By Demetrius Dillard
The late, great, honorable Marcus Garvey attempted to transport millions of Black people to the Motherland on what is known as the “Black Star Line” as part of the Back to Africa Movement. Regrettably, he was deported from the U.S. and the movement was unsuccessful.
However, his efforts were not in vain, and will go down in history as arguably the single-greatest endeavor – with the exception of the American Colonization Society – to bring the African diaspora to their native land in what he felt was an integral step toward universal liberation for Black people.
A relatively new campaign known as “BlackXit” (used interchangeably with “BlaXit” and not to be confused with Blexit) is the most recent widespread effort to transport Black people to Africa. This new movement has the potential of being just as — if not more — effective than movements of the past because of the influence of social media platforms. On the contrary, one could argue that Black Americans were more unified in the 19th and early 20th centuries, which leaves the prospective success of this new-age movement somewhat in the balance.
BlaXit, founded recently by Juliet Ryan, appears to be a constantly growing network of individuals. The organization’s YouTube channel has nearly 60,000 subscribers and aims to encourage a large family of diasporans to relocate back to Africa through a variety of interviews with individuals who have repatriated, showing appealing aspects of Africa to pique viewers’ interests and listing housing and land-purchasing opportunities, among much more.
“I want to show you how easy it is to make that jump here to Africa. I also want to show you all the opportunities that are here in Africa. I also want to dispel a lot of the myths about Africa,” said Ryan, a native of the United Kingdom.
“It really is an absolute, absolute honor to be living here, and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. I believe some of us are wasting our time living in the West, and we’re getting anywhere and we’re not happy. We’re facing extreme racism, extreme discrimination, [racial] bias, lots of micro-aggressions every day and never seeing yourself represented.”
A considerable portion of BlaXit’s efforts are geared toward encouraging diasporans to move to The Gambia, a small country in West Africa. Ryan hopes to provide a renewed perspective and open-mindedness on relocation to Africa. She felt repatriation was one of the best decisions she has ever made.
“I’ll also show you opportunities about how to buy land, how to build a house, how to buy a house and show you a lot of the beautiful places that are available here, so I really want to talk about the social and economical aspects of being here as well, and how your mental health is improved by being in this environment,” continued Ryan, who also goes by Nyancho Kujabi.
“I think that’s important because too many of us are suffering from mental illness living in the West.”
While Garvey’s Back to Africa Movement was perhaps the greatest known repatriation effort, many other prominent Black figures have made similar attempts before his time. One example was journalist and activist John B. Russwurm.
As the co-founder of the Freedom’s Journal, the first Black American newspaper, Russwurm was one of the Black leaders who helped shape the course of history and will be remembered as an influential voice in the quest for fair representation of Black people in the media.
Russwurm experienced his fair share of success and acclaim throughout his professional career, but he eventually came to the realization that the best course of action for Black liberation would be migrating back to Africa.
He worked briefly with the American Colonization Society (ACS), which was formed in 1817 to send free Black Americans to Africa (Liberia primarily) as an alternative to emancipation in the U.S. By 1867, the society had sent more than 13,000 emigrants to African soil, according to records obtained by the Library of Congress.
“While Freedom’s Journal proved very popular, Russwurm grew frustrated with the slow progress of abolitionism and concluded Black Americans would be more likely to thrive if they moved to Africa,” says a biography on Russwurm published by the Immigrant Learning Center.
“He worked for a time for the American Colonization Society to resettle Black families in Liberia before quitting in protest of the United States’ colonization policies. He went on to become the first Black governor of the Republic of Maryland, a nation of Black Americans who immigrated to Africa, which would eventually be annexed by the adjoining nation of Liberia.”
The BlaXit movement seems to draw from the philosophies of Garvey, Russwurm and others while offering a platform that promises all-around better quality of life on African soil — founded upon the notion that for true freedom, Black people must first free themselves from the “wilderness” of the West.
