WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 — Najima and Nayaba Bawa were despondent when their parents first raised the subject of sending them home to Ghana. It was three years ago, one evening as their mother was braiding Nayaba's hair. Najima, then in junior high, had lost focus in school. Hanging out with friends had become more important than studying. She had even brought home a few C's on her report card. 
They had reached a decision, the girls' parents calmly informed them. They were sending them to the Akosombo International School, a boarding school in the eastern Ghananian town of Akosombo, northeast of the capital, Accra.
"We tried everything to get out of it," said Najima, 16, now preparing, along with her sister, to begin her third year there.
Nayaba, 14, who like her sister grew up in Washington, said, "We wondered what we had done to be sent away."
When they arrived at the Ghananian school and met the children of other Africans from the United States, they realized that their parents' decision was not uncommon. The Bawas, and other African families like them, have opted for a temporary reverse emigration for their children. In part it is an effort to help them maintain links to their African heritage. But it is also, many say, a conscious, protective response to adolescence in the United States.
American teenagers have more opportunity to get into trouble than those in Africa, where high levels of independence and materialism are less common, these families say. And the negative consequences of slipping through the cracks in the United States, they say they have observed, often disproportionately affect black children.
For their children to realize the American dream, many immigrant parents have decided, it may be best for them to leave the United States for a few years.
"During those tender years when so many African-American children are lost, it is seen as a beneficial absence," said Sulayman S. Nyang, a professor of African studies at Howard University. "Parents worry that the negative values of self-denigration that some children fall into here will hamper the quest for social mobility that is part of the immigrant experience."
According to the latest census, the African-born population in the United States totals nearly one million. There are no figures on the numbers of African families who choose to school their children in their home countries, but Professor Nyang and other academics and families interviewed said the cultural timeouts had been practiced since the African population in the United States began to swell in the late 1970's and 1980's.
Though schooling back in Africa is impossible for refugees from the most unstable parts of the continent, it is a popular option for immigrants from African countries with relatively stable political and economic systems like Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Kenya and South Africa.
Though some schools in Africa do not take girls, others, like Akosombo International, are co-ed, and require the girls to take rigorous academic programs with more language and science courses than are required in many schools in the United States. Some schools, which cater to families who want their children to attend college in the United States or England, offer international baccalaureate programs. About 20 percent of students enrolled in Akosombo International are from Ghanaian families living outside Ghana.
Some families bring their children back to the United States in 12th grade, so they can take their SAT examinations and make sure they have all the necessary credits to apply to American colleges.
"We want to teach them that they can pick and choose from different parts of the American experience, like a buffet," said Mahama Bawa, the girls' father, who came to Washington from Ghana in 1983, and who owns an African clothing store in Adams Morgan, a neighborhood infused with African and Hispanic culture. "But to do that they need to be able to step back from it, to develop a broader perspective."
The Bawa sisters, who say they cannot wait to return to school in mid-September, say boarding school in Ghana is not devoid of normal teenage pressures. Though students wear uniforms, they still assess one another's coolness — or lack thereof — based on things like sneakers and backpacks.
But the girls said that the strict discipline imposed at their school — dormitory and classroom inspections, mandatory 4 a.m. jogs on Saturdays, rigidly enforced study and play times — relieved them of some of the pressure of having too many choices.
"Here a lot of people are just focused on what party to go to," said Nayaba, who will soon have to cut off the fashionable braided hair extensions she got this summer and return to the close-cropped natural look, required of all the girls in her school. "In boarding school the goal is just learning, not to be average but to be at the top of the class. You feel out of place if you're not trying; that's sometimes not the case here."
For many families, the relative affordability of boarding schools abroad is also a plus. One of the better private schools in Ghana, Akosombo International is far too expensive for the average Ghanaian. But tuition and board for a three-term school year totals about $750 for each child.
The Bawas, who are Muslim, said they would probably have enrolled their daughters in a Roman Catholic school had they stayed here, but even the least expensive private schools in the Washington area would have cost around $5,000 for each child.
The sisters say the experience is giving them a new view of their identity. Their mother, Tanya, a training and development manager for a federal credit union, is African- American. Ask the girls how they see themselves, and their response is decisive. "We are African-American — literally," said Najima.
Albouri Ndiaye, a senior at Michigan State University, says the benefits of his time abroad have become clearer to him now that he has been back in the United States four years. Mr. Ndiaye left an elementary school in Brooklyn for a Catholic school in Senegal at age 8.
"The things you pick up don't seem so important to you at the time," said Mr. Ndiaye, 24, who is majoring in environmental economics and policy, "but it's little things like respect for elders, hospitality and a sense of community. I feel so happy now to have received those values. It has given me a bigger sense of myself."
Silas Anamelechi, 29, says his parents' decision to send him back to Nigeria at age 15 might even have saved his life. Just 10 years old when his parents first moved to the United States, Mr. Anamelechi said he was teased mercilessly by the children in his predominantly black Washington school for having the wrong clothes, wrong haircut, wrong shoes and wrong accent.
The things he did to gain acceptance — cutting up in class, sneaking out of the house — got him into trouble with his parents. The summer after ninth grade, his father took him back to Nigeria (for what the then-teenager thought was a summer vacation) and left him there at a boarding school.
"I saw it as a punishment then," said Mr. Anamelechi, a Ph.D. student in atmospheric climatology at Howard. "Now I see it as a blessing. A couple of those friends I had started to run around with have been shot and killed."
The pressure to be cool and to fit in during junior high and high school, said Mohammed Mahmoud, who just started 10th grade at a public school in Fort Washington, Md., is especially tough for kids from immigrant families.
"When you're a freshman you get picked on anyway," said the shy 15- year-old, whose parents emigrated from Ghana. "But with me, people picked on my background, the way I talked and dressed. They said I should go back where I came from. I would say to them, `Don't we all come from the same place?' But the things they said really hurt me inside." Then he looked up from his feet and added: "But they started leaving me alone after I switched my ways and started acting more like everyone else."
The boy's parents, Mohammed Sr., a painter at an auto body shop, and Habiba, a bank teller, twitched uncomfortably on their living room sofa as their son spoke.
Over the summer, the couple decided that Mohammed and his younger brother Abdullah, 13, the two oldest of their four children, would start school in Ghana as soon as they could get them in. They were too late for enrollment this fall.
"It is time, we think," said Mr. Mahmoud, anxiously rubbing at the deep furrow in his brow. "It is time."
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