There is a growing trend among African Americans in Montgomery County and beyond to travel to West Africa during the New Year’s holiday season, a movement many describe as their “Year of Return.” The journeys are often in an effort to reconnect with lost heritage and uncover ancestral roots buried deeply inside the complex records of American history.
From 1619 to 2019
“It started with the ‘Year of Return’ in 2019. That was the year that commemorated the 400th [anniversary] of the first enslaved Africans to arrive in Virginia,” explained Gina Paige, CEO and co-founder of AfricanAncestry.com, a genetic testing company based in Bethesda. “And it took off! I mean, you saw it all over social media. There were celebrities promoting it and there were just waves and waves and airplane loads of people traveling back to Ghana to have this experience. In December, they started having these big concerts with all of the major Afrobeats artists. So, I think 2019 was really the culmination of this increased social interest in all things African,” said Paige.
The tradition coincided with a growing New Year’s party scene in Nigeria, called “Detty December,” where people from the global African diaspora go to party annually and ring in the New Year under the warmth of their native sun.
One Million Visas
Ghana, specifically, saw an explosion of visa requests from the United States that was estimated to jump from 150,000 visa requests per year to around 1 million per year, according to the founder of the AfroFuture Festival, Abdul Karim Abdullah in a statement on a recent episode of the CultureCon podcast. Abdullah attributes the rise in travel to his work with the Ghanaian government to simplify visa applications from the US and market leisure travel to the continent to African Americans specifically. Some Black Americans have since then relocated to Ghana permanently, others have even acquired Ghanaian citizenship in an offshoot of the “Year of Return” movement known as, “Beyond the Return.”
A Personal Journey
As an African-American, I am one of the thousands of Marylanders who made the pilgrimage recently to Ghana with my husband and our elementary school-aged son to explore our ancestral homeland after I got my DNA tested five years ago. The voyage inspired my spouse to trace his African roots through DNA testing this year, as well. The genetic testing coupled with our “Year of Return” trip sparked a desire for us to continue to travel back to Africa to deepen our understanding of the tribes from which we descended.
Experiencing the plane-loads of people at Dulles Airport traveling to West Africa around the New Year’s holiday, I wondered how many others like us were out there.
I recently spoke with African Ancestry’s CEO during Kwanzaa to find out more. Watch our conversation full of cultural insights, in the video above for more.
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