it in Ghana. (Mozie joined her that month.)

“I mean, Ghana has this rich and beautiful history,” said Núñez, who was already dressed like a local in a blue wax-print dress. “Not only is it one of the countries that many of my ancestors came from, but it also has this deep connection with African-Americans.” She attends the sister church of her Ithaca congregation, which gives her ready access to a community, and spends her days working through the archives in libraries and historical sites across the region. Her children, ages 16, 13, and 7, go to an international school in East Legon, a wealthy neighborhood, with a mix of Ghanaian and international students. “They like to go to the beach,” she said. “They’re on the swim team. They like to hang out with their friends. They have pizza. They go to our rooftop. They have their same basic life, minus the farm.”

Ghana has always been an attractive destination for the Black diaspora: Following its independence in 1957, its first president, the charming and influential Kwame Nkrumah, invited prominent Black Americans to visit the country. (He even asked the activist and historian W.E.B. DuBois to move there. The 93-year-old was given a house by the state, four servants, two cars, and citizenship. When he died in 1963, two years after his arrival, he received a state funeral.) The country has seen a renewed surge of visitors since 2019, which then-President Nana Akufo-Addo declared the Year of Return, timed to the 400th anniversary of the first arrival of African slaves in Virginia in 1619. In a speech in Washington, D.C., Akufo-Addo pushed Black Americans to travel to Ghana and reconnect with their lost lineage, “brothers and sisters in what will become a birthright journey home for the global African family.” International visitors reached the record number of 1,130,307 that year. The country has continued to enjoy a notable influx of tourists, aided by a government initiative that fast-tracks visa applications for international travelers as part of its efforts to attract members of the Black diaspora.

While fires were raging in Los Angeles in January this year, Mayor Karen Bass was in Accra as a guest of incoming Ghanaian president John Dramani Mahama. Eric Adams had his own much-publicized spiritual-cleansing trip in 2021 amid travel concerns over the omicron variant of COVID-19. Chance the Rapper, Meek Mill, Kendrick Lamar, Dave Chappelle, Stevie Wonder, and Twitch streamer Kai Cenat have all made pilgrimages to Ghana in the past few years.

There’s a smaller contingent of Black Americans, who, like Núñez and Mozie, visit and decide to stay. They are looking to experience life in a majority Black country for the first time. Donald........

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