Heritage Without Nostalgia

Observing Heritage from a Distance

Two events this month should have created a kind of nostalgia in me, but I seriously failed to be excited about either. I had become an observer of sorts of elements that have formed part of my identity.

Whilst in Cape Town, there was the Commonwealth Day Service at Westminster Abbey on the 9^th of March, and then yesterday came the conclusion of the first UK state visit in 37 years by a West African head of state, the Nigerian one. [The Royal Family: State Visit by The President and First Lady of Nigeria]

The first event gained significance through someone I follow on Twitter/X who had been invited to a reception at St James's Palace, though he could not attend because he was indisposed. As an activist for Nigerian immigrant causes, he had become prominent enough to be noticed and recognised as an important Nigerian diaspora figure.

For the state banquet at Windsor Castle, several people of Nigerian heritage were invited to represent the Nigerian community, many of whom have stronger roots in the United Kingdom than in Nigeria.

An English Identity

My living parents are Nigerian, but I was born in England, and though I have strong influences of Nigeria in my identity framework, I do not identify as such. To any question about where I am from, I respond that I am an Englishman, and I am originally from England.

This is reinforced by the fact that two-thirds of my life has been spent in Europe. Even for ethnic purposes, I would describe myself as Black English rather than the typical Black British or Black African.

This distinction matters to me because Black British functions as an umbrella term that groups together vastly different backgrounds and experiences, often implying a hyphenated identity or connection to a diaspora narrative.

Black English, by contrast, centres my English identity as primary. It asserts that I am English who happens to be Black, rather than suggesting divided loyalties or perpetual newcomer status.

The choice is deliberate: it reflects where I was born, where I belong, and how I understand myself. It challenges the assumption that Blackness and Englishness are somehow contradictory, and it refuses to accept that “English” is synonymous with “white.” For someone like me, whose connection to Nigeria exists more in memory than in meaningful attachment, this specificity matters.

The Outsider's Accent

I can reminisce about aspects of childhood and development that have served me well from having lived in Nigeria, yet for the simple reason that I had an accent, I was always an outsider.

That accent was no affectation; it was the sound of my formative years, the linguistic imprint of the England where I first learned to speak, to think, to understand the world. By the time we moved to Nigeria, my identity architecture was already established.

The English pronunciation I arrived with immediately identified me as different. In the playground, in the classroom, even within extended family gatherings, the way I spoke became a constant reminder that I did not belong in the same way others did.

Children would mimic my speech, adults would comment on how I sounded “British” or call me “Òyìnbó,” and I became known as “Ọmọ ìlú Òyìnbó,” the boy born abroad, or more literally, the child born in white-man’s land.

The accent was an audible barrier that no amount of time or adaptation could fully erase, a daily declaration of otherness that shaped my understanding of where I truly belonged.

The irony, of course, is that this very accent that made me perpetually foreign in Nigeria was simply part of the spectrum of English voices from the West Midlands. In Nigeria, I was told daily through reactions to my speech that I was foreign; in England, I simply was.

My parents, who moved from Nigeria to England and back, could navigate both worlds with the fluency of belonging. They spoke the languages without pronounced accents, understood the unspoken rules, carried the cultural memory in their bones. I had none of these inheritances.

Where they were returning home, I was simply living abroad. This distinction, between inherited belonging and biographical accident, crystallised my understanding that identity is not a matter of bloodline but of lived experience and genuine connection.

The experience taught me something fundamental: identity is not about where others place you, but where you place yourself, and where you are recognised as belonging without constant explanation.

Detachment and Memory

In terms of identity, whilst I am interested in what goes on in Nigeria, I am more detached than ever. The closest association nowadays depends on whether my flight between France or the Netherlands and Cape Town flies over the Nigerian landmass, where place names trigger some memory or recognition from more than 50 years ago.

In general, I have determined there is no reason to visit Nigeria since I left over 35 years ago. I have the name, I have the influences, I have the memories, but the nostalgia has fully settled into obsolescence and insignificance.

Gratitude Without Nostalgia

Yet I love that Nigeria was part of my upbringing because it strengthened elements of self-identity, self-esteem, and self-respect. For that alone, I am grateful for the Nigerian experience, as it reinforces the context and sense of who I am.

God bless Nigeria, for when things are going well in Nigeria, there is less anxiety for all of us associated, even in the remotest sense, with Nigeria.

A Google NotebookLM AI Audio Overview Discussion of this blog

The Boy Born Abroad

An Unexpected Journey

When I was asked if I wanted to go to Nigeria about 55 years ago, no one intimated to me that it was a permanent move. I thought we were going on holiday. I suppose I was not that perceptive, even with my known precocity, to notice the excitement in my parents' urgings, nor the significance of that final night in England when all their friends gathered for a send-off.

The place to which my parents belonged, and which they called home, eager to return, having watched the Nigerian Civil War for years until it ended, was foreign, different, and strange. But I had no choice in the matter. They were my guardians; I was their ward. The common idea was that, as a child, I would adapt, adjust, and adhere.

A Different Reality

No sooner had we landed than the first thing I noticed was that there were more of us and fewer of them. Nigeria hits you with a kind of alternative reality. I could only wonder whether having other siblings in England might have altered the idea of taking us back before my parents had settled down. Things would most definitely have been easier than being an only child.

In the approximately two decades that I lived in Nigeria, I had assimilated to an extent, yet I was very much an alien. Even though my accent had been affected, it had not radically changed to the extent that I could not be differentiated as having some foreign influence.

Besides, something daily reminded me of being other than among. From address to observation, a middle-class bubble placed me in a kind of elite and a place of privilege. Those of us born abroad seemed to have a built-in ET beacon calling home: abroad.

Then again, we all seemed to have endured Nigeria for as long as parental or guardian influence could keep us, before we mostly took flight as soon as we completed tertiary education. Something could be written about the exodus of kids born abroad in the 1960s, once they could.

A Turning Point

I even had a kind of fantasy. I was involved in some interesting projects where I, unusually, dictated my own terms, a daring born out of earlier precociousness that had matured into a fearless tendency to assert when, typically, others might deflect and genuflect.

I walked into a visa office with enough documentation that the conversation left the idea of granting the visa for exchanging anecdotes about other applicants who might have given the consular officer a second career full of material to be a successful stand-up comedian.

He was even urging me to apply for a British passport, but the lead time from lodging an application to getting an interview was 18 months. I just did not have the time when I was travelling the next week to get kit for a company in which I owned 30% equity.

However, after a fortnight in England, during which Maggie Thatcher was turfed out of Downing Street, it took me just four weeks to decide I had had enough of Nigeria. This was exacerbated by my partner in the firm. My original idea of visiting England at will had given way to leaving Nigeria for new opportunities, and that was executed with precision.

Roots and Reflections

As I write this blog post, I would have been flying into London Heathrow on a delayed flight from Lagos 35 years ago today. I have never returned, even as I cherished the quality of heritage and stories Nigeria gave me. I was always that boy born abroad in a white man's land.

That anyone still holds the prospect of a jaunt to the fatherland or motherland is interesting to the point of amusement.

I never had the emotional, nostalgic luxury of a dreamy reconnection with my roots, as my roots were never there, even as my ancestry is grounded there. The funny thing is, I still have my last boarding card from my departure from Nigeria. It was a different time.

My boarding pass from 1990