A Love Letter to Nigeria

“There is only one home to the life of a river-mussel; there is only one home to the life of a tortoise; there is only one shell to the soul of man; there is only one world to the spirit of our race. If that world leaves its course and smashes on boulders of the great void, whose world will give us shelter? — Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman”

Am I grateful to be a Nigerian? Yes. Would I wish to be anything else? No. Do I love my country? Well, it’s complicated. And here’s why.

The world is divided into those who – as many Americans do – bask in the illusion that their country is the best thing since Plato’s invention of the republic and those who, as many Nigerians do, believe their country is crap. I find these two ways of relating to one’s country uninteresting.

I have always had feelings for Nigeria. Many people find love of country when they live outside its borders, but not me. If you’d asked me when I was a 15-year-old girl living in Benin City what I felt for Nigeria, I probably would not have articulated it in those terms—as love. Still, I did feel something.

I came of age in the Abacha years, some of the toughest years to be a Nigerian. Only someone who lived during those times would know the despair of waking up each day to this overwhelming feeling of being trapped in a prison house of political assassinations, grinding poverty, a psychopathic head of state, and the shame of being part of a pariah nation.

I remember having to challenge a relative visiting from America who kept going on and on about how fucked up Nigeria was. Abacha’s Nigeria may appear awful to a visitor from America, I said, but it was home for the rest of us, and that should count for something. I remember being not a little surprised at myself for being protective of Nigeria. The realisation that I was implicated in Nigeria’s fate felt strangely endearing. I felt a fleeting sense of gratitude for being part of something even though it was no more than a collective fate of impending political crisis.

Nigeria has long since ceased to be home for me in the sense that I don’t live there any more. And maybe that has something to do with why I’ve grown more certain of my feelings about her. But it’s not a matter of distance making the heart grow fonder. I am not fond of Nigeria. My affection for my country is something much darker and tortured and selfish. Nigeria is coded into my political DNA. I carry my Nigerian passport in international spaces, not so much with pride as with a certain militant conviction that being Nigerian is a political fate I do not desire to escape.

The god who magically creates political identity by fusing birth and nation didn’t consult me before he had me born to two lovely Nigerian parents in a sleepy army cantonment in the western parts of Nigeria. Yes, my being a Nigerian is a conspiracy of chance but also of history and if history is, at bottom, a series of chance events glued together with that magical paste called the logic of cause and effect, then you’d understand why I have chosen to hold on to the superstition that I was meant to be a Nigerian.

My bond with Nigeria is something akin to a political instinct for survival. If Nigeria disappears, what will become of me?—a slightly more self-centred version of Wole Soyinka’s question: “If [our] world leaves its course and smashes on boulders of the great void, whose world will give us shelter?”

Perhaps this is all political mush. I can’t quite say why all this talk of love and country should matter, except to point out that we are living in strange times. School children are chopped down in cold blood. Girls are stolen in the dead of night as though they were furniture. This is only to say that I hope the death-dance with Boko Haram comes to an end and leaves Nigeria the surviving and the stronger one.