“A less accentuated but equally significant factor that contributes to such cross-continental movements is the perceptions that travellers have of the receiving country. Because such perceptions are often formed from a distance, they are sometimes warped or not properly vetted with the realities in the receiving countries. What we will call naïve or ignorant perceptions (IP).”-Exodus from – -Africa: Expectations versus Realities in the immigrant Experience.
Growing up, we all believed in magic, in happily ever afters and the delusion that if we went farther up in the sky, we could touch the gates of heaven. But through the motions of living and breathing, the upheavals of math and science in grade school, puberty and all its attendant hormones; we get the shocker of our dreams – life isn’t the bed of roses we’ve cracked it up to be!
Personally, I used to have this dream, you see? Since the cosmic gods had failed to deliver me to be birthed into royalty; I figured I was going to reenact my very own Swan Princess tale. I was going to be the ugly duckling that became the swan when she married the prince and they lived happily ever after in the far away land. Ha! You’ve got to love the power of Disney! It didn’t take too long for that bubble to burst. I learned, and fast too, that an excellent motion picture isn’t reality!
I think of Daniel now and it doesn’t faze me in the least why a twelve year old kid would want to hide himself in the tyre compartment of a plane in hopes that he’d miraculously land in the USA when the plane arrives its destination. Why? I see and hear it every day in/from above average kids around me. They are the ones who want to be “Kim Kardashian”, the ones whose future ambition is to become “a celebrity”, the ones who want to fly even before they’d had a chance at crawling. But that’s the thing with childhood; it’s that magical age when you can be and do anything in your imagination. It’s the age of innocence and gullibility!
What then do we say about the “adult” Daniels? What is their excuse/problem (depending on which side of the divide you’re on)? All I see is a bunch of people with a warped mentality and a complex; a mentality that seems to say Made in Nigeria is not “make” enough. From the poorly lit Nollywood dramas to the fabricated and one-sided stories of their kin washing granny diapers abroad, these Daniels think Oyibo land is “Heaven on earth”.
It was sometime in 2000 I watched a CNN Presents documentary – Exodus from Africa. I was but a wee tot (tongue in cheek) but the programme was riveting enough. I saw how grown men (and women) in search of greener pastures left the shores of Africa for the Whiteman’s land on a torturous journey through the Sahara desert. I saw gaunt looking people, dirty, thirsty; people who had lost relatives on the same journey; people who had lost everything but this hope that once on Oyibo shores, their lives would be better. I saw pictures of a desert littered with human bones and wondered how that wasn’t a deterrent for these weary wayfarers? I saw people who having endured nature at her harshest and still had human adversity in the form of immigration to contend with but were undaunted in their quest, and tried to wrap my head around the insanity. I saw how the “lucky” few who made it through to Spain had to sleep on cold streets and eat scrapes for nourishment, and my mom made a quip about those of us who had but refused to eat; and at that point the dam of my heart flooded.
Brainwash is a powerful thing; it can make a hungry man full and a lame man walk. But it can also make a man abandon his wife and kids for years on end just for the curse of the dollar. Ignorance of the facts would also make young girls go after a man just because he has been to, to the utter chagrin of our home bred men. A brand of this misconceived perception still keeps our hospitals in a deteriorating state of “out-of-stock-itis” enabling our leaders and wealthy lot flock abroad to German and Saudi hospitals. Isn’t it an inferiority complex that would cause a heavily pregnant and almost due woman to hop on a plane in hopes of giving birth to her baby in the UK just so he could bear the tag “British”? What is the name for the condition that has left our universities stuck in the 19th century while kids of the haves shoot breeze (ahem… coke) overseas? Do we seriously blame Daniel for trying?
At whose door do we lay the blame? Surely not Hollywood or Nollywood, they’d have you believe what you will. We are but a generation of quick fixes with get-rich-quick schemes popping up left, right and centre. We alone can rid ourselves and our children of this brainwash. Whatever makes us think that if we can’t make it here we’d do so elsewhere? Do we have to go abroad to give birth to children of foreign citizenship? Do we have to demean ourselves for the dollar/pound? Daniel had the excuse of being naïve; what do the rest of us have to say for ourselves?
#still typing in my sleepless state!
Sleepless in Zaria 