There is in Africa a select minority of people I call “native expatriates.” They are not the prodigal African for whom their homeland is a distant abstraction. Nor are they the rooted subject of shifting imperial powers who crave some kind of permanence in a world that has largely rendered them invisible. Outwardly at least, they are denizens of the continent for as many generations as you care to count, but they also inhabit a metaphysical space that makes them alien by design. They have almost invariably studied abroad, usually in the European country that colonized their homes—Britain, France, Portugal, Spain—where they own a summer house and quite possibly employ servants of the same ethnicity. The Francophones are the worst, dating from colonial policies that favored a deleterious definition of “French” that actively campaigned to keep the civil service estranged from any notion of African identity, but all are anxious not to be confused with the great, unwashed majority and never hesitate to signal their elevated status. As I write, the news reports that a housewife in an eastern town beat her ten-year-old servant to death because she caught her watching TV with her children.
Native expatriates can be found in most professions but are ubiquitous in politics, where they are free to loot a nation they perforce never believed in anyway. Take the case of Femi Gbajabiamila, the former leader of Nigeria’s House of Representatives, now personal assistant to President Bọ́lá Tinúbú. When his mother celebrated her ninetieth birthday, he paid for three hundred relatives and friends to fly to Dubai rather than condescend to meet a single celebrant on their home turf. Even more disheartening, not one of the invited guests saw the self-loathing for what it was: the ingrained need on the part of natives to prove to foreigners (who couldn’t care less) that they are superior to their impoverished compatriots in the Dark Continent they have been fortunate enough to escape. It is a tragic state. I should know, I was born into it.
Big Boys
I drew my first breath in London in 1953. Before my first birthday, my father relocated us to his native Nigeria, where he found work as an ophthalmologist after graduating from his studies at Moorfields Eye Hospital. My British mother was a reluctant trainee nurse twenty years his junior. At the time, Nigeria was a British colony, and it would be another seven years before it won the right to its own flag, anthem, and perfunctory UN seat. As a surgeon and ophthalmologist, my father was a “big boy,” as we say in Lagos, part of the minority of educated natives primed to take over from the white man when the time came—not that there was much in the way of industry to take over. The only real enterprise was oil, and that has always been in the hands of the multinationals, with Shell leading the way. He was allocated a house in the exclusive suburb of Ikoyi, developed for the expatriate civil servants who were our neighbors on either side. We were waited on hand and foot by a team of servants—steward, nanny, driver, night watchman—labor being dirt cheap, then as now. In other words, I grew up in a bubble, as far from the despised, struggling masses as possible. This was compounded by my father’s refusal to expose me to Yorùbá, his native language, which I only heard him speak when he was on the phone with a friend; he also actively discouraged his “backward” relatives—that is, most of them—from visiting us. My mother, with her lower-middle-class background (class in England being as poisonous as ethnicity in Nigeria), wasn’t the least bit interested in the culture she had married into and was keen that I learn how to speak the “proper” English of Received Pronunciation (RP). My accent was reinforced by my enrollment at the nearby St. Saviour’s primary school attended by white children of colonial civil servants and staffed by white teachers. This is to say nothing of the distinctly Anglophone books we were introduced to, the most memorable for me being C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; although there was little English-language Nigerian literature at the time.
As a child, l took my privilege for granted, although certain things began to bother me as I grew older. For one thing, our white neighbors, whose front garden I could peer into from the window of my upstairs bedroom, never invited my parents to their midafternoon gatherings, where the only black faces belonged to the white-gloved servants dispensing cocktails and sandwiches. My father, on the other hand, invariably invited them to his annual end-of-year party; though they never came, it would have been impossible for them to ignore the live band playing the makeshift stand at midnight. My father was a Yorùbá man, a member of the group the British considered the “fun-loving tribe of West Africa.” With the straight hair I had inherited from my mother, I was regarded as white by Nigerians who didn’t know my background. On the few occasions we ventured into downtown Lagos, the local children gathered to stare at the oyibo (white) woman and her white child, occasionally breaking into the well-worn chant still in vogue today—“oyibo pepper, if you eat pepper, you go yellow more more”—which I loathed. To the ordinary Nigerian, if you weren’t black, you were white, the “legend of color,” to quote James Baldwin, that is mistaken for race and which justified colonialism in the first place, just as it had the slavery that preceded it.
When Nigeria became independent, my father took over as head of the General Hospital from the less qualified oyibo doctor he had been obliged to work under, and he went about letting everybody know that he was now a man and could do what he liked. This mostly meant coming home in the wee hours, the worse for wear, and the inevitable shouting match—until one day when I was nine my mother called me aside and told me that I would be going with her and my infant sister to London. Living with my maternal grandparents, I doubled down on my Englishness (my grandmother was equally a stickler for RP), even playing cricket for my primary school. Still, after eighteen months my mother decided to return to Nigeria, perhaps hoping to salvage her marriage. But by then it was too late; my father, doing what he liked, had moved another woman, a Nigerian, into the home he had shared with my mother. He’d already had one son with her, and another was on the way. When my mother decided to return to her country for good, she left me behind, believing I would get a better education—and perhaps because she was overwhelmed by the responsibility.
I was to remain in Nigeria for the next five years. I not only missed my mother dreadfully but also the peace and order my grandparents had given me. London was clean and orderly; Lagos was hot and raucous, as the country drifted into a two-and-a-half-year civil war. Life at home with my stepmother was miserable, but I was only there during the holidays. The rest of the time I boarded at the exclusive St. Gregory’s College, where one of the Irish priest headmasters looked out for me at my mother’s request. Because we were the sons of big boys, the teachers treated us with respect. We were rarely beaten, although corporal punishment was then rife. The comforting school routine was in contrast to the unpredictability of life at home, where my stepmother might suddenly decide to report me for some infraction or other when my father returned from the hospital. He would beat me to placate her, so he might then be free to go to one of his clubs after he had attended to his patients during his evenings at his office, where he earned his real money.
One side of the school opened onto Ọbáléndé, an old, protected slum we easily accessed by climbing over the wall during evening studies. I lost my virginity in one of the many brothel-cum-beer parlors; she, amused at the oyibo boy in his after-school khaki uniform, giggled as she pressed my penis for signs of the clap I got anyway. I had to go for treatment at the General Hospital; when my father said nothing to me, I entertained the foolish hope that I had gone under the radar. It was only some weeks later, as he was driving me back to school, that he stopped briefly to talk to a man walking along the road. As he drove off, he said that they had studied medicine together at Trinity College Dublin but that the man had flunked out because he had spent all his time gambling and chasing women. Perhaps my father was also pleased that I wasn’t gay; Nigeria, like most of sub-Saharan Africa, is virulently homophobic, the result of what the Irish writer Anne Enright termed “the feminizing insult that is colonialism.”
All the time I was in school I pestered my mother to send me a ticket to join her in the UK. She finally caved in when I ran away from home. Six months later I was back in London, where I went to university and toyed with the idea of becoming a history professor before deciding I wanted to be a writer. I can’t recall anything about the six novels I wrote in two years flat, ritually burning the last before putting a fresh piece of paper in my typewriter. I also wrote the first of what became a collection of short stories drawing from my childhood, titled, appropriately enough, Loyalties. In the midst of this, my father died. I had seen him briefly at the London hospital he had come to for treatment, and it was obvious that he wasn’t long for this world. My mother told me that a Nigerian relative who came to commiserate with her had offered to host me in Lagos. Jumping at the opportunity, I returned to find a country whose population had exploded by several million in the fourteen years I had been away. Poverty and violence were everywhere. The silver lining was that a piece I wrote caught the eye of a publisher, who asked whether I had thought of writing a travelogue. The result, In My Father’s Country, was the beginning of a deeper journey into the country when, shortly afterward, I was appointed to the Africa desk of the magazine Index on Censorship.
The civil war had been over for a decade and a half, but the military was solidly entrenched in power and would be for another decade and a half. Soldiers were everywhere, enforcing the Muhammadu Buhari regime’s War Against Indiscipline by flogging the civilians in the streets for neglecting to use the overhead bridges or queue at the bus stop. The resentment was palpable. It was also the end of apartheid in South Africa—Index on Censorship’s previous African obsession—and the descent of Nigeria into a vicious military dictatorship had culminated in the “judicial murder,” per British prime minister John Major, of writer-activist Ken Saro-Wiwa for agitating against the theft of crude oil in the minority areas. My father, to my surprise, had left me a property in Lagos. Not only could I travel my country at will, I could write about it to my heart’s content and have done so ever since.
Plus ça change
The question I asked in In My Father’s Country was: Am I Nigerian and, if so, to what extent? I had only been out of Lagos on the few occasions my father took us to Abeokuta, our ancestral hometown just two hours’ drive away. Now I traversed the length and breadth of a country three-and-a-half times larger than the one that had colonized it. I was taken for white (onyocha in the Christian East, bature in the predominantly Muslim North), and even more of a foreigner than in the otherwise cosmopolitan Lagos, where white people were a not-uncommon sight and where, for the most part, people were too busy hustling to pay you any mind. Now I was openly gawked at. It was the beginning of a deeper understanding of my condition, which was not nearly as unusual as I had presumed. The question of who I was is one that occurs to everyone born into artificial borders. My case was simply more extreme; at the same time, my faultless English gave me an authority I didn’t ask for.
There are over five hundred indigenous languages in Nigeria. Three of them—Hausa, Igbo, and Yorùbá—are spoken by more than half the country’s population, and yet English is necessarily the country’s national language. No English, no Nigeria. For all intents and purposes, we remain a colony with only the veneer of independence, which is why St. Saviour’s school is still headed by a white Englishman, the better to deliver the British National Curriculum so that its pupils might “transition on to the leading secondary schools in Nigeria and the elite selective schools in the UK,” as stated on its website. The fee for this privilege would be $5,255 per annum in U.S. currency, in a country where the annual minimum wage—when it is paid—is $560. The class system is the British model and has displaced ethnicity in the upper echelons: the small minority of native expatriates versus the majority of native natives, with the latter naively accepting the ethnic card cynically exploited by the former.
The question of who I was is one that occurs to everyone born into artificial borders.
The contempt for the less privileged on the part of the elite perhaps exceeds the contempt the white colonialists had for their black subjects and betrays an element of self-hatred that is the legacy of four centuries of slavery and colonialism. My father had studied in the imperial heartland in the days when a white bus conductor could shout at the wog customer to “piss off back to the African bush and take his white, nigger-loving bitch with him,” as my mother relayed it to me. Shortly after my mother left Nigeria for the last time, she asked Alexander, our cook, to look after her children. I can’t imagine what motivated her, but I remember the puzzled look on his face as he showed me the blue aerogram letter. By and by my father came home, and Alexander showed it to him too. Though younger and bigger, all Alexander could do was attempt to protect himself as my father rained blows on him; he backed away into the kitchen and out the back door, where his upper right arm broke the glass panel. His wife had recently given birth, but they were out of the “boys’ quarters” within the hour. I never saw him again.
One sees such behavior again and again in the public sphere. Take, for instance, the case of Ike Ekweremadu, who served as senator of Enugu State in the Igbo-speaking Southeast from 2003 to 2023 and was paid handsomely from the proceeds of the country’s oil and gas reserves. By the time he left government, he was taking home the equivalent of $9,000 a month, although his actual salary was $471.25; the remaining charges are recorded as hardship, constituency, furniture, newspaper, wardrobe, fuelling, motor, recess, house maintenance, utilities, domestic staff, entertainment, personal assistant, and duty tour, along with something called estacode, or travel allowance for more desirable, civilized climes. He has two houses in London, three in Florida, and eight in Dubai, this last being a favorite with Nigerian politicians (whether or not they are celebrating their mother’s birthday), who between them have invested nearly a billion dollars in the Emirates in less than two decades. They are the second-largest group of foreign property owners and have invested in sprawling refuges for when the country finally implodes in the impending second civil war as a direct result of their shenanigans. But their survivors’ party won’t include Ekweremadu himself, currently serving time in the UK for arranging for a twenty-one-year-old street trader from Lagos to travel to London to have one of his kidneys harvested for Ekweremadu’s daughter. The operation was to cost £80,000; the intended victim was to receive just £7,000, and he only realized what was about to be done to him when he was questioned by doctors at the hospital. Ekweremadu was tried under the 2015 Modern Slavery Act, which probably mystified him, given that he didn’t see the young man as a human being. He was expendable in much the same way that the slave traders of old saw his own forebears.
Ekweremadu’s daughter, for her part, had received all her secondary education in the UK, one beneficiary of the $30 million or so that Nigerians spend annually giving their children a British education in the colonial heartland. They don’t even hide it. The previous president, Buhari, openly celebrated his daughter’s graduation from “the prestigious Ravensbourne University in England” on social media, complete with pictures of her mother attending her convocation.
Or look at Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed, our would-be vice president in the 2023 elections and a self-declared progressive—“Nigerians must take their country back”—whose daughter recently graduated from the University of Reading. Yet Datti Baba-Ahmed is also founder and prochancellor of Baze University here in Nigeria, which is described as one of the best in the country; and this was the man who once called for the extermination of Nigeria’s LGBTQ community. Plus ça change . . .
None of this is peculiar to Nigeria, which simply suffers a more dramatic version of the sub-Saharan African malaise on account of its population and potential. The problem is even worse in Françafrique, the derogatory term for the former French colonies whose independence was only granted on condition that they signed cooperation agreements that gave France control over their currency and considerable mineral resources. Captain Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso has called the arrangement “the most barbaric, the most violent form of imperialist neo-colonialism,” akin to the slavery that “continues to impose itself on us.” In power since September 2022, he has survived more than a dozen assassination attempts; his predecessor, Thomas Sankara, wasn’t so lucky, killed for demanding that “we must choose either champagne for a few or safe drinking water for all.” Traoré appears to believe that Africa’s salvation lies in Russia, hence his cozying up to Putin.
Africa’s salvation lies in Africa. Only when we grasp that will we rid ourselves of the foreigners—French as well as Russians—who have never had our best interests at heart. But first we must free ourselves of mental slavery; in the words of Fẹlá Kútì: “They don’ release you but you never release yourself.” There is some hope in the new crop of younger leaders, including Traoré but also Bassirou Diemaye Faye of Senegal (forty-four), Colonel Assimi Goïta of Mali (forty-one), and Duma Boko of Botswana (fifty-five). Africa is demographically the youngest continent—the mean age is about twenty—but with the oldest heads of state. Tinúbú of Nigeria is easily in his eighties, though he claims to be ten years younger; Alassane Ouattara of Côte d’Ivoire is eighty-three, and Paul Biya of Cameroon is ninety-one. Referring to Robert Mugabe beginning a new term as president of Zimbabwe in 2013 at the age of eighty-nine, the Sudanese British billionaire Mo Ibrahim once quipped that these ancient African leaders could only be leading their people to the grave.
Young people pouring out of schools and universities with few if any prospects must increasingly look at the elders leading them nowhere and will sooner or later do something about it, for instance nationalizing the gold mines that were once exclusively controlled by French companies and their native collaborators. Niger is doing the same with its uranium mines. The older generation is complacent but dwindling: in Nigeria, for instance, the people over sixty-five are about 3 percent of the population but monopolize power. Even now, politicians in the north, especially where the poverty is deepest, hardly go to their constituencies for fear of being attacked by hungry mobs. African self-determinism might be an idea whose time has come at last, in which case we will be left wondering at our collusion in our own enslavement for so long.