Distinguished historian and public intellectual, Professor Moses Ochonu, is a scholar’s scholar. A leading mind in African history, particularly the colonial and post-colonial eras of Nigeria, his contributions continue to shape the field.
Professor Ochonu’s brilliance shone early. From earning top marks and scholarships at Bayero University, Kano, to his subsequent degrees at the University of Michigan, his academic prowess was undeniable. In 2004, Vanderbilt University recognized his talent, appointing him an assistant professor. There, he rose through the ranks, becoming a full professor of history by 2015.
In this exclusive interview with allnaijadiaspora, Professor Ochonu tackles the complexities of migration and its impact on modern Africa, particularly Nigeria’s “japa” wave. He challenges the notion that migration is a contemporary problem, arguing it’s a fundamental human act. He dismantles the demonization of African migrants and offers advice to young African scholars venturing abroad.
Professor Ochonu’s insights promise a nuanced and thought-provoking conversation. Excerpts:
It’s a pleasure having a chat with a scholar with rich contributions to the field of History, especially African History. When you read the works and contributions of Moses Ochonu and some of the comments and appreciation posts from those who have been impacted by your work, how does it feel being Moses Ochonu?
Thank you. I am not entirely sure how one feels being oneself. In these online engagements, I’m merely being my opinionated self. I clearly have a lot to say about a lot of things. I am constantly reflecting on issues and events around me. My online contributions are the result of that reflection. I am merely expressing thoughts and ideas that occur to me from time to time about our world. When my interlocutors appreciate my thoughts, it simply means that those contributions are no longer just my personal online expressive vanities. They are taken seriously by those I encounter online. That gives me pause and it is a little uncomfortable if I’m being honest. The thought of being accountable to an online community of followers who perhaps take me more seriously than I take myself is a bit unsettling.
As a Professor of African History, your specialty is in the modern history of Africa, with a particular focus on the colonial and postcolonial periods; but your research interest lies in Nigeria specifically. Any strategic reason for this? Does it have anything to do with your Nigerianness or are there other reasons?
I am Nigerian, so it’s only natural that my historical curiosity and inquiry begin in and from Nigeria and branch out from there. The center of gravity of my research is in Nigeria for another reason: it is the country that I know the most about and whose research resources I’m most familiar with. So, research convenience is another reason for most of my research focusing on Nigeria. Lately, however, my research has taken a continental and diasporic turn even while being ground in Nigeria.
Prof, you have seen seasons, you’ve read about seasons, you’ve also written about seasons. In your own opinion, where does the current Nigerian wave of emigration (fondly called ‘japa’) rank in the history and discourse of migration in Africa?
The current “japa” frenzy is entirely new. It is a natural human reaction to intensifying adversity in one’s natal space. It may seem that more people are migrating out of Nigeria now than they did before, but I’m not sure that’s the case. We’ve had waves of emigration before. One example is the mass departure of university academics for Western institutions in the wake of the implementation of structural adjustment policies, which stripped our universities of resources and attention, making them inhospitable to rigorous inquiry, ambitious research, and the life of the mind. This is the wave that birthed the vocabulary of brain drain, which survives in popular and journalistic discourse to this day. In sheer volume, that wave was probably comparable to the current “japa” wave. The difference might be that “japa” is driven by a different, perhaps more complex crisis, and this crisis has persisted longer, prolonging the migratory outflow.
What are the opportunities and opportunity costs of this new wave for the country Nigeria?
Young Nigerians are looking for outlets for their talents, and they’re justified in doing so. They’re trying to realize their innovative, educational, and professional potential. They’re trying to get the fulfillment and recognition that they deserve and that elude them in Nigeria. Nigeria, as presently constituted and governed, does not provide a platform for these young people to productively channel their youthful energies and talents. Nigeria has proven that it can and does stifle these generative impulses. I see no downside to japa, quite frankly. I also see no opportunity costs besides the emotional anxieties of separation and nostalgia. In strict economic terms, those are not opportunity costs and do not extend beyond the personal domain. For Nigeria as a corporate unit, japa is a net benefit and not a loss because the returned value of emigration, assuming the migrant stays alive and becomes successful, is immense. In most cases, the japa people of today become the sustainers and benefactors of their families, friends, and communities tomorrow. In filling that role, they help to mitigate the tragic consequences of Nigeria’s crisis of governance and economic mismanagement, which has seen the economy contract, hardship increase, and purchasing power decimated.
One of the books you authored, Emir in London, highlights how some Northern aristocrats leveraged their travel to Britain to reinforce their positions as imperial cultural brokers, and to translate and domesticate imperial modernity. How can the modern-day Nigeria leverage the learnings, the exposures, the wealth of knowledge of its rich diaspora network towards advancing the country’s fortunes?
First, Nigerian bureaucratic and political leaders need to stop talking about Nigeria’s vast diaspora as people alienated or removed from Nigeria’s reality or future. That’s an outmoded view of diaspora that’s at odds with the reality. Diaspora Nigerians are now deeply, intimately connected to Nigeria because of the democratization of various forms of information and communication technologies. This means that they share the triumphs and burdens of their compatriots in Nigeria in real time. We need to make the mental, attitudinal, and policy shift to seeing the diaspora as a constituency in national politics and development. Once that occurs it would be easier for Nigerian leaders to create programs to cater to and attract the expertise and resources of diaspora Nigerians who desire to return or to export their skills, resources, and global social capital to Nigeria. Ultimately, however, fixing the country for everyone, home and away, is the best way to leverage the diaspora to improve Nigeria. If Nigeria is reclaimed and repaired or the dysfunction is reduced to a minimum, diaspora folks will stop seeing Nigeria as a burden, as a place that drains their resources through remittances and family support. They’ll start seeing it as a vast site of opportunities. They’ll start seeing themselves as well-placed to seize those opportunities because of their ancestral, linguistic, cultural, and familial connections to the country. There’s nothing special about diaspora Nigerians. They’re not a special group of Nigerians; they have the same stake in Nigeria as do Nigerians living in the country. A refocused and functional Nigeria would cultivate and benefit from the talents and sacrifices of all Nigerians, wherever they live. The only thing is that distance from the country can exacerbate the anguish that diaspora people feel towards the regression and dysfunction in their country. Many of them disengage from Nigeria to protect their mental health. Diaspora Nigerians need to see a different Nigeria that forces them from this posture of disengagement to one of enthusiastic and patriotic engagement.
As a reputable role player in the global knowledge creation business, what in your opinion is the role of African scholars in the strengthening of decolonial thinking, theories and practices?
Decolonial theories and practices are necessary to center non-Western peoples and ideas in circuits of knowledge production and in consequential institutions that determine the fate of all humans, including Africans. Because African ways of doing, seeing, and thinking have, in some ways been uniquely marginalized and violently subordinated to marauding Western imperial and neo-imperial systems, it seems to me that decolonial theories should resonate with a special purchase in Africa. Coloniality in both its brutally violent and stealthily deadly forms have wrought generational damage in Africa. Therefore, African scholars, thinkers, doers, and innovators should not only decolonize the structures and frames of their own work but also help create intellectual and political conditions for the ascendance of African modes of thought and political governance, and development. Their work should display unabashed fidelity to African perspectives and be rooted in what Achille Mbembe calls “African modes of self-writing.” African scholars should weaponize their epistemic productions to dismantle the powerful, stifling paradigms imposed or universalized by West through conquest, colonization, globalization, and other forms of hegemonic Western projections of power and knowledge.
With that said, I want to outline three important caveats. One of them is that older generations of African and Africa-descended scholars, activists, and thinkers have been espousing these same ideas for more than a century. Their foundational works and thoughts should be acknowledged and curated as part of our repertoire and manual of decoloniality. The second caveat is that there is so much for African scholars to do beyond advancing decolonial theories, a project which is often wrongly advanced as a defensive epistemological and intellectual maneuver. Given the many challenges facing Africa, there is a need for ameliorative, illuminating, innovative, and solutions-oriented thinking and activism. A decolonial agenda that becomes its own justification, that has no terminal point, and that is unable to bring forth new, actionable ideas for Africa’s reclamation and renewal can become lost in self-referential abstraction and irrelevance. A decolonial theoretical project that fails to go beyond critique to supply new catalytic ideas to strategically reposition Africa in an increasingly competitive and adversarial world runs the risk of cannibalizing itself over time. It could become too narrowly reactive as a masturbatory and incestuous intellectual exercise. African scholars need to create an alternative intellectual architecture of empowerment and not focus defensively and exclusively on challenging Euro-American power and knowledge that tend to disempower Africans. An epistemology of empowerment and self-recovery is what, in the final analysis, will force the African story and African modes of thought and development into global reckoning. Yes, our planet is now one giant continuum of networked, if asymmetrical, relations, but if we sort ourselves out as Africans and produce a truly pan-African template of cooperative development, we can blunt the impact of coloniality.
The third caveat is that, as African scholars doing decolonial intellectual work, we need to be careful not to validate the claims of Euro-Americans regarding colonial and neocolonial power. We should not exaggerate the reach of such power or inadvertently deemphasize the historical and contemporary resilience and creative flourishing of African peoples in the face of oppressive Western political, economic, and epistemic violence. The totality of the African experience and of African joys and pains should not be reduced to a project of foreign deterministic power, against which Africans are totally helpless and of which they’re passive victims. Such a framing is simply not consistent with events in the African past or present. And Africa’s quest for reckoning and development should not be presented solely in terms of how Euro-America devalues and subsumes African ideas under the rubric of Euro-American power. Africans’ capacity and ability to engineer their own triumphs and tribulations, whatever the foreign tentacles of those phenomena, should be written into our decolonial discourse so that we can better recognize the complexity, humanity, agency, and self-determination of Africans.
I apologize for the long answer. As you can see, I am a passionate supporter of decoloniality, but I’m also a critic of its faddish, indiscriminate, and undisciplined sweep.
Given extant challenges in some African countries, migration to the West appears to be a coping mechanism especially for the younger demography. How can people safely explore this possibility without walking into some sort of ‘coloniality of being’?
Migration is an inherently human undertaking. I am therefore uncomfortable with discussions and narratives that treat the migration of Africans as some sort of anomaly, and a contemporary problem. Such discussions are often loaded with innuendos and codes that demonize and criminalize African migrants as contaminating agents in the West. Migration, in and of itself, is neither a problem nor a new phenomenon, and it is not exclusive to Africans. The challenge for all migrants, not just African migrants to the West, is how to establish roots in a host society without giving up the emotional and tangible connections to the migrants’ natal homes. African migrants are grappling with that same challenge. But as your question implies, we live in a period and in a world particularly suffused in the coloniality of power and knowledge, which is embedded in and manifested through seemingly benign institutions that surround African migrants in the West. The only way to avoid getting sucked into this vortex of coloniality and being determined by it is to cultivate intense self-awareness grounded in critical knowledge of how power, especially Western power, operates. One must know the insidious and subtle ways that what you call the coloniality of being is accomplished before one can escape or transcend its venality.
Let’s come a little personal. What has your experience been living outside of Nigeria, from the time of your ‘American sojourn’ in the late 90’s?
My American sojourn as you call it has been rewarding and enriching, all things considered. It has enabled me to fulfill my educational and professional aspirations. It has helped me to cultivate a wide network of personal and intellectual connections. America, like all societies, has good and bad, but it is my considered opinion based on my experience that the good outweighs the bad. What I love about America is that it is a country constantly seeking to be better, to live up to its founding ideals. This search for a perfect union, as Americans describe it, happens through intense debate and self-critique. As a native of an African country in which citizens are told that the country is too fragile or too final to withstand certain foundational debates and critiques, I find America’s culture of no-holds-barred debate and critique refreshing. My graduate education in America was an intellectual treat and I absolutely love my current job as a professor in an American university. Being able to visit Nigeria regularly for research, conferences, and other professional endeavors means that I’ve been lucky to maintain social and professional footholds in both Nigeria and America.
From Bayero University Kano to University of Michigan, and then to this day, has your journey always been so smooth and well laid out?
Life’s journeys are rarely smooth. Mine has been no exception. There were times when I wondered if traveling so far from Nigeria to pursue self-development was the right idea. I wrestled with those thoughts when the inevitable struggles of the migrant life set in. But at each juncture, God, people, and institutions showed up to give me the ability and resources to cope and overcome challenges as they emerged.
How did you wriggle your way out of the culture shock, the nostalgic feelings and loneliness that most migrants claim they struggled against when they first arrive their new territory?
Navigating culture shocks is a normal aspect of adjusting to a new society. Everything seemed new and foreign in my early days in America. The thing that helped me overcome that feeling of being trust into a distant foreign land of unfamiliar sights, sounds, and culture is a realization that Americans, like Nigerians, are driven by the same quests, anxieties, pleasures, and daily routines. As for loneliness, I was extremely fortunate to find a family, my friend’s parents, and siblings, that basically adopted me. I’ve written on my Facebook page about how the matriarch of that family, Barbara Pierce, became my second mom, my American mom if you will. I spent the holidays with them. I also made wonderful friends who cared deeply about me and invited me into their worlds.
Let’s get a bit light. The probability of a child from an average Nigerian home having allergies is about 1 out of 10 despite being exposed to different categories of allergens. But living abroad has a way of humbling people, you know. Can you in any way relate to this experience?
Living and growing up in Nigeria, I was completely unfamiliar with allergies and allergic reactions to food and things in the environment around us. In Nigeria, I went everywhere and exposed myself to everything without worrying about allergies. When I began dealing with allergies, I was in denial and chalked it up to a persistent cold. I had no vocabulary through which to comprehend or explain what was going on in my body. Even after I did an allergy test and it came back positive for dust mite and other allergens, the Nigerian in me refused to accept the diagnosis. This was a condition of luxury suffered by only big men and privileged White folks. That’s what I told myself. I would not take any antihistamines until the reactions became quite severe. It turns out that all the lifetime immunity I had built up by constantly being exposed to all kinds of allergens outdoors and indoors in Nigeria left me after two years of living in America.
Years later, I heard an American medical expert explaining why infections are common in American hospitals, arguably the cleanest, most sanitized space in the country, and the rarity of environmental allergic reactions in Nigeria made sense to me. He said it would appear counterintuitive but that our bodies and respiratory systems need to be exposed to dirt, miasma, and germs to build immunity over time, and that while cleanliness was a good protection against microbial infections, excessive cleanliness actually made one more vulnerable to germ-borne infections. The same logic applies to allergens and immunity against allergy illnesses.
I also lost my anti-malaria tropical immunity and needed to take prophylactics when I visited Nigeria.
The most annoying thing that happened to my body was my loss of tolerance for spice or pepper. Growing up in Nigeria, I tolerated any level of spice in food. I remember how we would eat boiled or roasted yam with sauce made solely from pepper. I remember eating pepper soup of any degree of spiciness. America, unfortunately, robbed me of my spice tolerance. It remade me into a pepper wimp. That was the most traumatizing loss for me because it shrank the pool of Nigerian dishes that I could eat without suffering afterwards. To this day, I have not fully recovered my Nigerian tolerance for spicy foods.
What can you say you miss the most about the everyday reality of a Nigerian living in Nigeria?
Certainly, the informality of life in Nigeria. America is an organized society, an orderly society, and I appreciate that. It makes life predictable and planning easier. You can count on certain things happening and being available. That redirects your thoughts towards more consequential pursuits. But that orderliness can become both boring and imprisoning, taking away natural human spontaneity from human relations. I miss being able to simply go to the home of friends and family without an appointment, invitation, or prior notice. I miss spontaneous hangouts with neighbors. These are features of Nigeria life that I used to take for granted but which I now miss. I don’t mean to be graphic but sometimes I even miss the informal social freedom of going behind a bush to pee when pressed in public. In America, you have to look for a restroom or go into a business establishment to use their restroom. Life is too choregraphed in America, and that takes away some of the informal pleasures and freedoms that make us human and not machines. Don’t get me wrong, I think Nigeria could use a lot of social order, but Nigerians, as a people, in my opinion, have a superior ethos of social relations, one that’s unmoored to a mechanical and policed sense of order and planning. I miss that laid back, more relaxed, and less pretentious pace of life.
If there were a conference where every Nigerian living abroad is present in the same location, and Prof. Moses Ochonu is to address them, what will be your message?
I would say to them, stay engaged with Nigeria. It is, warts and all, your home. It is a place that renews your spirit and your energy. It is a place to escape, now and then, from the social and professional strictures and pressures of life in the Western world. And don’t abandon your family and friends in Nigeria. Your happiness abroad is coextensive with their own. You may pretend that you have an autonomous existence untethered to the condition of your folks in Nigeria but deep down you know that it’s not true. I would also say to them: do what you can with your spare change and time to help, but do not take Panadol for Nigeria’s and Nigerians’ headache. They have a strange way of sorting themselves out even when you think the country is doomed. It defies logic but there’s a bizarre method to Nigeria’s madness. Don’t kill yourself trying to understand Nigeria or make sense of it in terms of what surrounds you abroad. It doesn’t work and it will depress and frustrate you.
From your experience studying in the US, what are the survival and/or adaptation strategies for young scholars seeking to pursue education abroad?
The pace of study in American universities is, for the most part, much faster than that of Nigerian universities. The rigor and expectations are also different. I don’t want to be misunderstood as saying that American universities are superior to Nigerian ones. It’s just a different system with a different set of expectations. Therefore, young Nigerian scholars who find themselves studying in American institutions should divest themselves of Nigerian university culture. The key thing for survival, in my experience, is time management and balancing the different activities that dominate and define the life of a student. I would also advise them to take advantage of resources on campus when they’re struggling academically or with mental health or family issues. American universities have various ways of helping students, both domestic and international, cope with the stress of university life. Often, the cost is already included in and paid for as part of your tuition, so use those internal resources to your advantage. There is no struggle or transition you’re dealing with that your university has not seen and that students have never wrestled with, so don’t deal with issues that arise by yourself.
