Home & Away
A Four-Part Series
Part I — Home.
“I’m home but damn this shit don’t feel like I remember/ matter fact it's been about 30 Decembers — and these kids don’t know who I am / you don’t know you’re in the presence of a real made man”.
LL Cool J | 30 Decembers
Come October 2026, I will have lived outside of Nigeria for as long as I lived in it. Half my life at home, the other half away.
On paper, that’s merely a statistical detail but in reality, it’s much deeper. They say time and lived experience shape your identity. For me, the world now unfolds along two very different realities, and I keep trying to strike a balance between both worlds.
I’m a Naija thoroughbred by my own metrics. My patriotism knows no limit, performative or not. The green and white flag is permanently hoisted on my Instagram profile. My wardrobe is stacked with Super Eagles jerseys and traditional attires that I don with pride at any given opportunity. I follow and critique local politics ad nauseam, simply because even if you physically escape the country, you cannot outrun the grief of its people.
We as Nigerians carry the country with us wherever we go, so naturally we walk into rooms with noses up in the air, armed with that bumptious swagger and the inherited belief that we’re somehow the main characters.
Our “Giant of Africa” title feels more like the afterglow of a dying sun these days, but it still captures the grandiosity that seeps into everything about us. The inherent belief that excellence is less an aspiration than a birthright. After all, Naija no dey carry last.
My life today is fully diasporan but I’m still yoked to Home in thought, pride, and frustration in equal measure.
Home operates on a broken system that demands resilience at every turn, one that stunts your progress as an adolescent, and drains your energy as a young adult, breaks your spirit and eventually propels you into a midlife crisis. A vicious cycle we’re all too familiar with.
I vividly recall playing Eldee’s I’m Leaving on my iPod the night I left the country for the first time. That flight symbolised a literal and metaphoric escapism from the stifling grip of that broken system. I believed Home would freeze in time for me unchanged, waiting until I returned. Boy, was I wrong.
After many years away, I’m home now for the holidays. Nigeria welcomed me with open arms, yet it all feels different, topographically unchanged yet almost unrecognisable. Have I overdramatised the situation, or is it jamais vu?
Home feels foreign to me. The old neighbourhood has moved on. The slang has evolved. The systemic dysfunction that once felt like part of the country’s identity now weighs heavy on my heart, impossible to romanticise. I find myself clinging to a mental picture of home that no longer exists. I walk the old streets half-expecting recognition but also realising I don’t recognise these faces either. Around old friends, I keep slipping into “back in the day” stories regardless of if they fit the conversation or not.
Dazed, disoriented, disillusioned, I walk the familiar path to the popular neighbourhood canteen where the young men used to convene every evening after a long day of work or study— the ambiance feels different, the waiters greet me with nonchalance. Unperturbed, I let the catfish peppersoup jog my memory and wash the nostalgia down with an Orijin beer, as if every sip is to reassure me that I still belong here.
I’m indeed Home. Born in, sworn in. But how well do I still fit in?
Part II — Away.
“Something strange about travelling / overseas for the Uni life, niggas hustling — but it's kinda worth it ’cause the things you get exposed to teaches you to stand on your own two”.
Sute Iwar | Badagry
Abroad, I learned very quickly that I’m Black before I am Nigerian or anything else for that matter. Living in Eastern Europe was my first real reckoning with the kind of micro-aggressions any international student or third world immigrant will recognise. There were the stereotypes about Africans and stereotypes about Nigerians specifically that I had to face constantly, ones I don’t need to spell out because I’m sure a few have surfaced in your mind in real time.
The quick fix, as suggested by people from the outside looking in:
“YOU NEED TO BLEND IN. INTEGRATE!!!!”
What a load of bollocks!! As if blending in while hanging on to your true identity doesn’t already feel like a toxic marriage. After a while, code-switching becomes a chore. You pick and choose which parts of yourself to reveal depending on what room you’re in. Experience has taught you that you’re more likely to be judged than be accepted for being true to yourself. You learn to soften your stance on certain social issues, you swallow your true opinions. You go home after a long day of “blending in and integrating” to face the ambivalent thoughts that you can’t escape:
Should I have spoken up more in that meeting or is my accent off-putting?
Can my coworkers sense that I don’t particularly enjoy putting on that fake corporate-smile?
Did my food smell weird in the lunchroom?
Am I being overly sensitive, or was that joke about Black people actually inappropriate?
Exhausting way to live if you ask me. Many immigrants are familiar with the mental gymnastics you have to do daily to make life easier.
You do the dance but it never quite sits right within you.
Ironically, the broken system of Home became the building block of the very skillset that helps me thrive abroad. I learned to read a room quickly, keep my head on a swivel, and function with the quiet paranoia that anything could go wrong at any moment.
Countless times as a child, I watched an angry mob lynch a robbery suspect on my walk home from school, and I just walked past, absentmindedly as if nothing strange had happened. Because truly nothing strange had happened. Complex PTSD is almost a Nigerian birthright.
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So, when I say life here is safer in measurable ways, it comes from a real place. However, every now and again, right as comfort starts to settle in, something reminds me it could all still go sideways. Is that paranoia, or is it muscle memory from a place that taught me early that stability is a privilege, not the norm?
I function well here. I’ve built a life here. But ever so often, subtly or unmistakably, I’m reminded that I don’t fully belong here either.
I’ve found safety in a place that never quite lets me forget where I really came from.
Part III — Living In The Hyphen.
“It's only so long fake thugs can pretend. Homie you aint live it; you witnessed it from your folks’ pad, scribbled it in your notepad… (and then) created your life”. JAY Z | Takeover
There’s a group I used to watch with a kind of quiet irritation: children of first-generation immigrants, visibly wrestling with questions of identity and belonging. You know the type — the exaggerated “Nigerian” accents they put on around their friends for sport, the bits and pieces of the culture stitched together from what they’ve learned through imitation. Through badly written YouTube miniseries. Observing through a fractured lens.
Poor kids. They hadn’t lived the reality so they had to study it, absorb it, perfect it and wear it like a costume, performing culture loudly, as if that could secure the validation from Nigerians who were born and raised at Home.
I admit I judged it too harshly because it looked forced, almost fake to me. I now realise that my resentment came from a place of my own ignorance and what I observed wasn’t kids dealing with an identity crisis, but rather the difficult position of being stuck in The Hyphen: never fully one thing and never allowed to be both. Too African for the circles they move in here, too foreign for their relatives back home.
And then it hit me, this will be my children’s fate one day.
They won’t have my neat half-and-half split. They won’t carry the formative memories of Nigeria that I do. They’ll inherit the stories, the cuisine, maybe the language but not the lived context that gave those things meaning for me. They won’t know the difference between Santa Claus and Father Christmas or what an Item 7 means at a wedding reception.
I think about the first time I’ll try to teach my own child to greet an elder properly. The small choreography of respect it took me years and a few sharp corrections to get right. I wonder if I’ll have the patience to teach them never to receive or hand anything to an elder with their left hand. Will the gesture even carry any weight for them, or will it just be something I ask them to do, hollowed out, disconnected from tradition?
And I think too about the day my own child might stand in front of someone born and raised at Home, mispronouncing Yoruba words, watching that same flicker of quiet irritation cross a stranger’s face.
Will that make them any less Nigerian? Second-class members of their own culture, perhaps.
Part IV — Sankofa
“Ajo o da bi ile, no matter where you go make you no forget area o”
Sound Sultan | Area
There’s a Ghanaian proverb I’d like to borrow, “Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi” which translates as: “It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten."
The Sankofa bird is depicted looking backward while holding an egg in its beak. The bird’s posture illustrates the balance between looking back and moving forward, unwilling to accept that moving forward is akin to leaving everything behind.
For those of us born and raised back home, the yearning for home is probably easier to understand. But what about people who feel homesick for somewhere they’ve never really called home? A place they’ve only ever visited, or perhaps a culture they inherited through their parents.
For millions across the world, that distance was never a choice — slavery, colonisation, war, famine, exile, adoption, migration.
Different reasons. Different journeys. The same feeling of displacement.
It’s evident in the African diaspora scattered by the Middle Passage. It’s there in the long Jewish history of exile and return. It’s there in Armenian, Vietnamese, Palestinian, Korean and Irish diasporas, in the Indian communities scattered through indentured migration.
Different centuries. Different ships. Yet the same ache lies underneath.
There’s actually some science that makes this conversation a bit more interesting. Descendants of people who lived through severe trauma seem to carry real biological traces of subtle changes in how their bodies respond to stress, echoing down through generations. The evidence is still too tangled to say it’s simply “in the genes,” though. Culture, parenting, family stories probably matter just as much.
Lately there’s been an upsurge in the number of people taking DNA ancestry tests to trace their roots. What are they hoping to find when they send off samples to the lab? Recognition? A sense of belonging? A quiet Ah-there you are?
Homesickness isn’t only for people who left somewhere. Some inherit it, fully formed, without ever having boarded the plane.
Sankofa is really teaching us not to live in the past nor to romanticise it, but to turn around and reach back far enough to retrieve the things worth carrying forward.
Go back. Get it. Remember the road that leads you home.
