Why some Black Americans are leaving the U.S. to reclaim their "destiny" in Ghana

Accra, Ghana — In 2019, Ghana's president invited African descendants in the diaspora to mark the "Year of Return," commemorating 400 years since the first Africans arrived in the colony now known as Virginia on a slave ship. The invite prompted record tourism to Ghana, and an increase in Americans who applied for visas to stay.

But it was the events in the United States in 2020, and the Black Lives Matter movement, that drove a real surge in people looking to move out of America and into Africa.

The Elmina Castle on Ghana's Atlantic coast is more than 5,000 miles from American shores, but the five-century old structure occupies a particularly dark place in U.S. history. Hundreds of years ago, it was a central trading hub where African people from around the continent were sold into slavery.