
Nigeria and the “IJGB” experience
By Salam Jesudamilola, February 2 2025—
IJGB or “I Just Got Back” is a phrase used to describe Nigerians living in the diaspora returning to their homeland for Christmas. IJGBs (perhaps as an extension on stereotypes about diaspora Nigerians as a whole) are thought of as loud, flamboyant, aloof and prone to cloaking truisms as profound philosophical insights — “Nigeria’s problem is corruption” uttered with a deep and solemn shake of the head.
Last December, I joined the movement. I returned home for Christmas after almost three years abroad. I was officially an IJGB.
The return was not as advertised. The heat settled back on me like a second skin, the air chafed my throat, the food was nice — I fell sick. Everything was where I left it, yet nothing like I imagined it would be.
Some great change always seemed to be lurking over the horizon. I suppressed this feeling. I wasn’t going to be one of them, I told myself, there would be no not-so-great catharsis for my Twitter followers to endure. So, I ate, I slept and I met up with friends. I watched old Christmas movies with my family while sniffling and coughing all the way through. They tolerated me.
All the while I ignored the knot in my chest, the feeling that a world I once knew had suddenly sprouted strange new corners, paths I had never gone down. It was only once I got to the airport that I fully understood what it was. Only past the checkpoint, after I had hugged my mother goodbye and ran my hands for the last time in who knows how long, along the Nigerian soil. I was placing my passport back into my bag, getting ready to empty my pockets when I noticed how large the room I was standing in was. Large and sparse, with some construction going on at the back.
This could have been a warehouse, I thought to myself. Then it clicked, all the unease. That room really could have been a warehouse. I wasn’t standing in an airport; I was, like always, standing in space.
To explain further, there are two unequally dangerous views on the African continent I have been wrestling with for a while. For some, Africa exists as a virgin, unspoiled land. A place where man and nature still commune, outside of the sin of modernity. The other view I’ve seen crop up often in direct response to the first is a ludicrous exaggeration of African wealth. Pictures of the snazziest areas in Johannesburg and Lagos are used to represent the typical African experience.
I mention this because going back home, I realized my mind was subconsciously oscillating between these two viewpoints. The years away had made me wary-curious. I was testing my country, looking for cracks, looking through cracks, for stories of abundance I could draw away. What I discovered in that airport, the great change I had been suppressing, was in me. I was judging my country like a tourist would, constantly negotiating the difference between what I saw and what I expected to see.
The result was what I felt in that airport. While negotiating between two stereotypes, I had landed somewhere in the middle. Nigeria was where the two worlds met, I decided. Plastic hills and hard earth valleys. The modern in uneasy coexistence with nature. It allowed me to see things as they truly were. An airport was but a building, one that could just as easily be a mall (or nothing!) in a few years. The road was a neat asphalt strip fighting for its share of the earth. I could see the brushstrokes.
This sounds intuitive but for me, at that specific moment, it felt profound. To think of the world not as definite, but as something we consent to. A once blank canvas we keep painting over.
In Nigeria, the canvas (nature) fights back. The road is earth at its edges, lizards weave through barbed wire. Vines grow beyond their bounds, reaching, ever reaching.
Being an International student, it is easy to construct a specific romantic image of what your country, your home looks and feels like. One you relay to co-workers, classmates, professors. An image in intentional opposition to what home is ‘supposed’ to look like, or maybe completely aligned with it. But I have come to think these images take something from us, I have come to think of them as unnecessary approximations, translations that don’t quite capture the rhythm of the original. Ours is a foreign romance, and even if we can’t quite describe that in quick polite pleasantries, we must know it.
So, what am I saying? I guess that I understand now. I understand how someone comes back home and sees corruption anew. I understand why diasporic Nigerians wax lyrical about the smell of Dodo in the air and the heady smog of Lagos. How quickly the obvious can be mistaken for the profound, how beautiful it is to see the moon and be amazed again as though one were a child. I have been a tourist in my land and found it breeds bad prose. I loved every moment of it.
This article is a part of our Voices section and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Gauntlet editorial board.