Return home: leave their America

Go home. Not in shame never in shame but in the full, unhurried dignity of one who has finally remembered their own name.

You came with your gifts wrapped in ambition, your hands carrying centuries of ingenuity that built civilizations long before they had a word for civilization. You arrived not as a beggar but as a contributor, not as a shadow but as a source of light. Yet they placed you under fluorescent lamps in cold offices, asked you to spell your name again, to explain your country again, to justify your presence again. And now, emboldened by the shamelessness of a leader whose ignorance wears a suit, they have dispatched uniformed men to remind you that you are unwelcome in the land you helped build. Do not waste your tears on them.

Do not be humiliated by a man who reads from a script he cannot understand, whose contempt for Africa flows not from knowledge but from the hollow arrogance of one who has confused loud words for wisdom. He who denigrates a continent of 54 nations, a billion souls, a thousand tongues, and the oldest human footprints on this earth he does not deserve your rage. He has earned only your pity. But pity is a luxury. Your time is more valuable than that.

Think of what you left behind. Not the poverty they zoomed into in their documentaries to justify their superiority  but the real Africa: the laughter that spills out of open windows at midnight, the market at dawn that smells of groundnut oil and fresh possibility, the grandmother whose soup is a philosophy, whose hands are a library. Think of the red earth that knows your blood because it has held the bones of your people for ten thousand years. No American suburb, no matter how manicured its lawns, can offer you what the land of your origin holds in a single fistful of soil.

They will tell you their country is the greatest. Let them have that story. A nation of volcanoes and tornadoes, of mass shootings in schools and prayers that change nothing, of a healthcare system that will bankrupt you for having the audacity to fall ill  this is the paradise they are guarding with such vigilance? Let them guard it. You were never meant to be kept anywhere. You were meant to move freely across a world that, at its bones, belongs to everyone.

They have no real food only the borrowed bread of other people's cultures, pressed flat between two halves of a bun and called civilization. No jollof rice smoky from an open fire. No egusi that took all morning to make. No suya wrapped in newspaper at the roadside, eaten standing up, which is how the best things in life are eaten. What they call cuisine, we call convenience. What they call fast food, we call the absence of love.

Remember Wole Soyinka that great lion of Aké, that Nobel laureate whose pen has always been sharper than any sword they could forge who looked at America and its careless talkers, its men who reduce the world to slogans and the slogans to insults, and simply said: no. Not with a fist raised. Not with a press conference. But with the calm, devastating authority of a man who knows his worth and refuses to negotiate it. He packed his conscience and his genius and he came home. And home received him as home always receives its children  without condition, without paperwork, without asking him to prove he belonged.

Africa is not waiting for you with pity. Africa is waiting for you with need  the urgent, electric need of a continent that is rising, that is building, that is tired of watching its finest minds water other people's gardens while their own soil goes unplanted. Your engineering, your medicine, your art, your business mind, your stubborn refusal to be diminished  bring it home. The soil will know what to do with it.

They stole our gold and called it trade. They stole our labour and called it history. They stole our art and placed it in their museums under foreign names. Now they want to steal the one thing we have left  our people. Do not let them have even that. Not by force, not by the slow theft of exhaustion and humiliation. Walk out on your own terms. Turn your back not in defeat but in the sovereign indifference of one who has found something better.

You are not leaving because you failed. You are leaving because you are finished with them. There is a difference as wide as the Atlantic that same ocean your ancestors crossed in chains, which you will now cross in a plane, with your passport and your pride and your future folded neatly in your carry-on bag. Let that crossing be a reclamation.

Let your departure be as deliberate as Soyinka's. As quiet as dignity always is. As final as a door closed gently  not slammed, for slamming is for those who are angry, and you are not angry. You are simply done. Done with the cold weather that never agreed with your bones. Done with the food that has no memory, no ceremony, no love in its making. Done with proving yourself to people who decided before you arrived what you were worth. Done with a nation that has made enemies in every corner of the world and cannot understand why.

Come home to Accra's golden corridors of ambition. Come home to Lagos, that furious, magnificent beast of a city that never sleeps and never apologizes for its hunger. Come home to Nairobi's skyline lifting itself taller each season. Come home to Dakar, to Kigali, to Addis, to Abuja, to Johannesburg and her complicated, beautiful soul. Come home to the village too  do not be ashamed of the village  for the village is where the roots go deepest and where the stories are truest.

Their America was never yours. You leased it with your labour and your loneliness and your Sunday phone calls home and your silent endurance of a thousand small degradations. The lease is up. You are not renewing. Collect yourself. Collect your children. Collect your name  say it the way your mother says it, the full version, all the syllables, without apology  and walk.

Walk the way our elders walked out of their colonizers' offices: slowly, deliberately, with the knowledge that history is long and the last word has not yet been spoken. Walk knowing that the same sun that rises over their skyline rises first over ours  earlier, warmer, and with the full approval of a sky that has always loved Africa best.

The continent did not forget you while you were gone. It kept your place at the table. It kept the fire low, but burning.

Leave their America. It was never yours to lose.

Africa calls her children home  and she is not asking twice.