It gives me no pleasure to write this, but I need to be honest with myself… and with everyone who has followed my thoughts on Africa, Pan-Africanism, and repatriation.
For the past several years, I have seriously considered repatriating to Africa, especially Ghana. I’m not trying to do this as some fantasy vacation or “spiritual journey,” but as a real-life project. I saw myself, and still see myself, as part of something bigger. I saw myself as contributing, building, and helping blaze a trail for other people in the African diaspora who wanted to reconnect materially, politically, and culturally with the continent.
And to be clear: I never went into this thinking Africa would be paradise.
I already understood that many things Americans take for granted, such as reliable utilities, stable infrastructure, predictable bureaucracy, clean drinking water, consistent internet, traffic laws, and public systems that mostly function, are not guaranteed in many African countries. I also already knew that corruption, bribery, and dysfunction are real parts of daily life in many places.
But there is one issue that I have tried to rationalize for too long. That issue is scam culture.
More and more Black American expats and Diasporans are citing it as one of the main reasons they leave Africa and return to the United States. And honestly, I can no longer dismiss that as whining, cultural ignorance, or anti-African cynicism.
When people constantly raise prices, exploit your unfamiliarity, or see you first and foremost as a walking wallet, it destroys trust. And without trust, there can be no real unity.
Yes, poverty is real. Yes, exploitation by the global North has devastated much of Africa. Yes, many people are surviving however they can. I understand all of that.
But theft is still theft.
And if the relationship between Africans on the continent and people in the diaspora is going to mean anything, it cannot be built on symbolic slogans while one side is constantly being hustled by the other.
That does not mean I have abandoned Pan-Africanism.
Far from it.
I still believe deeply that unity among African peoples and the diaspora is essential to Black liberation. I still believe that a strong Africa (economically, militarily, scientifically, and industrially) is necessary if Black people anywhere are going to be taken seriously in a world that often sees us as little more than labor, entertainment, or obstacles to resource extraction.
However, belief in unity cannot mean dishonesty.
If we are serious about building a future together, we must be willing to say hard things out loud. We cannot build solidarity while normalizing exploitation among ourselves. We cannot discuss nation-building while preying on each other for crumbs.
I still believe in African settlement. I still believe in African people.
I still believe the diaspora has something valuable to offer the continent, and that Africa has much to teach us in return.
But if we are ever going to build real bridges between us, those bridges will have to be built on more than romance, symbolism, and rhetoric.
One of the biggest lessons I keep learning while in Africa is something uncomfortable, but necessary to understand:
In a deeply twisted way, chattel slavery and apartheid in the Western world helped force Africans in the diaspora into a single racialized identity.
The “Black” identity became politically real and socially unavoidable in the Americas and much of Europe. But Africa itself did not historically evolve around that kind of singular identity. And if we are serious about understanding African history, slavery, and even Pan-Africanism, we have to start there.
San bush people gather in the setting sun, Makgadikgadi Pans, Botswana, Southern Africa. The San are an ancient indigenous tribal people who inhabited much of southern Africa, and although few in number today remain proud of their culture, ancestry, and traditional ways of dress, customs, and behaviour that included subsistence hunting and foraging
Africa Is Not a Monolith
Africa is the most ethnically and genetically diverse continent on Earth. That matters more than most people realize.
Many people outside the continent talk about “Africans” as if they are one people who are arbitrarily divided by colonial borders. But that is not really how Africa works. Across the continent, and even within individual countries, there exist many different ethnic groups with their own languages, cultures, religious traditions, histories, and political identities.
A picture of me and my fiancé at the Meskel festival in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Take Ethiopia as an example. To outsiders, they are all simply “Ethiopian.” But within Ethiopia, people may identify first as Oromo, Tigray, Amhara, Afar, or something else entirely. Those identities are not cosmetic. They are rooted in deep histories, sometimes cooperation, sometimes rivalry, and sometimes conquest. These groups have their own languages, cultures, and histories that may seem similar to outsiders but are very distinct to Ethiopians themselves.
Some of the ethnicities in Ethiopia.
That is one reason why the question, “Why did Africans sell their own people into slavery?” is often framed misleadingly.
In many cases, they did not see the people they were selling as “their own people” in the way we mean that phrase today. That doesn’t excuse it morally, but it does make it historically legible.
A Weird Thought Experiment as a Comparison
A relatively small number of the hypothetical American ethnicities in my thought experiment. These are the different people I imagined if the current makeup of the United States were allowed to develop separately for a long period of time.
Let’s imagine that the United States is much older than it is. Let’s, in turn, imagine that each region was able to evolve in some isolation for a long time. The Californians will have a different culture and possibly a different language from the Cajuns, the Appalachians, the Lakers to the North, the Dixies, the Floridians, the Plains Folk, the Northeasterners, etc.
Even right now, with all of us identifying as “American”, except with a hyphenated race identifying prefix, we are different people regionally, with different political ideologies.
The Dixies (the people of the Deep South) have ALWAYS been very conservative, religious, and loyal to hierarchical systems, whether it was ruled by Republicans, Democrats, Whigs, Democratic-Republicans, Federalists, Loyalists, or whatever party or faction.
This is different than the Lakers of the eastern parts of the upper Midwest (from Michigan to Minnesota). The Lakers have always been more liberal, regardless of their political party allegiance.
Lakers and Dixies are different.
The Lakers and the Dixies are different people in this thought experiment, but their attitudes and sentiments come from reality.
Dixies are the descendants of Scots, Irish, Africans, and Native Americans. Lakers are the descendants of Scandinavians, the French, and Native Americans.
Please keep in mind that this is a weird thought experiment to explain African sentiment.
If the Dixies and Lakers were separated by up to 300K years and have evolved their own languages and customs, then why should we expect them to think of each other as “one people?” If the Dixies and Lakers are different now after only 250 years. Imagine how different they would be after 500 years, 1000 years, 10K years, 50K years, 70K years, 100K years, 150K years, and 300K years. And naturally, the Lakers and Dixies will branch into smaller subgroups and so forth.
A Better Comparison
A better comparison would be asking:
Why did the Greeks enslave the Macedonians?
Why did Spartans dominate Athenians?
Why did rival European peoples conquer one another for centuries?
The answer is simple: they did not see themselves as one people.
That is much closer to how many African societies historically understood themselves. Ethnicity, kinship, language, and political allegiance mattered more than some broad racial solidarity that would only become more meaningful later under European domination.
What Slavery and White Supremacy Changed
For Black people in the diaspora, however, the story was very different.
In the United States, especially, people of African descent were stripped of their original ethnic identities and grouped into a single racial caste. Whether your ancestors were Igbo, Wolof, Mende, Akan, Kongo, or something else became socially irrelevant in a white supremacist society that only saw one category: Black.
That process was violent, dehumanizing, and catastrophic.
But it also produced a single peoplehood forged through oppression. This is something new.
Black Americans today may have major internal cultural differences, such as Gullah, Creole, Black Midwesterners, Black Southerners, Black Northeasterners, and so on. However, we are still socially treated as one people. In that sense, our race had become our ethnicity and historical/cultural marker.
The Gullah people.
Africa and the Diaspora Are Related, But Not the Same
That is part of what makes the relationship between continental Africans and the diaspora so complicated.
We are connected by ancestry, by history, and by racialization in a white-dominated world. But we are not simply interchangeable. Africans are not automatically “us,” and we are not automatically “them,” at least not in a cultural or ethnic sense.
That doesn’t mean the connection is fake. It means the connection has to be understood honestly.
This is the same for Black Americans, Black Canadians, Black Jamaicans, Afro-Latinos, and other Diasporans. We’ve been separated long enough to have different cultures, different linguistic rules, and different sets of values.
And that honesty matters because it opens the door to a more mature version of Pan-Africanism based not on fantasy, but on political solidarity.
The Future of Pan-Africanism
The Black World Tree by Dike Obioma Matthew. He had permitted me to use this image on my blog. In this, he makes the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade the Trunk of the tree uniting the people of many different roots before they are branched off.
The encouraging thing is that many Africans and people across the diaspora are increasingly embracing a broader consciousness.
More and more people are beginning to see that, whatever their ethnic or national differences, they share a common struggle against White supremacy, neocolonialism, extraction, and domination.
In that sense, Pan-Africanism is not about pretending all Black people are the same. We are not. But neither are White people nor Asians.
It is about recognizing that we do not have to be the same to fight for one another.
That is the challenge and the promise.
Africa does not need to dominate the world. Neither does the diaspora.
The goal is about something much more meaningful than some bullshit race to the top.
Our goal is about self-determination, dignity, cooperation, and the power to shape our own destiny without the aid, supervision, or permission of powerful developed countries run by those of European or Asian descent.
