Jápa: Migration, Home, and the New Yorùbá Identity

Check out host Bidemi Ologunde's new show: The Work Ethic Podcast, available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Email: bidemiologunde@gmail.com

In this episode, host Bidemi Ologunde explores the contemporary concept of "Jápa" in terms of migration, home, and the new Yorùbá identity, asking what it means to leave, what it costs to stay, and how Yorùbá families are redefining home across continents. What do remittances really represent: love, duty, or pressure? How do returnees fit back into a place that has changed without them? What happens when children raised abroad inherit Yorùbá identity through accents, proverbs, screens, and memory? This episode reflects on migration, accent shame, raising children overseas, and the evolving meaning of home for Yorùbás everywhere.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:32

According to Yoruba tradition, a young person quoting proverbs in the presence of adults must do so humbly and respectfully. Therefore, in line with tradition, I humbly crave the indulgence of my parents and Yoruba elders worldwide before going ahead with this episode. Thank you for your time. Let's get to it. In early April 2026 in Lagos, Nigeria, thousands of people flooded the streets for the Fanti Carnival. This year's theme was a homecoming of heritage. Descendants of the Aguda, people whose ancestors had been taken across the Atlantic and whose families later returned from Brazil, danced through Lagos Island in feathers, beads, and Brazilian colors while indigenous Yoruba rhythms drove the procession forward. There was even a young boy in body paint standing inside that history as if it were the most normal thing in the world. And maybe that's the point. For Yoruba's, home has never been only one place. Home has long been a place you live, remake, remember, and sometimes return to wearing another people's fabric over your own heartbeat. So today let's talk about JAPA, migration, home, and the new Yoruba identity. The word japa is Yoruba. It means to flee, to escape, to get away fast. Writers use that definition in reporting on Nigeria's brain drain, and in December 2024, the Oxford English Dictionary added Japa in its update of Nigerian and West African words. That tells us something important. What began as Yoruba speech became a Nigerian slang and then became a global vocabulary for a national feeling. A people's anxiety pretty much entered the dictionary. But behind the slogan, behind the memes, behind the passport envy and embassy cues, there is something more intimate, which is the family. Jakpa is never only about the person who boards the plane. It is also about the mother who stays back and says, Go, my child, but don't forget us. It is about the father abroad doing night shifts while pretending on WhatsApp that everything is fine. It's about grandparents who now know their grandchildren through phone screens. It's about siblings who start speaking in time zones. It's about children who know two national anthems, three slang systems, and one stubborn question. Where exactly is home? In many families now, migration can feel less like an exception and more like part of the script. Not every family has left, of course, but many families now imagine leaving. They know someone who has left, or they are helping someone leave, or they are even waiting for someone to return. And that is why we must slow down and talk honestly, because Jakpa has both poetry and pain. Let us begin with the leaving part. People do not leave only because they hate where they come from. Many people live because they love the people tied to them. They live because they want school fees paid on time. They live because they want stable electricity, safer streets, functioning hospitals, and a future that does not feel like a gamble. In Reuters reporting on Nigeria's Japa wave, one father preparing to move to England said plainly that he wanted a better quality of life for his children. That sentence has probably been spoken in 10,000 Europa homes in 10,000 different ways. But leaving is not only aspiration. Sometimes it is desperation, and desperation attracts predators. In March 2025, a BBC AfricaI investigation exposed relocation agents exploiting Africans seeking UK care sector jobs. The reporting described people being charged for jobs that either did not exist or left them stranded and out of status after arrival. So even the dream of escape can become a trap. The road out of suffering can itself become another form of suffering. That's why I say JAKA is not just mobility, it is vulnerability, it is hope under pressure. So now let us be fair to those who stay, because one of the quiet cruelties of this era is that staying can be treated like failure, as if the only evidence of ambition is departure. As if the person who remains in Ibadon, Akure, Abel Kuta, Lagos, Elisha, Iloni, or Oshobu has somehow lacked courage. But staying also requires courage. Staying means building in a place others are exiting. Staying means refusing the humiliation of comparison. Staying means saying, I too will create value here. I too will raise children here. I too will insist that a Yoruba life at home is still a full life. Some stay because they cannot leave. Some stay because they do not want to leave. Some stay because they believe that if everybody runs, who will remain to repair the house? And that takes me to one proverb. When a child falls, the child looks forward. When an elder falls, the elder looks backwards. That proverb helps me understand this moment. The young often look forward. Visa, degree, residency, passport, new system, new possibilities. The elders often look backward. Land, lineage, language, burial ground, memory, clan, compound, ancestors, and so on. Neither of these is foolish. Both are asking a serious question. The young are asking, where can I live? The elders are asking, what must not be lost? And between those two questions sits the Yoruba family. Now let's talk about money because migration is not only emotional, it is primarily financial. The remittance story is one of the biggest untold stories in modern Yoruba and Nigerian family life. Reuters reported, citing the Central Bank of Nigeria, that remittances rose 8.9% to just over$20 billion in 2024. Then in February 2026, the CBN governor said formal diaspora remittance inflows were averaging about$600 million a month with a target of$1 billion monthly in the near term. On the global level, the World Bank estimated that officially recorded remittances to low and middle income countries would reach about$685 billion in 2024. This is not side money. This is survival money. This is school fees money. This is hospital money. This is rent money, elder care money, send something small money that is never really small. And then there is what many Africans call the black tax. A Forbes Africa report on Lagos workers said most allocate about 20% of their income to supporting extended family members. The Guardian, writing in January 2026 about the pain and pride of remitting, described this support as both burden and badge of honor. That is exactly right. Remittances are love made visible, but they can also become obligation made permanent. The same money transfer can be an act of dignity as well as an act of exhaustion. So when a Yoruba son in Toronto, Canada, or a Yoruba daughter in Houston, Texas, or London, England sends money home, what exactly are they sending? Because it's not just cash. They are sending proof of continued belonging. They are saying, I may be away, but I'm still inside the family covenant. That's why remittance arguments can become so emotional. The sender thinks, do they know what this cost me? The receiver thinks, do they know what this means to us? And both of them are usually correct. So now let's talk about returning. Because every migration culture eventually develops a return vocabulary. For us, people have begun to speak not only of Jakba, but of Jakbada, the turnback, the return, the reconsideration. And yes, people are returning. According to the International Organization for Migration, 14,787 Nigerians returned home safely in 2025, and more than 2,500 migrants had already been supported in 2026 by late March. That should tell us something. The migration story is not a straight line from village to airport to permanent settlement abroad. For many people, it bends, it doubles back, it disappoints, it matures, it changes shape. But let's not romanticize returning. Return is not always victory. Sometimes it is grief. Sometimes it is death. Sometimes it is burnout. Sometimes it is deportation. Sometimes it's a strategic pause. Sometimes it's a deliberate choice by people who have seen enough and now want to build that home with clearer eyes. And sometimes returnees discover that the home they preserved in memory no longer exists in exactly that form. This is one of the deepest emotional truths of migration. The person who lives changes, but the home they left also changes. So return is not a rewind button. Return is a new meeting between two altered things. That's why returnees can feel strange in the very place they call home. They may be welcomed, envied, mocked, admired, overcharged, and misunderstood, all in the same week. They come back with new habits, new anxieties, different expectations of time, service, privacy, work, and speech. And then the old community asks, sometimes lovingly and sometimes cruelly, so you are now oyable. You've changed. Of course they've changed. Migration changes people, but it does not erase them. Which brings us to accent shame. This is one of the ugliest little dramas inside modern Yoruba life. A person lives and acquires another cadence, another tempo, another pronunciation. Then they come back and they are mocked for sounding foreign. Or a child is raised abroad, speaks with an American or British accent, and is told they are not really Yoruba. On the other side, some migrants learn quickly that their Nigerian accent can trigger bias in professional spaces. A recent Guardian Nigeria explainer on Nigerian accents urged people to pursue accent awareness without accent shame and noted that Nigerian accents still face prejudice in some conservative sectors. Separate UK research from the Accent Bias in Britain project says accent bias can affect how candidates are judged in professional hiring. So the migrant is squeezed from both ends, too foreign at home, too foreign abroad. But we must reject that nonsense. An accent is not a moral failure. It is evidence of travel, adaptation, context, and contact. It has moved through Oyo, Ijebu, Ekiti, Ondo, Abelkutta, Lagos, Porto Novo, Freetown, Salvador, London, Atlanta, Toronto, and so on. Our speech has always traveled. So the real question is not, do you sound exactly like those who never left? The real question is, what do you carry? What values remain? What relationships do you sustain? What language do you honor? What responsibilities do you remember? And that takes us to the children. Perhaps the most delicate question in the Jakbar family is not who left, it's who the children will become. A 2025 study of Yoruba families in the US-Midwest found that parents were deliberately using poems, folk stories, songs, proverbs, cartoons, and even religious texts to help their children develop bilingualism and biliteracy in English and Yoruba. The study also found that these parents saw no separation between learning Yoruba and participating in a Yoruba-speaking community. Another study of first-generation Yoruba English immigrants in the US found that heritage language maintenance supports positive ethnic identity. It helps maintain connectedness and can reduce identity crisis. In plain language, when parents fight to keep Yoruba alive in the home, they are not being old-fashioned. They are giving their children another root system. And notice something profound in that research. These parents were not simply trying to produce children with perfect grammar. They were trying to produce children with continuity. Children who know the songs. Children who can decode the proverbs. Children who understand why an elder greets first, why a name matters, why a family story matters, why well done is not a small phrase, why language carries respect. One of the studies makes a powerful point. Language moves with people. It is not locked forever to one geography. That means Yoruba does not stop being Yoruba because it is spoken in Minnesota, Maryland, Manchester, or Melbourne. It means home can be rehearsed at the dinner table. It can be preserved in bedtime stories. It can survive in prayer. It can be hidden in jokes, it can travel in lullabies. But we should also be honest. This work is hard. Children abroad absorb the dominant culture faster. English becomes the air they breathe. School becomes the loudest voice. Convenience tempts parents into surrender. Let you speak English so that everything is easier. And yes, ease matters. Parents are tired, work is demanding, assimilation is efficient. But every language surrendered narrows an entire worldview. Every proverb untranslated is a lost philosophy. Every greeting abandoned is a missing bridge to elders. That does not mean every child abroad must speak perfect Yoruba or be measured by impossible standards. Shame is a bad teacher, love is better, repetition is better, music is better, story is better, community is better, the goal is not purity, the goal is transmission. So what then is home now? Home for the contemporary Yoruba family is no longer one house in one town under one sky. Home is becoming layered. Home is the grandmother in Ibado and the granddaughter in Calgary. Home is a forero in a London kitchen. Home is a naming ceremony live streamed across four countries. Home is a child in New Jersey answering a caro with a foreign accent but a sincere heart. Home is a returnee in Lakey Lagos who misses Manchester weather and still wants Amala on Sunday. Home is the son abroad who pays school fees from a night shift and still wants to be buried in the family soil. Home is the daughter who left to survive and came back to rebuild. Home is the family group chat. Home is remittance and remembrance. Home is where your language is still recognized when it reaches the air. Home is where your absence is counted. Home is where your return, however awkward, still has a seat. That is the new Yoruba identity I see emerging. Not less Yoruba, but networked Yoruba. Stretched, translated, accented, digitized, economically entangled, emotionally overcommitted, sometimes confused, often resilient. And maybe that is not a tragedy. Maybe it is simply a new chapter in an old story of movement. After all, Yoruba history did not begin with stillness. We've always been traders, travelers, thinkers, pilgrims, returnees, city builders, border crossers, and interpreters of worlds. The Atlantic changed us. Colonialism changed us. Lagos changed us. Modernity changed us. Migration is changing us again. So instead of asking whether the Jakarta family is still authentically Yoruba, perhaps the better question is this: how shall we be Yoruba well in an age of movement? Can we live without contempt for those who stay? Can we stay without bitterness toward those who leave? Can we send money without reducing love to transactions? Can we receive help without entitlement? Can we welcome returnees without mocking their changed selves? Can we raise children abroad without teaching them that belonging must be earned by perfection? Can we honor accents without worshipping imitation? Can we carry home forward instead of carrying it only backward? So let me end with another proverb. We take a look at the home before naming the child. For a long time, many of us heard that proverb as a lesson about family background and reputation. But today I hear something more. Before you name the child, study the house. Before you define the future, understand the home that is shaping it. And how a house has changed. Now it is larger. It crosses oceans. It has cousins in six countries. It speaks Yoruba, English, Pidgin, and borrowed slang in the same breath. It sends money through apps. It argues on video calls. It returns in December. It lives again in January. It carries nostalgia in one hand and ambition in the other. That is the house. So when we name the child of this era, this new Yoruba identity, we must name it truthfully, not ruthless, without roots, not finished, not betrayed, but carried, stretched, tested, traveling, and still somehow at home. So that's all I have for this episode of the Yoruba Proverbs podcast. If you've benefited from this episode, if you feel like this podcast as a whole is adding some value, please and please kindly share the episode, the podcast, depending on whichever platform you are using to listen right now, you can send the podcast to whoever you think might also learn a thing or two. You can share on WhatsApp, you can share on text messages, you can share however you want to share email and so on. So again, um thank you once again for being part of this, which is a learning process for me as well. And like I said in the beginning, a young person quoting proverbs in the presence of elders must do so humbly and respectfully. So I crave the indulgence of my parents, um, Yoruba elders worldwide, as I narrate and break down and analyze these proverbs from my own perspective. And of course, none of these proverbs are definitively translated in one way or the other. The whole concept behind this is to glean the wisdom and the knowledge that our elders keep passing down to us. And this proverb, this podcast, is basically doing just that so that we. Just pass on that knowledge as much as we can to as many people as possible, especially in this day and age where the younger ones don't even want to learn the language anymore, and they would rather be on social media and so on. So, anyway, thank you so much. Talk to you next time. Bye for now.