I went to Nigeria at the beginning of this year for the first time in over a decade. When we arrived, it was the kind of heat you could feel whilst you were still in the plane. The car ride to my grandmother’s new house was about an hour and a half. But nothing could have prepared me for what I saw. A gorgeous gated mansion!
Whilst my grandmother had been building this house for a couple of years, I hadn’t realised the size of the house. The mansion had a patio and two small flats inside, where two families lived.
We arrived in the evening, so the next day when we were looking around the house, we were overjoyed with how gorgeous the house was. The massive beds, the huge TV, the balcony, the gorgeous sitting room, etc.
However, the reality of what this mansion meant settled in when one evening, I was staring out the balcony on the second floor. I was looking at a normal neighbourhood. Our random mansion in a normal neighbourhood. This mansion represented the gentrification of the motherland that diaspora Nigerians engage in. The uneasiness I felt deepened when I was reading my father’s legal documents for another smaller house, as he increased the rent for the tenants for the coming year. I was seeing Black capitalism with my own eyes, I was unknowingly partaking and I wasn’t quite sure there was a way for me to wash my hands clean.
Whenever it was too warm for me, I would go sit under the AC. When NEPA would take electricity, we would turn the generator on. I remember speaking to one of the children in the area who would often come to the house and we had this conversation where he highlighted how the two small flats at the back of the mansion don’t have AC. I felt like a parasite.
My alienation deepened even more when we went to go visit my other grandmother. She is more fluent in Edo, our tribal language, than in English. Whenever I had spoken to her and my aunties on the phone and I could only reply back in English, I hadn’t been too bothered. But staring face to face at my father’s mother, and being unable to fully communicate, broke me and confirmed that I was a foreigner.
All these experiences made me realise that whilst I am ethnically Nigerian, my family was not being ethically Nigerian. My grandmother, my mum and my dad were all born and brought up in Nigeria. A measure of success for African diaspora is to be able to send money back home to your family and to build a house as well. This creates a dichotomy in African diaspora households where Western working class families are continually investing relentlessly at home. But rather than being investments that help the local economy or the local community (beyond family), they are investments that line your own pockets.
The reality is that whilst this can be problematic, this is the way that many diaspora families have found it best to provide ‘stability’ for themselves and their families.
As someone who was born in the West, I don’t have the same need to buy land in Nigeria or to build a house, but I do see the importance of remaining close with family back home and the wider community. I hope and pray that my generation finds ways to do that are more ethical, more in touch with the land and with local communities.
wow.. on point and gorgeous writing as always. I feel this so bad,, I get lost in translation when talking to even my friends in Assamese