‘People Want That African Euphoria’

Dancing to live music at Zen Garden in Accra. Photo: Francis Kokoroko/The New York Times/Redux

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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.