There’s a quiet, stubborn story we tell ourselves about success. It goes something like this: to become someone, you must first leave somewhere. The village is too small, the town too stifling, the community too demanding. You pack your bags, cross a border, climb a ladder, and you don’t look back. I’ve heard this story in many accents. In the Nigerian-British homes of my childhood, it was often dressed up as common sense. You can’t be a prophet in your own land. Go and make something of yourself, then you can come back and help. But the coming back part always felt like an afterthought, a footnote to a life lived elsewhere.
I want to talk about a different kind of success. One that doesn’t measure distance from your starting point as the main proof of progress. This isn’t a rejection of ambition. It’s a redefinition of it. It’s a question I’ve been turning over for years, ever since I first felt the tug between the life I was building in London and the life that still pulsed in the memories of Lagos, of Ibadan, of the aunties’ sitting rooms where I learned to be quiet and watch. What if success meant staying legible to the people who made you? What if it meant building a life that your grandmother could understand, even if she never used a smartphone? This is the tension I want to explore: the cost of a mobility that asks you to become a stranger to your own.
The Myth of the Necessary Departure
In many diaspora narratives, the departure is the first act. It’s the inciting incident. The protagonist leaves a place of lack—lack of opportunity, lack of freedom, lack of future—and arrives in a place of plenty. The story is so familiar it’s become a template. But templates flatten. They erase the texture of what is left behind: the networks of care, the unspoken debts, the quiet ways a community holds you up even as it holds you back.
I remember a conversation with my father, years ago. He was explaining why he’d chosen to study in the UK rather than stay in Nigeria. The reasons were sound: political instability, a crumbling education system, the simple math of a stronger passport. But there was a sadness in his voice, too. A recognition that his expertise, his decades of work, had mostly benefited a country that was not his own. He had succeeded, by any conventional measure. But the community that raised him had lost a doctor. And he had lost the daily, ordinary belonging that comes from being known.
This isn’t a guilt trip. It’s an observation. The myth of the necessary departure often frames the choice as binary: stay and stagnate, or leave and flourish. But this binary ignores the middle ground, the messy, imperfect attempts to build a life that spans two worlds without abandoning either. It also ignores the fact that for many of us, the departure is not a single event but a recurring ache. You leave for university. You leave for a job. You leave for a marriage. Each time, you are asked to shed a layer of your old self, to become a little more legible to the new place and a little less to the old.
The Unspoken Tax of Mobility
There’s a tax on this kind of mobility, and it’s rarely itemized. It’s paid in the loss of language, in the fading of childhood nicknames, in the gradual inability to follow the family gossip because you no longer know who is fighting with whom. It’s paid in the awkward silences when you visit home and realize you have become a guest. Your bed has been given to a cousin. Your opinions on local politics are politely ignored because you are now an outsider. You have succeeded yourself right out of belonging.
I think about this tax every time I hear someone say, with a hint of pride, that they can’t really speak their mother tongue anymore. As if it’s a necessary sacrifice on the altar of a global identity. But language is not just vocabulary. It’s a way of seeing. It carries proverbs that encode an entire philosophy, jokes that only work if you know the rhythm of a place, terms of respect that map a social universe. When you lose the language, you lose the map. You can still visit, but you’ll always need a guide.
Redefining Success from the Inside Out
So what does it look like to refuse this trade-off? Not to reject opportunity, but to reshape it so that it doesn’t require amnesia. I’ve been collecting examples, both from my own life and from the lives of others who are trying to do this work. It’s not a neat, Instagrammable project. It’s often invisible, a series of small decisions that add up to a different posture toward the world.
For me, it started with a question: Who am I writing for? When I first began to take my writing seriously, I assumed my audience was elsewhere. The literary world of London, the editors of certain magazines, the kind of reader who would understand my references without footnotes. But the more I wrote, the more I realized I was performing. I was translating my experience into a language that would be palatable to people who had never eaten pounded yam. And in doing so, I was leaving my actual community behind on the page.
So I made a shift. I started writing as if my cousins in Lagos were reading over my shoulder. I started explaining less and evoking more. I let the Nigerian English sit alongside the British, without italics, without apology. It was a small act of defiance, but it changed everything. It made my writing feel like home. And, surprisingly, it resonated with readers far beyond my immediate community. Because specificity, it turns out, is not a barrier. It’s an invitation.
Building Economic Roots That Don’t Uproot You
The economic argument for leaving is often the hardest to counter. How do you stay when the jobs are elsewhere, when the currency is unstable, when the infrastructure is unreliable? These are real constraints, not just cultural preferences. But I’ve seen people find creative ways to build economic roots that don’t require a permanent uprooting.
There’s a growing network of Nigerian-British entrepreneurs who are deliberately structuring their businesses to have a footprint in both countries. They run tech startups with developers in Lagos and sales teams in London. They open restaurants that source ingredients from specific farms back home, creating a supply chain that is also a lifeline. They’re not just sending remittances; they’re building institutions. This is not easy. It requires navigating two sets of regulations, two business cultures, two sets of expectations. But it’s a form of success that strengthens the community rather than draining it.
I think of a friend who is a lawyer. She spent years in a top City firm, doing the kind of work that impresses at Nigerian parties. But she was miserable. She now runs a small practice that specializes in immigration and family law, serving the diaspora community directly. Her office is in Peckham, not Canary Wharf. Her clients bring her pepper soup when they come for consultations. She earns less, but she told me she has never felt more successful. She is known. She is needed. She is home.
The Quiet Grief of Belonging Everywhere and Nowhere
I want to be honest about the grief that comes with this territory. Even when you try to stay rooted, there’s a loss that accumulates. You miss funerals. You miss weddings. You miss the ordinary Tuesdays when nothing happens except your mother makes your favourite soup and you are not there to eat it. This grief is not dramatic. It’s a low hum in the background of your life, a constant companion.
I’ve learned to sit with it rather than run from it. I’ve learned that it’s not a sign of failure. It’s a sign that you love something you cannot fully hold. The Nigerian-British experience is full of this particular ache. We are experts in long goodbyes, in holding multiple truths in our bodies at once. We can be grateful for the opportunities of the diaspora and still mourn the loss of a life that could have been. We can build a new community without pretending the old one doesn’t matter.
This grief is not a problem to be solved. It’s a landscape to be inhabited. And when we let ourselves feel it, we become more human, more tender, more capable of real connection. We stop performing success and start living it.
Practical Ways to Stay Tethered
If you’re feeling the pull between where you are and where you come from, here are some practices that have helped me and others I know. They’re not grand gestures. They’re small, deliberate choices that accumulate over time.
1. Keep Your Language Alive
Speak your mother tongue, even if you stumble. Even if your children laugh at your accent. Language is a living link to a way of seeing the world. If you don’t have children, speak it to yourself. Listen to radio stations from home. Watch Nollywood films without subtitles. Let the cadence of your first language shape the way you think, even when you’re thinking in English.
2. Invest in Relationships, Not Just Remittances
Money is important, but it’s not the same as presence. Call your people. Not just on birthdays. Ask them boring questions about their day. Remember the names of their neighbours, their colleagues, their church friends. Be a person in their lives, not just a source of funds. When you visit, don’t stay in a hotel. Sleep on the couch. Let your aunt fuss over you. Let yourself be a daughter, a son, a cousin again.
3. Build Bridges with Your Work
Whatever your profession, look for ways to connect it back. If you’re a teacher, can you develop a curriculum that includes the history and literature of your community? If you’re in tech, can you mentor someone back home? If you’re an artist, can you collaborate with artists who still live there? These bridges are not just symbolic. They create real pathways for knowledge, resources, and belonging to flow in both directions.
4. Redefine What “Giving Back” Means
The phrase “giving back” often implies that you’ve taken something away. It frames the community as a charity case and you as the benevolent outsider. What if, instead, we thought of it as staying in circulation? You’re not a donor dropping coins into a well. You’re part of an ecosystem. Your success is not separate from the community’s wellbeing. When you contribute your skills, your time, your presence, you’re not giving back. You’re participating. You’re remaining a member.
The Cost of Leaving Your Community Behind
When success is defined solely by individual achievement, the collective suffers. This isn’t abstract philosophy. It shows up in concrete ways. Communities lose their most educated members, their most ambitious thinkers, their potential leaders. The people who stay are often those who had no choice. The result is a brain drain that hollows out institutions and leaves a vacuum that is too often filled by corruption or incompetence.
But there’s also a personal cost. I’ve seen it in the eyes of friends who have climbed every ladder only to find themselves alone at the top. They have the job, the house, the passport, but they don’t have anyone who knew them when. They’ve traded belonging for achievement, and they’re not sure it was a fair trade. This isn’t a call to abandon ambition. It’s a call to redefine it. To ask: Who is this success for? Who will celebrate it with me? Who will tell my story when I’m gone?
The Diaspora’s Double Bind
The Nigerian-British experience sits inside a particular double bind. In Britain, you may be seen as perpetually foreign, no matter how many generations your family has been here. In Nigeria, you may be seen as ajebutter—soft, privileged, out of touch. You’re too British for Nigeria and too Nigerian for Britain. This in-betweenness can feel like a curse. But it can also be a gift. It gives you a perspective that’s not available to those who have only ever lived in one place. You can see the strengths and weaknesses of both cultures. You can translate between them. You can build bridges that others cannot even imagine.
The key is to refuse the pressure to choose. You don’t have to be one thing. You can be a complex, layered human being who carries multiple worlds inside you. Success, in this light, is not about fitting in. It’s about showing up as your full self, wherever you are.
Stories of Staying Connected
I want to share a few stories, composites of people I know, that illustrate what this can look like in practice. They’re not perfect heroes. They’re real people making real choices.
Aunty Bimpe is a nurse in Manchester. She came to the UK in the 1990s, worked for the NHS for thirty years, and retired last year. But she didn’t retire to a bungalow in the English countryside. She retired to Ibadan, where she now runs a small clinic in her family’s compound. She uses her NHS pension to fund it. She trains young nurses. She is known in her neighbourhood as Iya Nurse. When I asked her why she went back, she said: “I didn’t go back. I just came home. I was always coming home.”
Chidi is a software engineer in his early thirties. He works remotely for a company in Berlin, but he lives in Lagos. He could earn more if he moved, but he stays because he wants his children to grow up around their grandparents. He’s building a co-working space in his neighbourhood with reliable internet and backup power. He’s tired of the narrative that you have to leave to make it in tech. He’s proving, quietly, that you can stay.
Folasade is an artist. She splits her time between London and Abeokuta. Her work explores the textures of both cities: the concrete and the red earth, the grey skies and the harmattan haze. She sells her paintings internationally, but she also runs free art workshops for children in her father’s hometown. She told me once: “I don’t want to be a successful artist who forgot where she came from. I want to be a good ancestor.”
These stories are not about heroism. They’re about intentionality. They’re about asking, again and again: What am I building? Who am I building it for? Who am I becoming in the process?
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it wrong to leave your community for better opportunities?
No, it’s not wrong. The desire for safety, stability, and growth is human. The problem arises when leaving becomes the only imaginable path to success, and when it requires a complete severing of ties. The goal is not to judge those who leave, but to expand the definition of success so that staying—or staying connected—is also seen as a valid, valuable choice.
How can I stay connected to my community if I live far away?
Connection is built through consistent, small actions. Regular video calls, not just on special occasions. Learning and using your heritage language. Supporting community businesses and initiatives financially or with your skills. Visiting when you can, and being fully present when you do. The key is to treat the relationship as a living thing that needs ongoing care, not a museum piece you dust off once a year.
What if my community doesn’t understand or support my definition of success?
This is a real and painful tension. Many communities have narrow definitions of success: certain professions, certain lifestyles, certain markers of status. If your path diverges from these, you may face criticism or confusion. The work here is internal: to define success for yourself, to find allies who understand your vision, and to gently educate those who are willing to learn. You cannot control how others see you, but you can control how much weight you give their opinions. Your community is not a monolith. There will be people within it who get it. Find them.
Can you really be successful without leaving? What about systemic barriers?
Systemic barriers are real and cannot be wished away. Corruption, lack of infrastructure, and economic instability make staying difficult or impossible for many. This article is not arguing that everyone should stay. It’s arguing that we should question the assumption that leaving is the only route to success, and that we should support those who are trying to build viable lives within their communities. It’s also a call to those who have left to find ways to remain connected and to use their resources to help dismantle the barriers that forced them out in the first place.
A Different Kind of Legacy
I’m writing this because I want a different kind of legacy. Not a legacy of individual achievement, but a legacy of belonging. I want to be someone who is remembered not just for what I did, but for who I stayed connected to. I want my work to be in conversation with my community, not in spite of it. I want my success to be measured by the strength of the relationships I maintain, not the distance I’ve travelled from my starting point.
This is not a simple path. It’s full of compromises and heartaches and moments of doubt. But it’s a path that feels true to me. It’s a path that allows me to look at my reflection—in the mirror, in the eyes of my elders, in the faces of the children in my family—and recognize myself. And in a world that constantly asks us to fragment, to choose, to leave parts of ourselves behind, that recognition feels like the most radical kind of success.
So here’s my invitation to you: Redefine success on your own terms. Ask yourself what you’re building and for whom. Ask yourself who you want to be legible to. And then, in your own way, in your own context, start building a life that doesn’t require you to become a stranger. The community is waiting. It has always been waiting. Not for a hero, but for you.
