Note on Being Groomed for Exile

Africans

Illustration by Dami Mojid / THE REPUBLIC.

THE MINISTRY OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS

Note on Being Groomed for Exile

As Africans, our being lost in the diaspora is contingent on the preservation of life for ourselves and for those of our families left behind.
Africans

Illustration by Dami Mojid / THE REPUBLIC. 

THE MINISTRY OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS

Note on Being Groomed for Exile

As Africans, our being lost in the diaspora is contingent on the preservation of life for ourselves and for those of our families left behind.

There’s a coloured-printed map of Africa sitting on the wall of my home office. I stare at it a lot these days and remain conflicted. For much of my young adult life, I called Nigeria home. Upon saying ‘yes’ to pursuing a doctorate at the University of Mississippi more than two years ago, I crossed continents to settle in this quiet suburb of Oxford. Nothing about my move or all I have moved from saddened me more than the daily realization that I have now become another one of Africa’s newest lost generations.

CONDITIONING

I was born and bred in Lagos, arguably the commercial capital of the continent, but I’d never seen an African map up close. The map, which shows all 54 independent nations of the continent, has Algeria at its top and South Africa at its bottom. There is no inclusion of Somaliland like there is in real life since it is yet to be recognized by many sovereign nations even as it continues to efficiently govern itself since 1991. There are mainly colour-coded territorial nomenclatures that remind one that Europe once called the shots there. 

On my first day of gazing at the map, all its shades of alternating brown shapes arose in my mind a vague delight that the creator of the digital map deployed an Afrocentric representation by colour-coding the spatial terrain with its respective type of prevalent brown skin. Before I realized that the only Afrocentric view was of my projection and that the slice of Europe affixed on top of Africa was the same colour combination, I considered what it would have been like had the continent’s knowledge of self survived the destructive exploitation wrecked upon our minds by the Europeans and our post-independent ‘heroes’ past. 

The map, for me, is a sad reminder. Honestly, it’s worse than that. It makes me think about all the possibilities that were never brought to life because each of these blocks of African countries remained wrapped up in the finality of its drawn colonial borders. Unlike the maps of other continents I have seen, the map of Africa sitting on my wall has a plane underneath it. The northern region appears big; the western part drifts left; and central and southern subdivisions pull themselves down like a sinking ship. There are three stray islands by the side of Mozambique, and Djibouti looks like it’s trying to kiss Yemen. The map isn’t aesthetic. Depending on the angle I bend my head, some details stare at my squinted gaze as if challenging my performative curiosity. 

I asked my friend who moved to the UK three months after I left for the US if he had ever thought about the map of Africa and how the actual landmasses by the equator are pruned to make it look disproportionately smaller. He told me that’s not a concern he harbours. Mastering the new reality we face in our new spaces is paramount. What we left behind is now in the past. 

But I am unable to give mind to his sentiment. I think about this map. I think about how I got here; how we got here, and every time I do, I feel a rush of bile running down my stomach. 

That my generation of Africans have chosen to leave the continent is nothing to be dramatic about, in principle. Migration is the legacy Adam and Eve left for mankind following their trek from Paradise down here. What is disconcerting, however, is how many of my generation of Africans were unconsciously groomed to desire the doubleness of exilic life. 

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As a child growing up in Lagos in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was overdosed on ensuring that I was not local—which means mine was a generation of kids whose feet were rooted on the shores of the Lagos Lagoon but had everything up our loins tuned into what was foreign. Adults around me thought acquiring competency in Western language(s) and culture would prove most useful in my pursuit of purpose, career and excellence. By the time I was twelve, I could read, write, and function adequately in English. I knew a lot about the (foreign) language, and the ways of its people more than I knew my own history, culture, customs and norms. I enjoyed the misplaced envy directed at me by my peers when I demonstrated my mastery of the form and function of the language and would always volunteer to speak for or lead a group at whatever. At no time around these developing years did I stop to ask why I knew so much about Celine Dion, Michael Jackson, Chris Brown and WWE superstars than I did about the Sakara music that used to pierce the pre-dawn skies of Adegbite Street during my family’s circumstantial residency in Mushin. I definitely didn’t question either why Fela or Gbenga Adeboye were names I never knew until my early 20s. 

When Mr. Deji, a lanky thin-bearded English teacher paid to fix our poor pronunciation, arrived at my junior secondary school, he instituted what became popular across many other schools. He said: ‘To master spoken English, you need to practice. So, from now onwards, you will refrain from vernacular, and you’ll be penalized if you don’t.’ 

Of course, proficiency in speaking a language is not a skill that is mastered without effort. And, of course, priority has to be given to creating ample avenues for testing this skill. Still, the way I was made to uphold this logical position created in my impressionable mind a single idea: that all things non-foreign are of lesser importance, and to be of respectable value—even in a Lagos that is categorized as a Yoruba state—first, my English must be impeccable. 

Fig: The referenced map of Africa.

Like me, many of my friends organically tilted towards Europhilic predispositions. Unlike my friends, my distaste for what is native was heightened. The highlights of my quirkiness were not surprising. From the age of seven, I had announced my aversion to every traditional meal that looked odd on a spoon. The little allowance my father gave me went to the habitual purchase of my beloved Palito radio, through which I tuned in to my favourite programming, grinning as the popular presenters chattered on in quaint English, their voices accentuated with each unnecessary reference made to those distant cities—Berlin, London, Paris, New York. I had no close relative to walk me through my disastrous affinity, but what I lacked in human guidance, I made up for in multimodal materials. I overwatched many bootleg DVDs of Hollywood movies: Merlin, Terminator, Rocky, and others. I read a lot of Texaco’s Supa Strika comic books. I let my imagination follow every plane I saw pass over our skyline. I questioned why I was born in a place where nothing seemed to work. 

It didn’t make much difference that when I grew much older and naturally shed some friends for others, my recurring peers fit just right into the old framework. We used each other to sharpen our ‘wannabe-ness’. Many of us mutated our tongues and minds. We lost our abilities to fluently embody our indigeneity yet sometimes commanded the English language like drunken generals. We sought to solve our local problems with foreign solutions, crippling our creative abilities for problem-solving. On the level of the personal and the national, we collectively abdicated our agency over our brains. I was of the cohort of youngsters who read Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad in a bid to understand the path toward wealth. On TV, we watched a plethora of pundits overuse the flaccid phrase, ‘In saner climes…’ to situate an alternate reality our country had to look up to. Everything I could turn to pointed toward the exit door. Yet, nothing did so like the fatal realization that in the cause of nurturing me for a perceived future, I and others like me were taught nothing about our past. 

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ALIENATION

When I met the first group of non-Nigerian Africans in Oxford, Mississippi, many of them writers, I paid close attention to all the things we had in common that had no root in our collective Africanness. Our discussions were very cordial like we each had a good grasp of how far we had each come to be here. And in that, I realized, was a strange camaraderie: we were comfortable ridiculing the ruling class of our respective countries, but very reluctant to address how our cohesive awareness of many things American and sparsely anything African might be an indication that bad governance isn’t the only reason we chose to seek out greener pastures.

Africans since the formal end of colonization have been strangers to one another. But it seems as though the disconnection among my peers of Africans, especially, was merely symptomatic of our disconnection from our respective selves. Many of us sure can speak our indigenous languages, but a good number of us can’t read or correctly write in them. It is worse for those of us who grew up in wannabe cities where giant skyscrapers keep popping up at the expense of advancing our indigenous architecture.

A Kenyan brother was asked by a curious white girl to tell her about his country. His answer was honest. He responded, ‘I don’t know much about it.’ When we gather as an international student body to celebrate our Africanness, we tread a predictable path. Many of us wear our non-African attire. The food is hardly traditionally African. When it’s time to showcase the African heritage through dance or oral rendition, no one is comfortable enough to represent their country. We all sit in our chairs avoiding the glance of the MC.

On occasions when an American asks me why Nigerians are always everywhere, I give them our classic answer. We are a very industrious people who enjoy seeking opportunities wherever they may lead us. But if other non-condescending questioners ask why it is that Nigerians are everywhere, I respond to them, truthfully. I tell them that I can’t speak for the generations before me, but my generation of Nigerians, and by extension Africans, are everywhere because we are a lost generation.

We have no anchor tying us down to a root. We have no love for the countries our parents grew up in. We don’t have an authentic experience of what it means to belong to our ethnicity. Many of us are either ashamed or clueless about our traditional origins. And worse, we were brought up for a future our respective countries cannot accommodate.

Not long after the Makerere African Writers Conference of 1962 did the malignant underdevelopment of our African identities began. This first generation of African writers belaboured to convey what is truly African in stories, fictional and realistic, through a language they were happy to bend. Nothing in the books of Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Leopold Senghor, Camara Laye, Flora Nwapa, and others triggers doubts over their cultural competencies in their indigeneity, even as they convey narratives wheeled on imported tyres. All that wrote after them—Bessie Head, Buchi Emecheta, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Alex La Guma, and others—followed in their display of cultural knowledge, as did those after them, albeit with noticeable reductions.

What I have seen many among my generation of African writers do is just add diacritics to our African names. We acknowledge this much, quietly, when many of our creative outputs tactfully steer clear of many things traditional. We project our writings in the cadence of a globalized African experience, and we do that because we know that the part of us that is African in the true sense of it is non-existent in comparison to the part of us that desires to be foreign. We write about truly important issues like migration, identity, technology, trauma, mental health, war, grief, governance, exile, and so on, but many of our writings are too grandiose and have at their heart a foreign audience.

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I was sitting in a class about World Literature when the question of African writing and globalization popped up. The professor explained, among many other things, the consequence of globalization on Africa: how the International Monetary Fund is a key saboteur of our economies; how the strangled spread of technological advancement is designed to limit our participation in global decision-making, and so on. He made a brilliant case for Euro-American greed, attributing that to the spread of hunger, wars, and migration within African countries. What we didn’t get to talk about, however, is how the sidelining of what makes us a unique component of this globalization and the continued alienation of Africanness in the upbringing of newer generations of Africans is a massive contributor to the erosion of the African consciousness in the minds of many in my generation.

What has become of us is that we don’t mind being attributed to the continent insofar as it remains performative. We will gladly acknowledge that we were born in Osogbo or some other remote township but eagerly display on our LinkedIn profiles all our Euro-American affiliations. I am a doctoral candidate at the University of Mississippi. You’re a writing fellow at the Iowa Writing Workshop. She is a UK Global Talent. He is a Forbes 30 Under 30. And we are all Africans in the diaspora.

The tragic consequence of our situation is that many of us are now accepting the finality of our detachment. We know we wish to retain the part of us that is African. Yet, we also acknowledge the necessity to reposition ourselves as the new African diaspora. Many of us have gotten married to the wildest imagination of our parents. Our kids will not be fully African. We are the first or the last of our immediate families who will shed the remains of our African identity. From here on, our Africanness may not go beyond our names.

Comparatively, we are not Afropolitan. An essential difference in self-perception sets us apart from Afropolitans as it does those who preceded them in this wilderness of exilic beings. Theirs is a generation of ‘transnationals’ predominantly born in the West to parents who chose to exit African countries for the same reasons we are now leaving. Their childhood entails memories of roller coasters at fun fairs and climates that spit snow in December. Ours is populated by memories of watching roller coasters at fun fairs and climates that spit snow in December from neighbours’ generator-powered TVs. Many of them are biracial or double nationals. We know we can’t be biracial, so we hope to be double nationals. Money is often not their problem like it is ours. And their idea of Africa is often comically romanticized.

Our being lost in the diaspora is contingent on the preservation of life for ourselves and for those of our families left behind. We have been brought to view our current Western stations as our family’s exit ticket from a life of lack. So, when we get here, being whimsical like Taiye Selasi’s acquaintances is not an option we can choose. Our generation of lost Africans wears the thrown-away shoes worn by the generation that parented the Afropolitan. We can’t decide to be DJs and designers and pet sitters but must be doctors, scientists, professors and engineers. Perhaps this is a metaphor personified: the egg becoming the hen. Or perhaps not.

I am staring once again at the map of Africa sitting on my wall. The airplane is static underneath West Africa. Its head is tilted north-westward: towards North America. I sat by the window side of a United Airlines plane in the summer of 2022 en route to America. I don’t know when a return trip will be due. I don’t know if it will be due⎈

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