I’ve seen how people leave their homes, some for survival, others for adventure, but all are in search for better, talk of opportunities, safety, or just a fresh start. I've seen some of my neighbors disappear to America, I have some of my cousins now settled in UK, I even have childhood friends and classmates who just send money home all the way from America. Some return, some visit, some don’t. Its funny how someone can leave oshodi here in Lagos with a thick accent combined with slangs and return after a year struggling to pronounce “Eba”(cassava flake) correctly. Beyond jokes, migration is more than just crossing borders, you always carry a pieces of you, of your past into that future/new place.
Migration to me is just like the social media, it is both a blessing and a burden. Migration is a blessing because it exposes people to new ways of thinking, different cultures and better opportunities and a burden because it forces them to drop familiarity, they begin to exist in places where they are sometimes if not most times treated like outsiders. Imagine being in a country where only your skin makes people assume things about you. Most Nigerians abroad tell stories of their struggle to fit in, of the need to work twice as hard so as to be taken serious.
Still, I can’t deny the beauty of cultural diversity. When different cultures mix, they tend to create something powerful, there are new ideas, when it is music, you love it differently. Diversity teaches us empathy, it makes us to see the world through another’s eyes, it makes us remember we are human and to appreciate what makes us different. A friend convince me to taste a certain food some years ago, and I still crave for more, the food does not look sweet on the outside, but just tasting it made me order more while traveling back, that is how humans are, we can't judge until we've experienced it.
Sometimes, things get tensed and may lead to conflict and when people from different backgrounds meet, misunderstandings are bound to happen.
I saw a Nigerian criticize his brother for forgetting where he came from. We want them to succeed but not change too much. Is that not a strange contradiction, we always want them to be proud of their roots but to not let those roots hold them back.
Even in Nigeria, where there are over 250 ethnic groups, cultural diversity is both a gift and a challenge. Sometimes, it creates unity, like when we all come together to celebrate things and owr own that is making wave globally.
There arw other times that it creates division, for instance when tribal differences turn into political tensions. But the truth is, the more we embrace our differences, the stronger we become. The world is moving fast, and countries that welcome/allow for diversity tend to grow faster and innovate better.
The truth is, people will always move, cultures will always mix, and the world will always change. Now, are we going to flow with it or fight against it?
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