The inciting incident

Parts of this post will make a lot more sense if you’ve read Adim’s first.

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Even though I’m Yoruba, I’m not in love with the word “Japa”. It just doesn’t roll off the tongue. Not for me, at least. But it gets the job done. And here I am, co-writing a Japa Diary with Adim.

My japa story is not an action film like Adim’s. It’s actually pretty mundane. A much slower burn that started sometime in 2017.

Close to the end of that year, I was in a weird place where I had a tough decision to make. Pay the next month’s rent and get a “real job” within the next four weeks, or take the last of the cash in my bank account, and buy a plane ticket out of Lagos.

I thought about it for three seconds, paid for a flight to Rwanda, and spent the next three months on the road, backpacking through East Africa, crashing on couches as I went. From Lagos to Kigali by plane, then to Kampala by bus, and then another bus to Nairobi, where I spent the next two months eating free food, going on lots of cheap Tinder dates*, and contemplating my next steps in life.

I returned to Lagos with weeks to spare on my East Africa Tourist visa. But I knew that it was only a matter of time before I hit the road again. This was before we’d added the term “digital nomad” to mainstream lexicon, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I have spent the past five years living for weeks to months at a time in Kenya, Togo, Rwanda, Portugal, and Niger. It’s not a longer list, partly because the pandemic happened. But mostly because being a digital nomad on a Nigerian passport is nothing like the glossy millennial or Gen Z hipster variant that is popular on Instagram. It’s closer to something of an extreme sport. On that 2017 backpacking trip, when I was crossing the Rwandan land border into Uganda, I was singled out to be “interviewed”  for nearly an hour. Apparently the only reason the bus didn’t leave me behind, with no local money and a dead phone in what for all intents an purposes to me was the middle of nowhere, was because an elderly lady I’d given up my premium seat for insisted that they couldn’t go until “Rasta” returned — I had super long dreadlocked hair at the time.

Even if it’s not an action film with a cast of nine armed robbers versus neighbourhood vigilantes, every japa story has an inciting incident. But the fact that my Nigerian passport condemns me to various visa application indignities, and drama at airports and borders around the world wasn’t it. To be clear, having a Nigerian passport is, to put it mildly, pretty inconvenient. But it’s actually not the worst passport you can wind up with in the lottery of birth. And considering what’s happening around the world, it’s not the worst place to live either. Of course experience is relative, and I suppose if you ask Nigerians in Nigeria, “how far?” , they’ll give you an earful about how bad a time it is right now.

My inciting incident wasn’t when I noticed that my mates** in Nairobi and Cape Town earning at least 5x my salary were living in comfortable apartments with gym, pool and cityscape views, for the same amount I was paying in Lagos for a “serviced apartment”, which actually means 18-hour generator power on weekdays, and a view of exterior plumbing snaking all over the building, out of the tiny burglary-proofed windows that Lagos landlords favour.

And it wasn’t when the AC unit outside a friend’s Victoria Island apartment spontaneously combusted, while I was there all by myself. At 3am. If I hadn’t been up and working at my computer, right next to the window, which let me observe the first flames and alert the sleeping “security” men downstairs, I have no idea what might have happened.

In the end, it was the ENDSARS protests at the end of 2020 that culminated in tragic loss of life that did it for me. That was my inciting incident. I felt like if I kept living like normal, getting pulled over at least once a week by armed policemen simply for existing, I would be pushing the luck I’d had so far.

Of course it’s never just one thing. I haven’t even begun to list all the things. I haven’t talked about the income ceiling, even when working remotely. Or how it’s almost impossible to participate in the global economy because local forex controls and global geo-fencing collude to exclude Nigerians. These things add up, and then one day you realise that the “economics” no longer work, and no amount of creative optimisation will be enough.

So at the end of 2021, I resolved to never pay rent in Lagos ever again, gave my stuff away, and hit the road one more time. Most people spent the pandemic lockdown period learning stuff or producing their magnum opuses. That wasn’t a luxury I could afford. I spent that time thinking and planning how to change my base of operations permanently. It might sound like I was hatching a grandiose plan, but it’s really just a long ass checklist of things to do. At the top of the list was renewing my passport, and making sure it was the ten year one, because I expected the whole enterprise to take about that long.

I was talking to Adim a lot about what I was up to, because we had a number of things in common. But he’s also an actual travel/immigration nerd, and his perspective was incredibly valuable to me. After just over two years on this specific subject, and multiple expeditions and experiments later, we decided that it could be useful to start documenting our conversations and parallel journeys.

But when we made this call, I had no idea that I would wind up in the UK. I was in Lagos, planning my next junket to Nairobi, when it kind of just happened, and pretty randomly.

That’s a story for another day.

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*When I told one of ogas that I was travelling, he recommended downloading Tinder as a way to explore new cities. It was a great idea, I met quite a few interesting people!

**In Nigeria “your mate” is not to be confused with “your friend”. It’s a general way of referencing people in the same age or peer demographics, typically as a way of measuring comparative achievement in one’s cohort. See usage example here.