no individual whose ancestral home is inside a colonially constructed nation is from the nation.
personally, I'm not a Nigerian. I'm an onye Igbo from ala Igbo with Afrikan traits, whose ancestral home happen to be inside the boundaries the colonizers carved and mapped out as Nigeria in the scramble for Africa in the 19th century.
now, am I really not a Nigerian though? of course I am, I was given birth here, and legally, it makes me a citizen.
but am I really a Nigerian? no I'm not. something as surface level as citizenship cannot be my identity.
I belong firmly to my ancestral nation, while recognizing politics.
just like the black Americans in America who have been there for generations, are they Americans? yes.
but are they really Americans? no.
how about the blacks in the Caribbeans? same applies. their true identity traces back to Afrika and to their various ethnic nations.
if you are Kalabari and birthed within the borders of Nigeria, you're a Kalabari-Nigerian born.
Fulani whose ancestral home is in the borders of Senegal and given birth there, you're a Fulani-Senagalist born.
as a Yoruba person, if you were born in UK, you would be a Yoruba-British. and never a Nigerian-British or British with Nigerian roots or however they put it.
you're not of a colonial construct's roots, your roots go a thousand years deep. they are deeply Yoruba.
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same applies to every single one person in a colonially constructed nation.
naturally, every ethnic identity and culture regardless how small is a distinct nation. colonization disrupted that, but it did only on papers, politically, & institutionally. your ancestral nation is deeply in you.
I say this not as a separatist, but as a political nationalist, an ancestral nationalist, and identity sovereignist. one who deeply resonates with the ideologies of nationalists such as Zik, Kwame, Gaddafi.
let your identity be your identity and let your earned citizenship be your earned citizenship. this distinction matters enormously and shouldn't be collapsed.
one of the reasons we were conquered and put into one nation is because we were scattered nations. one reason we lost ourselves is because we didn't really know ourselves.
