₦airaland Forum

Go home. Not in shame never in shame but in the full, unhurried dignity of one who has finally remembered their own name.

You came with your gifts wrapped in ambition, your hands carrying centuries of ingenuity that built civilizations long before they had a word for civilization. You arrived not as a beggar but as a contributor, not as a shadow but as a source of light. Yet they placed you under fluorescent lamps in cold offices, asked you to spell your name again, to explain your country again, to justify your presence again. And now, emboldened by the shamelessness of a leader whose ignorance wears a suit, they have dispatched uniformed men to remind you that you are unwelcome in the land you helped build. Do not waste your tears on them.

Do not be humiliated by a man who reads from a script he cannot understand, whose contempt for Africa flows not from knowledge but from the hollow arrogance of one who has confused loud words for wisdom. He who denigrates a continent of 54 nations, a billion souls, a thousand tongues, and the oldest human footprints on this earth he does not deserve your rage. He has earned only your pity. But pity is a luxury. Your time is more valuable than that.

Think of what you left behind. Not the poverty they zoomed into in their documentaries to justify their superiority but the real Africa: the laughter that spills out of open windows at midnight, the market at dawn that smells of groundnut oil and fresh possibility, the grandmother whose soup is a philosophy, whose hands are a library. Think of the red earth that knows your blood because it has held the bones of your people for ten thousand years. No American suburb, no matter how manicured its lawns, can offer you what the land of your origin holds in a single fistful of soil.

They will tell you their country is the greatest. Let them have that story. A nation of volcanoes and tornadoes, of mass shootings in schools and prayers that change nothing, of a healthcare system that will bankrupt you for having the audacity to fall ill this is the paradise they are guarding with such vigilance? Let them guard it. You were never meant to be kept anywhere. You were meant to move freely across a world that, at its bones, belongs to everyone.

They have no real food only the borrowed bread of other people's cultures, pressed flat between two halves of a bun and called civilization. No jollof rice smoky from an open fire. No egusi that took all morning to make. No suya wrapped in newspaper at the roadside, eaten standing up, which is how the best things in life are eaten. What they call cuisine, we call convenience. What they call fast food, we call the absence of love.

Remember Wole Soyinka that great lion of Aké, that Nobel laureate whose pen has always been sharper than any sword they could forge who looked at America and its careless talkers, its men who reduce the world to slogans and the slogans to insults, and simply said: no. Not with a fist raised. Not with a press conference. But with the calm, devastating authority of a man who knows his worth and refuses to negotiate it. He packed his conscience and his genius and he came home. And home received him as home always receives its children without condition, without paperwork, without asking him to prove he belonged.

Africa is not waiting for you with pity. Africa is waiting for you with need the urgent, electric need of a continent that is rising, that is building, that is tired of watching its finest minds water other people's gardens while their own soil goes unplanted. Your engineering, your medicine, your art, your business mind, your stubborn refusal to be diminished bring it home. The soil will know what to do with it.

They stole our gold and called it trade. They stole our labour and called it history. They stole our art and placed it in their museums under foreign names. Now they want to steal the one thing we have left our people. Do not let them have even that. Not by force, not by the slow theft of exhaustion and humiliation. Walk out on your own terms. Turn your back not in defeat but in the sovereign indifference of one who has found something better.

You are not leaving because you failed. You are leaving because you are finished with them. There is a difference as wide as the Atlantic that same ocean your ancestors crossed in chains, which you will now cross in a plane, with your passport and your pride and your future folded neatly in your carry-on bag. Let that crossing be a reclamation.

Let your departure be as deliberate as Soyinka's. As quiet as dignity always is. As final as a door closed gently not slammed, for slamming is for those who are angry, and you are not angry. You are simply done. Done with the cold weather that never agreed with your bones. Done with the food that has no memory, no ceremony, no love in its making. Done with proving yourself to people who decided before you arrived what you were worth. Done with a nation that has made enemies in every corner of the world and cannot understand why.

Come home to Accra's golden corridors of ambition. Come home to Lagos, that furious, magnificent beast of a city that never sleeps and never apologizes for its hunger. Come home to Nairobi's skyline lifting itself taller each season. Come home to Dakar, to Kigali, to Addis, to Abuja, to Johannesburg and her complicated, beautiful soul. Come home to the village too do not be ashamed of the village for the village is where the roots go deepest and where the stories are truest.

Their America was never yours. You leased it with your labour and your loneliness and your Sunday phone calls home and your silent endurance of a thousand small degradations. The lease is up. You are not renewing. Collect yourself. Collect your children. Collect your name say it the way your mother says it, the full version, all the syllables, without apology and walk.
Walk the way our elders walked out of their colonizers' offices: slowly, deliberately, with the knowledge that history is long and the last word has not yet been spoken. Walk knowing that the same sun that rises over their skyline rises first over ours earlier, warmer, and with the full approval of a sky that has always loved Africa best.

The continent did not forget you while you were gone. It kept your place at the table. It kept the fire low, but burning.

Leave their America. It was never yours to lose.
Africa calls her children home and she is not asking twice.

Womiloju. blog

Nice writeup, but this will not help when bandit ask us to do front jump and beat us crazy.

Return home to where? After Tinubu has plunged the nation into debt and insecurity?..

Me self dey look for how to escape, even if na Chad or Bukina-Faso.

An impressive piece of literature and that, really is where it ends.

The United States will remain one of the greatest symbols of modern civilisation long after our generation is gone. Regardless of criticism or bad press, America continues to represent aspiration, opportunity, and ambition on a scale few nations can rival no matter how much they try.

For people across the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, Europe, and Africa, the American dream still carries a unique global appeal. To many, it remains the ultimate destination for opportunity, innovation, influence, and personal advancement.

Even among its loudest critics, if presented with a choice between American, Russian, Iranian, Saudi Arabian, or Chinese citizenship, many would still choose America without hesitation.

So, you can keep conjuring grammar all you want, America has come to stay and even the children of their adversaries are living in the American dream.

aaaaabbbbbccccc:
Nice writeup, but this will not help when bandit ask us to do front jump and beat us crazy.

Lol, We can only go home if insecurity is fixed and the corrupt politians removed.

Come back and vote tinubu so you can understand better 🤣😂😂 some tribe in West will cry 😭😭😭 after this election

Return Where?
You're returning to a worse place than when you left oh.
You have already experienced a better life so coming back here will really feel like backwards movement oh.

Stay put until you're forced to leave.

😊 it's funny that you're advising people living like human to come and get treated like cows by fulani bandits

Arrant nonsense complete rubbish it's better to be second class citizens over there than to become third class or fourth class citizens (after the politicians, Fulani and there cows) in your own father land without basic life amenities

True but its really not easy.

Even the writer of this episode wish he's an immigrant in America, it's not all advise someone will take o, this is the voice of village people

womilojublog:
Go home. Not in shame never in shame but in the full, unhurried dignity of one who has finally remembered their own name.

You came with your gifts wrapped in ambition, your hands carrying centuries of ingenuity that built civilizations long before they had a word for civilization. You arrived not as a beggar but as a contributor, not as a shadow but as a source of light. Yet they placed you under fluorescent lamps in cold offices, asked you to spell your name again, to explain your country again, to justify your presence again. And now, emboldened by the shamelessness of a leader whose ignorance wears a suit, they have dispatched uniformed men to remind you that you are unwelcome in the land you helped build. Do not waste your tears on them.

Do not be humiliated by a man who reads from a script he cannot understand, whose contempt for Africa flows not from knowledge but from the hollow arrogance of one who has confused loud words for wisdom. He who denigrates a continent of 54 nations, a billion souls, a thousand tongues, and the oldest human footprints on this earth he does not deserve your rage. He has earned only your pity. But pity is a luxury. Your time is more valuable than that.

Think of what you left behind. Not the poverty they zoomed into in their documentaries to justify their superiority but the real Africa: the laughter that spills out of open windows at midnight, the market at dawn that smells of groundnut oil and fresh possibility, the grandmother whose soup is a philosophy, whose hands are a library. Think of the red earth that knows your blood because it has held the bones of your people for ten thousand years. No American suburb, no matter how manicured its lawns, can offer you what the land of your origin holds in a single fistful of soil.

They will tell you their country is the greatest. Let them have that story. A nation of volcanoes and tornadoes, of mass shootings in schools and prayers that change nothing, of a healthcare system that will bankrupt you for having the audacity to fall ill this is the paradise they are guarding with such vigilance? Let them guard it. You were never meant to be kept anywhere. You were meant to move freely across a world that, at its bones, belongs to everyone.

They have no real food only the borrowed bread of other people's cultures, pressed flat between two halves of a bun and called civilization. No jollof rice smoky from an open fire. No egusi that took all morning to make. No suya wrapped in newspaper at the roadside, eaten standing up, which is how the best things in life are eaten. What they call cuisine, we call convenience. What they call fast food, we call the absence of love.

Remember Wole Soyinka that great lion of Aké, that Nobel laureate whose pen has always been sharper than any sword they could forge who looked at America and its careless talkers, its men who reduce the world to slogans and the slogans to insults, and simply said: no. Not with a fist raised. Not with a press conference. But with the calm, devastating authority of a man who knows his worth and refuses to negotiate it. He packed his conscience and his genius and he came home. And home received him as home always receives its children without condition, without paperwork, without asking him to prove he belonged.

Africa is not waiting for you with pity. Africa is waiting for you with need the urgent, electric need of a continent that is rising, that is building, that is tired of watching its finest minds water other people's gardens while their own soil goes unplanted. Your engineering, your medicine, your art, your business mind, your stubborn refusal to be diminished bring it home. The soil will know what to do with it.

They stole our gold and called it trade. They stole our labour and called it history. They stole our art and placed it in their museums under foreign names. Now they want to steal the one thing we have left our people. Do not let them have even that. Not by force, not by the slow theft of exhaustion and humiliation. Walk out on your own terms. Turn your back not in defeat but in the sovereign indifference of one who has found something better.

You are not leaving because you failed. You are leaving because you are finished with them. There is a difference as wide as the Atlantic that same ocean your ancestors crossed in chains, which you will now cross in a plane, with your passport and your pride and your future folded neatly in your carry-on bag. Let that crossing be a reclamation.

Let your departure be as deliberate as Soyinka's. As quiet as dignity always is. As final as a door closed gently not slammed, for slamming is for those who are angry, and you are not angry. You are simply done. Done with the cold weather that never agreed with your bones. Done with the food that has no memory, no ceremony, no love in its making. Done with proving yourself to people who decided before you arrived what you were worth. Done with a nation that has made enemies in every corner of the world and cannot understand why.

Come home to Accra's golden corridors of ambition. Come home to Lagos, that furious, magnificent beast of a city that never sleeps and never apologizes for its hunger. Come home to Nairobi's skyline lifting itself taller each season. Come home to Dakar, to Kigali, to Addis, to Abuja, to Johannesburg and her complicated, beautiful soul. Come home to the village too do not be ashamed of the village for the village is where the roots go deepest and where the stories are truest.

Their America was never yours. You leased it with your labour and your loneliness and your Sunday phone calls home and your silent endurance of a thousand small degradations. The lease is up. You are not renewing. Collect yourself. Collect your children. Collect your name say it the way your mother says it, the full version, all the syllables, without apology and walk.
Walk the way our elders walked out of their colonizers' offices: slowly, deliberately, with the knowledge that history is long and the last word has not yet been spoken. Walk knowing that the same sun that rises over their skyline rises first over ours earlier, warmer, and with the full approval of a sky that has always loved Africa best.

The continent did not forget you while you were gone. It kept your place at the table. It kept the fire low, but burning.

Leave their America. It was never yours to lose.
Africa calls her children home and she is not asking twice.

Womiloju. blog

Soyinka that has been begging to return to the United States?

Empty writing! Return to a home that is burnt, right?

Who wrote this crap ?


Leave America for what or where ? This hellhole ?

Where 1kg of gas is almost 2k in a space of one week ?

The families of those in America must be cvrsing womilojublog now.

Pocohantas said every family needs at least one generous high earner.

You think it's a joke ?

Do not be humiliated by a man who reads from a script he cannot understand,

Please mention one thing our leaders can understand

You are right but who will fill the hungers ravaging the land,? Who will solve power and security problems for us? Who will save the bleeding nation from corruption that has eaten deep into our fabric?
Until we rise up and take responsibility for our actions and stops blaming the West.

A call to "come home" without addressing why people left in the the first place is not encouragement — it is poetry masquerading as advice.

The hypocrisy of many Nigerians is appalling. I stand to be corrected, but I’m about 75% certain that this writer would jubilate if offered the opportunity to relocate to the West.

That’s how one of them was preaching while secretly processing her japa. When she eventually moved and was confronted, she claimed to have the right to change her mind anytime. Meanwhile, the japa process isn’t a one-day thing. That means as she was preaching, she was working on it deeply.
SMH.

On another note, the emphasis is to leave. Leave and to settle at where? Was it not something that prompted them to leave Nigeria in droves? Has the country become better or worse since then?

Some people will finish 3 bottles of trophy, carry toothpick, and start typing nonsense.

Despite all the wahala, diaspora remittances is still a major driving force of our informal economy. Most of your customers with no job are able to patronize you because of their people abroad. Think!

Precious201010:
Return home to where? After Tinubu has plunged the nation into debt and insecurity?..

Me self dey look for how to escape, even if na Chad or Bukina-Faso.

Yup
Ani was caused by Tinubu
Maitasine
1 million boya
Shina Rambo
Boko started under Tinubu
Nigeria was perfect before Tinubu came

And you sef go claim say you go school fa

Insecurity will fix itself Abi

Oritna94:
Lol, We can only go home if insecurity is fixed and the corrupt politians removed.

Which home? Do you have a home? Is this hellhole a home to you?

We should leave their America and stay in Tinubu Nigeria? How........



No matter how bad it is in America, Nigeria is worst even security wise. A country where death, kidnapping, bandit attack etc is no longer news everyday on news FrontPage, a country you can't talk without been witchhunted. I wonder what's the motivation of an average Nigerian living in Nigeria, even sycophants like Seyi law kept their families abroad and gallivates around with police escort here.

Nastrademus:
😊 it's funny that you're advising people living like human to come and get treated like cows by fulani bandits

so humans are docile like cows?

Bello Turji is waiting for you in the airport

MIKOLOWISKA:
Yup
Ani was caused by Tinubu
Maitasine
1 million boya
Shina Rambo
Boko started under Tinubu
Nigeria was perfect before Tinubu came

And you sef go claim say you go school fa

it did not start under Tinubu, but he promised to handle those things...

Just like when a company is having a problem, and U applied for the job with the promise of solving those issues.... So has he fulfilled the promises that he made?

MIKOLOWISKA:
Insecurity will fix itself Abi

So it is people living abroad that will come home and fix insecurity, the same factor that drove many of them abroad with some having lost precious family members while everyone around them saw it as business as usual?

we'll surely come back home not in casket. Some of us are already back home sef.Once the needful I'm putting up on Nig is done.I'm coming back home .Wife/children stay back here.

Quite interesting but too long. I will read it all some other time.

The old corn hair man will give up in 2 years time..People wey don 🏃‍♂️ 🏃‍♀️ 🏃‍♂️ 🏃‍♀️ 🏃‍♂️ 🏃‍♀️ enter Canada,to Europe will return back In Feb 2029 .

E nor easy 🏃‍♀️ from those pipu

Na so e easy?
After spending 15-30m on an average...