One of the things I consider as a superpower is growing up as a middle class kid in Lagos, Nigeria. This allowed me form a strong identity, values and sense of self before I needed to venture into the larger world and hear what it thought about people who looked like me. A big concern is that economic migration could make my kids miss out on this.
I didn’t have to deal with those concerns about racial superiority or inferiority, questions of identity, relationships celebrity, popularity that tend to plague children of African descent who grew up in the west. There’s either a rush to conform to the status quo, an overcompensation for not belonging or worse still, no real push either way as they slip into the cracks of everyday society.
The worst scenario though, would be having kids who are completely lost, where their heritage has no strong bearing on their person. You know, the type of kids to put on a cringeworthy Nigerian accent as a joke, who are generally clueless about the real state of anything at home. To the point where Nigeria, west Africa and Africa - places people with no direct connection except their skin tone are increasingly feeling compelled to go visit - just never register on their scale of interest or desire.
As I get to the age when I’m starting to think about kids, a big question is what kind of world I want to bring them into, and where their formative years should be spent. It seems cruel to deprive them of the same superpower I had to just exist, and grow up among people who looked like me, with fewer questions of self-worth from the society around me.
Don’t get me wrong, everything is a tradeoff. Access to knowledge and resources in the west could also be a super-power too. There’s heights I could probably have attained faster growing up in the states. At what cost though? Being distanced from my culture would be one trade too many. I’d like to think that by growing up in Africa I took or am taking the scenic route to self-actualization, one with fuller experiences which still gets me there eventually.