‘I’ll live in the diaspora someday’

 

Skyscrapers in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Francois Nel/Getty Images (cropped)

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 The Pilgrim, June 25, 2022*

As my series on the Zambian restaurant in America called Stango kicks off, I’ve decided that this is also perhaps the best time to reply to an email that I got from one of my readers.

She was inspired by an earlier piece that sought to tell the success stories of a couple of Zambians that I met recently in the USA.

Apparently, it’s the best news she's heard so far about Zambians living abroad. I understand such an impression because back home we’ve no way of knowing what’s happening with our people in the diaspora, unless a journalist like myself writes about them, as I go about my own business in this part of the world.

The said reader wrote: 

“I have just read your article online and I am amazed by the facts stated in it. I must say that I am impressed by the fact that you have given us readers the opportunity to 'hear the unspoken’. What I mean by this is that often we hear of Zambians living abroad, we do not get to hear their success stories.”

It was the middle part of the email that piqued my interest even more and prompted today’s column.

“With everyone's view and opinion put aside,” she wrote, “I still believe that I will live in the diaspora someday (and it's coming soon). Maybe not in the United States but somewhere around the world away from Zambia.”

Did you read that? A very impassioned statement if you ask me. And I think that this may not be a dream unique to this reader alone. It might be widely shared. In fact, it is. I know this because of the many people who reach out to me about work and education opportunities abroad.

I personally don’t live abroad but I study there, and my own research and experiences probably put me in a good position to advise people with immigrant intent back in my country.

The idea of living abroad is alluring. But while it’s a decision many consider from time to time, there is little or no appreciation of its potential emotional or psychological impact. Let me explain what I mean.

My own Nigerian mentor, Farooq Kperogi, who teaches media studies and journalism at Kennesaw State University in the USA, recently wrote a pertinent article under the title Warning for Nigerians Who Want to Leave Nigeria.

Kperogi himself has seen the best and worst of the United States, having lived and studied in the country for so many years folowing his exit from Nigeria as a newly admitted graduate student in an American university.

He has done well for himself and the people around him, and he takes the trouble to offer us some free experiential advice.

He writes:

“But here’s a warning from [me] who has left the country for nearly two decades: even if you leave Nigeria, Nigeria won’t leave you! In spite of being thousands of miles away from Nigeria—or, perhaps, precisely because of it—I find myself deeply emotionally invested in what goes on there. No effort I’ve made to create an emotional distance from Nigeria for my own sanity has been successful.”

He adds: 

“In moments of extreme despair, I often proclaim that I’ve given up on the country and won’t bother with it anymore. But my self-imposed moratoriums don’t usually last more than a month and are now a source of humor for my wife. Even my claim that I’d renounce my Nigerian citizenship if certain corrupt, airheaded charlatans become president next year is ironically motivated by the same emotional investment in the country that makes it impossible for me to sever my umbilical cord from it.”

So there you’ve it: there is absolutely no disconnecting permanently from your country, no matter how far you stray, even to a planet, I dare say, as far afield as Mars.

Maybe I’m reading into it, but the email from my Zambian reader seems to suggest that she would be happy if only she left the country permanently and reinvented herself somewhere in the diaspora. But I’m not sure if this is the right approach.

Living abroad doesn’t mean that frustrations with your country of origin will end. It’s counterintuitive because they won’t even diminish. Your attachment to and affection for your country will even grow much stronger. More than ever before you’ll be heavily emotionally invested in the affairs of your home country.

Those of you who read widely must have heard about the 1960s story of a South African journalist called Nathaniel Nakasa, who hoped to pursue the rest of his existence in the USA after it became clear that the apartheid government in his country would not allow him to return home.

Once in the USA, Nakasa became restless and reportedly succumbed to homesickness. He plunged to his death after falling from a high-rise building in a suspected case of suicide. He was a talented young journalist who wrote for the New York Times and studied at Harvard as a Nieman Fellow.

Nakasa’s story may be complicated, but we can all certainly relate with Kperogi’s own reflections. The best would be to think of going abroad as an opportunity to make the world a better place, rather than taking it as a form of personal aggrandisement that saves you from your own country’s woes—because it won’t.

Zambia has its own economic and political challenges, but wherever we are we must work hard to make it a better place—not only for ourselves, but even more so for posterity.

*This column is published every Friday in Zambia's best-selling newspaper, the Zambia Daily Mail