Diaspora Jazz

We observe, with increasing alarm, that some Nigerians, particularly expatriate Nigerians, wrongly refer to any and any Nigerian that happens to be living outside of the boundaries of Nigeria, as a “Disaporan”. Unfortunately, the term, “Diasporan”, has been frequently misused as the newspeak for “expatriate Nigerians”. We are shocked, amazed, but also amused by all the confusion. And so, we wish to initiate the process of focusing constructive attention on the Nigerian Diaspora, and, hopefully, arouse healthy deliberations about certain interesting developments that have so far arisen from the generally fuzzy notion of a Nigerian Diaspora.

For a start, the term, “Disaporan” is simply bad English, or at best, it is both a neologism, and an oxymoron. In simple Queen’s English, the Latin-derived term “Diaspora” refers to a subset of any human population that is dispersed far away from its indigenous habitat (roots). The term “Diaspora”, contrary to popular misconception and regular abuse, particularly by expatriate Nigerians, is not a synonym for “overseas”, or “abroad”, or “yonder”. “The Diaspora” is not a place: it is a group of non-indigenous people living in a different territory from their origin.

Incidentally, Diasporas abound worldwide. For example: The Israelites (ancient Palestinians) in captivity in Babylon (ancient Iraq), Argentine Germans, Australian Britons, Haitian Igbos, Ugandan Indians, South African Dutch, Cuban Efiks, Texan Kalabaris, Brazilian Yorubas, Kano Libyans, Sierra Leonnean Nigerians, Cameroonian Ijaws, Egyptian Hausas, Californian Koreans, American Vietnamese, Nigerian Béninois, Hawaiian Japanese, Gabonese Igbos, Peruvian Japanese, Indian Africans, Ethiopian Jews, and so on, and so forth, including exiles, and refugees living in other lands.

Moreover, within Nigeria, myriad local mini-Diasporas exist. For example: the Nigerian Lebanese Community, the Kalabari Community in Abuja, the Beriberi Community in Rivers State, the Igbo Community in Kebbi State, the Hausa Community in Shagamu, the Edo Community in Kaduna, the Ijaw Community in Ajegunle, the Itsekiri Community in Abonnema, “self-governing” communes of nomadic beggars from Niger Republic throughout Nigeria, the Yoruba Community in Sabon Gari, Kano, the Urhobo Community in Oyingbo waterside, the Wãwá Community in Jos, and the Brazilian Community in Campos, Lagos.

And so, to simplistically refer to any and any persons (such as students, holiday-makers, illegal immigrants, active dual citizens of Nigeria, 419 operatives/facilitators, re-naturalised Nigerians, or even Ambassadors, and diplomatic staff), who happen to be transiently outside of the map of Nigeria, as “Diasporans”, who, by some patently foolish insinuation, are then presumed to be automatically imbued with relatively superior moral, mental, material, and/or spiritual attributes, over and above their Nigerian origins, is to stretch wishful thinking beyond its limits of elasticity, rather recklessly. More disturbing, is the observation that some so-called “Diasporans” actually doggedly believe their self-deluding “holier-than-thou” postures towards Nigeria, its citizens, and indeed any thing Nigerian, to a point of nauseating paternalism.

In order to place the problem in a clearer context, we will take the liberty to provide a snap overview of various Diasporas in the USA, vis-à-vis their impact on both their host country, the United States of America, and their countries of origin, in comparison with the impact of the Nigerian Diaspora in the USA, on both the United States of America, and Nigeria. We will deliberate on emergent issues, and identify useful lessons, in the interest of progress.

According to a US government census report, Blacks, (and that includes many Nigerians residing in the United States of America), have acquired more material comfort, and have also made significant contributions in science, technology, medicine, education, and business, over the past two decades. Such tales of progress in Black America are more than just academic or mere statistical data. Indeed, in real life, Anthony Akpati is a specialist in rocket dynamics at Boeing Corporation. Oprah Winfrey has joined the world’s top billionaire’s club. Professors Nnaji and Emeagwali belong to the avant garde of leading-edge technology. The Nigerian culinary delights (akpu, akamu, tuwo shinkafi, inyan, edikaikong, moin-moin, akara) of Mr. Ajayi Ojo, a Paris-trained Nigerian chef, are the talk of New York. Femi Oke, or Michael Okwu of CNN, is to Nigeria, what Chrisianne Anampour is to Iran: they are global benchmarks, or role models of professionalism, from the Third World. And of course, retired General Colin Powell has become a much-touted showman for the foreign policy thrust of US President George Bush (The Younger).

In the year 2002, for example, several Black executives, including some Nigerians, grabbed top executive positions in AOL-Time-Warner, Merrill-Lynch, and American Express. Add to that, the several US dollar-denominated multimillionaire Black superstar musicians, athletes, comedians, entrepreneurs, social workers, professionals, actors, and actresses, many of them, Nigerians living in the USA. The list is impressive, and laudable.

However, another recent US government report found that nearly one million Black children, (and that includes many Nigerian children), live, not in poverty, but in extreme poverty, in the United States of America today. The contrast to the usual awe-inducing tales about prosperity, in the same United States of America, cannot be more glaring. A multitude of destitute Black persons and criminal gangs plague many Black communities. There are nearly one million Blacks behind bars in the United States of America today. The widening rift between the Black “haves” and the Black “have-nots” has been ignored by Blacks. Class tensions among Blacks, though distorted by benign White racism, and hidden from the rest of the USA, have long existed, and are getting more and more strained with time. Therefore, for the Nigerian Diaspora, the story is not all that so rosy.

Again, according to US census data, between 1975 and 1995, the number of Black professionals (i.e. doctors, lawyers, bankers, engineers, scientists, technicians, teachers, administrators, and business managers) has nearly tripled, and the number of Black university graduates has doubled. By 2000, more than 15% of Black households earned more than US$50,000 annually. The top 20% of Black families earned nearly 50% of all Black income. In short, in the United States of America, just like it is in Nigeria, Black wealth, is now concentrated in just a few Black hands!

In the 1950s, sociologists warned that many Blacks in the United States of America were becoming what was subtly, though contemptuously labelled as the “Black bourgeoisie”, which controlled the wealth, and power within the Black community, and turned its back on its own people, just like it is in Nigeria today. Worse still, many members of the so-called “Black bourgeoisie” began to mirror the values of the White American middle class, by distancing themselves, both physically, and emotionally, from their origins.

In the 1960s, government affirmative action programmes, initiated by US President Lyndon Johnson (LBJ), broke the last barriers of institutionalised racism in the United States of America, some 190 years after that country’s independence. The path to universities, and by extension, an assurance of a better life for some Blacks, was suddenly thrown wide open. More Blacks than ever did what their parents only daydreamed about, as they literally fled the devastated, and depressing ghettoes of Chicago, Detroit, Louisiana, New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and several others, in multitudes.

By the end of the 1980s, about 10% of Blacks in the United States of America were affluent enough to move into suburbia. Since the 1990s, the mad dash of Black entrepreneurs and professionals, out of Black ghettoes, has escalated. At the same time, civil rights groups and Black politicians have changed gears dramatically, as they redefined the Black agenda in progressively narrower and narrower terms: that is to say, affirmative action, economic parity, and professional advancement displaced poverty alleviation, jobs creation, quality education, self-help, and political empowerment, as the goals of the African American Diaspora.

This left the 25% of Blacks, some of them, Nigerians, who wallowed below the official poverty level, trapped in crime-infested neighbourhoods. For most of them, their children had to attend sub-standard and decrepit schools, which Black middle class families had earlier abandoned. Lacking adequate education, competitive skills and basic training, the Black “have-nots” were further relegated to the outer fringes of society in the United States of America. Even though Black professionals, politicians and celebrities may be light years ahead of their poorer (Black) kit and kin in their economic and social status, racism is hardly a relic of the past in the United States of America.

Once in a while, even supposedly decent, rich, level-headed, and responsible Blacks fume in anger as they observe taxis speed past, and openly ignore them. Even they can be stopped, frisked, shaken down, and spread-eagled by the police, as readily available victims of “racial profiling”, especially in this new era of impudent unilateralist actions, “War against terrorism”, and “Homeland Security”. They can be subjected to poor or no service. They file countless complaints and lawsuits against their employers for limiting them at the lower end of management. Worse still, any sudden economic downturn could simply dump many of them back into the same crumbling neighbourhoods that they worked for so long and so hard to escape from, only recently.

Ultimately, rich versus poor; prosperity versus poverty: it is still the same old story. The twist in the tale is that it can now be told in Black America, especially, in the Nigerian Diaspora.

Before the end of the First Nigerian Civil War (1967~1970), despite affirmative action by the LBJ government, very few Nigerians bordered to reside permanently in the United States of America, mainly because of institutionalised White racism, and perceived crime levels in that country.

However, from the early 1970s, quite unlike before, for some Nigerians, the gates to American universities, and by extension, a taste of American values, were thrown wide open. More Nigerians, than ever before, did what earlier generations of Nigerians only did as a matter of last resort: Nigerians started de-emphasising Anglo-centric values, British educational and/or professional qualifications, and proceeded to the United States of America in large numbers, mainly to study, qualify, gain professional experience, and then return home to Nigeria.

Since the early-1980s, following a long succession of predatory military autocrats in Nigeria, most Nigerians that “checked out” of Nigeria (for the United States of America, and other countries) did so mainly out of sheer frustration with the widespread non-conducive and unsupportive environment in Nigeria, just like it was for Irish, and Italian immigrants that left Ireland and Italy earlier, for the United States of America, particularly during moments of protracted national economic depression, or/and life-threatening national catastrophes (like plagues, and famine).

For the Nigerian immigrants (i.e. the “Andrews”) of the 1980s, and 1990s, their motivation for migration was primarily economic survival (not educational advancement, as most Nigerian immigrants did in earlier generations). In most cases, the physical, emotional, material, and financial costs of leaving Nigeria were disproportionately high, considering their very low incomes, low employment opportunities, near-zero job mobility, escalating inflation, excruciating and dehumanising visa application procedures, etc.

For some of them who left Nigeria for the “greener pastures” in the USA, the EU, the Middle East, South Africa, and several others overseas, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, their bitter memories of those dismal moments in their lives (during the predatory dictatorships of Buhari, Babangida, Shonekan, Abacha, and Abubakar), cannot be wiped out easily, (just like that). They simply are bitter; and are rightly so.

And so, such Nigerians, the so-called later-day “Diasporans”, have predictably sublimated their understandably hurt feelings in rather chauvinistic and paranoid terms, with their repeated negative commentary about Nigeria, and anything Nigerian, instead of contributing positively in, say, poverty alleviation, or skills acquisition, or knowledge base creation, or propagating quality education, or undertaking self-help projects, and/or any other useful means of empowering Nigeria, in whatever little way they can.

Unlike the Israeli, or Irish, or Indian, or Vietnamese, or Polish Diaspora in the United States of America, the Nigerian Diaspora appears to be, more ore less, completely decoupled from Nigeria: physically, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, politically, economically, and otherwise, until recently.

The imperial proclamation of “War against terrorism (worldwide)” by US President George W. Bush (The Younger), and the advent of “Homeland Security”, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Tuesday, 11 September 2001, in New York and Washington DC, have triggered the sudden reverse migration of large numbers of Arabs, Asians, Africans (including former so-called Nigerian “Diasporans”), EU citizens, Canadians, Latin Americans, Caribbeans, and other non-US residents, out of the USA, rather dramatically. This time around, the return of the various Diasporas to their roots is creating a “brain gain” in their countries of origin.

The return of the Indian Diaspora, for example, has significantly depleted both the skilled manpower, and knowledge base of the information and communications technology industry of the USA, and has, in turn, enhanced the competitive advantage of India in medicine, science, engineering, information and communications technology, globally.

The Chinese Diaspora in the United States of America is very effective in applying political pressure on their motherland, China, by means of a pro-democracy Internet news service, which reaches out to millions of Chinese, both in mainland China, and in the Chinese Diaspora. Their focus is on issues of human rights, and ensuring freedom of expression in China, even though they still identify themselves as “exiles”, or “refugees” in the United States of America. By the way, they have started to run their “far-from-home” Chinese communities in the USA!

Just like there is an American Jewish lobby, there is a fledgling Indian (South Asian) lobby in Washington DC too. In the 1980s, a group of wealthy Indians who had previously lived quite unobtrusively in many of America’s affluent suburbs, began to worry about the apparent lethargy of their community, and their glaring lack of political contribution. The situation was akin to that of Ugandan Asians, who never had a stake in national politics, either in India or in Uganda, and who were later expelled from Uganda after amassing tremendous wealth in Uganda. Since then, there has been a growing political lobby of Indians, determined to have a stake in both American and Indian politics, and also influence, or expedite US-India relations.

Businessmen of the first generation of the Indian Diaspora in the USA are trying to build up sufficient political clout in Washington DC, so as to create a formidable lobby for Indians, and their motherland, India. Furthermore, second generation Indians resident in America tap into the financial institutions of the Indian Diaspora in a bid to make a run for Congress in the United States of America.

For the Nigerian Diaspora, (whether in the USA, the EU, the Middle East, or indeed anywhere else in the world), there are very many lessons yet to be learned. The effective emancipation of Nigeria, (from the strangle grip of a new wave feudalism, characterised by the callous indifference, and megalomania of predatory autocrats that claim to represent Nigerians), would depend on the catalytic effect of the “guidance” provided by an enlightened and aware Nigerian Diaspora, in facing the task of re-inventing Nigeria for the better.

However, the Nigerian Diaspora can only be complacent at its own peril, with, or without the understandable cynicism about Nigeria, Nigerians, and everything Nigerian, by some Nigerians in the Diaspora.

I welcome your comments (via e-mail: kombomasonbraide@msn.com), and encourage this article to be freely reproduced, published, photocopied, scanned, faxed, reprinted, reformatted, broadcast, digitised, uploaded or downloaded, in whatever manner or form, with or without acknowledgement, or further permission.