Romanticizing Home

고향의 환상|: Two Months in Nigeria and What It Taught Me About Belonging — The One with Doc Ayomide | Episode 39 (2025)

“My favorite country would be one that has the social cohesiveness of Nigeria with the advanced infrastructure of the US. — Mo! (2025)”

“Classism is a huge issue in our country. We talk a lot about ethnicity and tribalism, but we rarely talk about class- even within the same tribes. It’s so deeply rooted that many people don’t even realize it exists. You see it in how people speak to you: the moment they realize you have money or status, the respect suddenly increases. I’ve seen it most clearly in how people treat domestic staff, as if being in that role makes someone ‘less than.’ That realization was shocking to me, especially when it came from people I thought were kind and respectful. But at some point, you have to admit that behavior reflects belief.” — Doc Ayomide (2025)

The Privilege of Disillusionment

There is a particular kind of homesickness that only distance creates. When you have been away long enough, memory does what it does best: it edits. The generator noise fades. The traffic becomes “vibrant.” The systemic dysfunction that drove you away starts to look like “character.” And somewhere in that editing room, you start saying things like “I miss home” and “maybe I should go back.”

I spent two months in Nigeria. Not visiting. Living. And what I brought back was not just stories, but a reckoning, with the gap between the Nigeria I remembered and the one that still exists for the people who never left. More than that, it was a reckoning with myself. With how much I had changed, how much had not, and how much I had been quietly rewriting in my own memory.

I want to name the privilege first, because it matters: being able to leave, being able to return, and being able to afford the nearly one million naira it cost to get my daughter a passport. Privilege does not erase frustration, and frustration does not cancel gratitude. This whole conversation, all of it, exists in that tension. And that is exactly where the most honest diaspora conversations have to begin.

Why We Romanticize What We Have Left Behind

I brought this question to Doc Ayomide, who joined me for this episode, because if anyone was going to give me a clear-eyed answer, it was him. Why do we do this? Why, when we are far removed from the conditions we once lived in, do we start softening them? His answer was measured, precise, and a little uncomfortable. “It is a combination of things,” he said. “There is the comparison thing, the greener grass. We compare ourselves to others, to our past selves, and sometimes to imagined future selves. That one is especially pernicious because that self does not exist yet.”

But the hardest hit was what he said about adaptation. “We are good at adapting; it is almost our superpower. The problem with adapting is that once you have adapted, that becomes your new normal. So you are in Nigeria hustling, you know it holds a lot, but you are cool, you are happy. And then you go somewhere else. Over time, what was your old normal is no longer normal. But you do not know that, because now you are comparing yourself to your past self, to how you felt when you were there, the feeling of being at home. And you conveniently edited it out.”

He reached for an example from psychiatry that stopped me mid-conversation. “When people are depressed, they tend to remember the sad things. If you ask someone who is depressed about their life, they will often say things like, ‘I have never had anything good happen to me, and they genuinely believe it, because in that moment, all the good things are almost filtered out.” The reverse is true of distance. When you are far from home, the warmth stays and the difficulty dissolves. You are not lying to yourself exactly. Your memory is just doing what it was built to do.

“Between comparison, adaptation, and memory,” he concluded, “we just set ourselves up for this huge fall, romanticizing our school friends, our home, whatever lives we have left behind.”

I crashed. Not immediately. There was a grace period, pre-Christmas and post-Christmas, when I was still the shiny returnee. “The shine had rubbed off,” as Doc Ayomide put it. “The new customer is gone.” By the third week, what remained was the daily grind of a system that runs on who you know and how much you are willing to pay.

The Classism We Have Stopped Naming

One of the things that struck me hardest when I returned was not the infrastructure or the bureaucracy; it was the classism. We talk endlessly about tribalism in Nigeria, but classism gets a pass. And as Doc Ayomide observed, “It is so pernicious that people do not even realize it.”

It showed up everywhere. In how prices shifted the moment a vendor sensed you had money. In the quiet cultural assumption that some people matter less. But nowhere was it more visible than in the treatment of domestic staff. I found myself in homes with people I knew to be warm, kind, and respectable, watching them speak to domestic workers with a dismissiveness that genuinely shocked me.

“Immediately, my mouth was almost like, wow,” I told Doc Ayomide. “I know you as a person. I know that you don’t believe this, but why are you behaving in this way to this person?”

Not cruel people. Good people operating inside a cultural framework that had not yet built a language for the dignity of that labor, and who genuinely could not see what they were doing. That, to me, was the most unsettling part. Not the obvious cruelty, the invisible kind. “There is this belief,” I observed, “that if somebody is here with you as domestic staff, they are less than. And that was the scariest part of it for me.”

Doc Ayomide put it in a broader context. “Christianity, long centuries of Christianity, has so shaped Western thought that some things just look obvious and normal. But actually, for most of the world, those things are not a given. One of those things is the idea that everybody is equal.” He was careful not to be reductive. Individuals try to do the right thing everywhere. But culturally, he asked: “Is this even recognized as a normal thing or as a bad thing? The point is not about those individual people. The point is the cultural framework.”

I grew up with a different model. My mother fostered children, sent them to school, sat them at the family table, and raised them as her own. Returning and watching the contrast play out in real time, in homes I loved, with people I respected, was one of the most disorienting parts of being back.

It is worth saying clearly: this is not an attack on Nigeria or Nigerians. It is an observation about what happens when cultural frameworks go unexamined, and an invitation to those of us who have had the privilege of distance and perspective to name what we see when we return. “The human rights activist that America has kind of entrenched in me came out a lot,” I admitted. And I am not apologizing for that.

The Bureaucracy That Bleeds You Dry

If classism was the emotional weight, bureaucracy was the practical nightmare. I needed to obtain a Nigerian passport for my daughter. What should have been a straightforward process became a months-long ordeal involving a letter from the Lagos High Court, biometric capture, a letter from the Ministry of Interior, multiple affidavits, and several round-trip flights to Abuja, because Lagos immigration refused to process it.

The reason given? She is light-skinned. The passport official looked at me and said, plainly: “Madam, we no dey do this kind thing for Lagos.” As if the shade of a child’s skin determines where her citizenship can be processed. My mother was told to take her outside and keep her out of the lobby so she would not be seen. The optics, apparently, were the concern. Not the adoption certificates. Not the documentation establishing Nigerian citizenship. The optics.

“Every transaction requires a contact,” I reflected. “Someone at immigration. Someone at the Ministry. Someone who can help you navigate a system designed to extract money at every turn.” My phone filled up with names, not connections, but middlemen. “Mustapha Abuja.” “Immigration Balogun.” I found myself asking: Are we really forming connections, or just hustling around one another?

That is not hustle culture. That is a country eating its own citizens. And the most exhausting part is that the people doing it do not see themselves as the problem. They are surviving, too.

The Small Mercies: Teachers Who Actually See Children

In the middle of all of this, something unexpected happened. I enrolled my daughter in a Nigerian school for the duration of our stay, genuinely bracing for disaster. In the US, her kindergarten teacher emailed on the second day of school to flag concerns. I had learned to dread that notification sound.

What I got instead was patience. The school called once to ask about food allergies. That was the only call. Every time I arrived to collect her, already tensed for the next complaint, the teachers said the same thing: “She is doing great. We love her here. She has a lot of energy, but we are managing it.” Two days after we left Nigeria, a teacher sent a WhatsApp message: “We miss Arii so much. How is she doing?”

“Can you come to Oklahoma?” I told them. “I want you to come and teach them how to teach children.”

The contrast was real and instructive. Nigerian teachers, in my experience, operate with a collectivist understanding of childhood. The child is not solely the parent’s project. She belongs to the community of adults around her, and those adults share responsibility for her wellbeing, her adjustment, her flourishing. When something is hard, the response is to hold the child, not to send a report documenting the problem.

In the US, where emails about behavioral concerns arrive before solutions, where a five-year-old can already be described as “behind,” where the assumption is that parents will supplement in-home teaching, the burden falls differently. “They expect so much and put a lot of burden on the parents,” I reflected. “They seem to have these huge expectations without the proper support for kids.”

I left Nigeria genuinely wishing I could have bottled those teachers and brought them home with me.

The Things That Make You Miss It Anyway

For all the frustration, I still carry Nigeria with me. There is the ease of being around people who understand your reference points without needing a briefing. The communal living, where someone’s birthday becomes a shared event by default, where extended family is not an obligation but an assumption. The resilience, and I mean this specifically, the Nigerian ability to find something to laugh about even when things are genuinely terrible. The memes about T-Pain are circulating while the economy burns. The jokes told inside pain, not despite it.

When I returned to the US and found “BREAKING NEWS” filling every screen every few minutes, something had shifted in me. I could see it for what it was. “You all need to calm down,” I thought. “Americans act like the sky is falling because something happened in America, but the rest of the world is not dying.” Nigeria recalibrated me. It reminded me that crises are relative, that survival is not exceptional, that people find ways to live inside systems that should not work, and that this is worth something.

I also returned more aware of how thoroughly I had absorbed American individualism. In Nigeria, privacy is a Western luxury nobody has agreed to enforce. Neighbors know your business. Family is involved in your decisions. Your situation is, to some degree, communal. It can feel invasive. But it is also a connection, the kind that insulates you from the particular loneliness that can quietly settle in when you are living abroad and nobody knows if you are okay.

The Country That Does Not Exist Yet

By the end of our conversation, Doc Ayomide and I arrived at something honest. “My favorite country,” I told him, “would be a country that has the social cohesiveness of Nigeria, the communal living, combined with the advanced infrastructure of the US.”

“So,” he said. “Heaven.”

“Exactly. And thank God I am a Christian. At least I have something to look forward to.”

It is funny. But it is also true. Diasporans live in this in-between space indefinitely, comparing, nostalgic for a version of home that may never have existed quite the way they remember it, and aware that the version of abroad they chose comes with its own particular costs. The grass is not greener. It is different grass, with different weeds, and you spend a long time learning which ones you can live with.

Three weeks is the sweet spot. Long enough to reconnect and remember why you love it. Short enough to leave before the bureaucracy grinds you down, before the saturation hits, before you start questioning what you were thinking. Long enough to feel it. Short enough to still miss it when you leave.

A Final Word

Going home after years away is not a homecoming. It is a reckoning. You see the country you left with eyes that have changed, and sometimes those eyes are not kind. But critique is not rejection. I can call out classism and corruption and love Nigeria fiercely in the same breath. I can say “I am not doing this again” and mean it completely, while also knowing that Nigeria gave me something I would not trade, a cultural heritage that keeps me grounded, a resilience I did not earn alone, and a sense of humor that has carried me further than I would like to admit.

The challenge for those of us in the diaspora is not choosing between here and there. It is learning to hold both at once, the frustration and the love, the privilege and the guilt, the homesickness and the relief of having left. It is accepting that you can miss something deeply and still not want to live inside it. That you can criticise a place without betraying it. That home, in the end, may not be a place you return to but a set of reference points you carry, a way of seeing the world that was shaped there and that no amount of distance fully dissolves.

Nigeria is not perfect. Nowhere is. But maybe that is not the point. Maybe the question was never “should I go back?” but rather “what do I do with everything it gave me?”

Three weeks next time. Maybe four if the WiFi is cooperating.

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