Ubuntu.
That’s the spirit of our fathers. The spirit that kept us together. The spirit of success. The one thing we can’t find in the mothership anymore. It went out the window. When, no one can place a finger on that.
See, I was born in the Lagos to parents who are 100% Igbo. My mother was born in Ghana before Nigerians were chased home. Lagos became home until 1966. My dad moved to lagos as young lad in ‘72, 2 years after the Biafran geneocide, because that’s where the jobs were.
I have 5 uncles on my mother’s side, just two married Igbo/Nigerian Women. I also have countless older cousins all married to ‘foreigners’. So essentially, my family is a mini-UN.
Between the year 2000 and today, I’ve visited 32 of 36 plus the FCT, I’ve also lived in 8 for longer than 3 months. I’ve recently pledged my forever to a man of Yoruba heritage. I say I have absolutely no sense of tribe and that’s the truth.
So, when our real or perceived differences dominate conversations, it leaves me in awe and in severe pain. Why are we so fixated on our differences? So fixated we can't see anything but threats everywhere?
I've been called Efulefu by Biafran agitators because I've carried on a campaign of the cause being an unnecessary one in the 21st century.
I've been refused things in the my home state, Lagos, because my parents are originally from Imo state. Even though I'm a Lagosian who was born here 35 years ago and who speaks and writes better Yoruba than some with the Yoruba DNA, a DNA that's 99% like the Igbo DNA by the way. The fucking irony.
The point of this dramatic exposé on my family tree is to establish that people move around. The truth is that if we get down to the ‘Made in China’, we’re all immigrants.
So, I will never get used to this "we vs them" syndrome borne from the inability for people to see beyond the bridge of their noses.
Believe me, it’s killing me.
