ACCRA, Ghana — Flipping through a family album, Keachia Bowers paused on a photo of her as a baby on her father’s lap as he held the 1978 album “Africa Stand Alone” by the Jamaican reggae band Culture. “He joined the ancestors when I was 10 years old. I was supposed to come to Ghana with him,” she said.

The November group was the largest one granted citizenship since Ghana launched the "Year of the Return" program, aimed at attracting the Black diaspora, in 2019. It marked 400 years since the first African slaves arrived in Virginia in 1619.

Ghana recently granted citizenship to 524 people from the Black diaspora, most of them Black Americans, as part of its “Year of the Return” initiative.