I was standing in my aso oke and gele with my bridesmaids when she suggested it, a year of planning finally taking shape. I didn’t record the TikTok with the sound. I turned to the women around me instead and told them exactly why it was wrong.

Because that sound treats the traditional wedding as something you borrow into. A costume that transfers with proximity. Marry a Nigerian, and the gele comes free. Sit close enough to the culture, and you inherit its rites. I understand why it’s a comforting thing to believe, especially for Black British women navigating diaspora identity across so many overlapping cultures. Outside of the glossy social media posts on bellanaija, I did not fully understand what it took to become a Yoruba bride. But it’s fundamentally incorrect, and three weeks into being a Yoruba bride myself, I feel the specific ways it’s incorrect more sharply than I ever have.

Let me be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not arguing against intercultural marriage, my husband is Jamaican. I sold aso ebi to his family who’d never encountered the concept before in their lives. I’m not against non-Nigerians engaging with the culture, wearing the clothes, eating the food, or celebrating alongside us. I loved having people from outside my culture in that room with me. That was one of the proudest parts of my wedding.

What I’m saying is narrower and, I think, more precise: wearing the clothes is appreciation. Standing as “the bride” in a rite that presumes a Nigerian family behind you is occupying a position you have no inherited claim to.

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That distinction isn’t just a feeling, it’s structural, and it’s worth laying out plainly.

A Yoruba traditional wedding is not primarily a decorative event. It’s an economic and social exchange between two families, and the roles in that exchange are not interchangeable. The bride’s family originates and hosts the entire ceremony, traditionally held at their family compound, at their cost. They cover the venue, the catering, the entertainment, her attire. They compile the eru iyawo, the formal gift list the groom’s family must fulfil, and negotiate the bride price alongside it. This process, one detailed account of Yoruba custom, describes as the least negotiable part of the entire wedding process, the point where “culture plays its strongest hand.”

The groom’s family responds. They pay the bride price, fulfil the eru iyawo, fund their own delegation’s attire. But they do not originate the ceremony. They do not carry its financial or logistical weight. That’s not incidental detail, it’s the architecture of the thing.

You can see that architecture in the roles themselves. It’s the bride’s younger sister or cousin who reads out the family’s acceptance letter. It’s the bride’s mother whose care and standards the ceremony is, in part, a testament to. Every role on the bride’s side assumes a family that has watched her grow up inside the culture being invoked.

This isn’t unique to Yoruba custom, either. Among the Igbo, the dowry list presented to the bride’s family can run to dozens of items, each demonstrating a specific kind of respect to specific people. This respect only makes sense if the bride’s whole family knows what’s being respected and why. The details differ by tradition; the underlying logic repeats: a negotiation between two families legible to each other, not a script handed to whoever happens to be standing nearby.

Which means the “bride’s side” role cannot simply be filled by whoever the groom happens to have married. It requires a family with an inherited stake in the custom: who understand what the eru iyawo signals, why the bride price list is being built the way it is, what it means to host and to hand over a daughter. A non-Nigerian bride’s family can absolutely be told what’s expected and do the logistics. What they can’t do is carry the inherited meaning behind the role, because that meaning was never handed down to them in the first place.

That’s the difference between a tradition and a costume of one. And I think it’s worth naming plainly: we already understand this instinctively in other contexts. Most people recognise the discomfort of a non-Native person putting on a war bonnet, or a costume-shop geisha look worn for an aesthetic rather than a role. We understand, in those cases, that the clothing is bound to something (a role, a rite, a lineage) that doesn’t transfer with the fabric. I don’t think Nigerian tradition is exempt from that same logic just because our weddings have become aspirational content. If anything, the fact that they’ve become so visible online is exactly why the distinction needs saying out loud now, before “gorgeous” quietly becomes the only thing anyone remembers to ask about a ceremony this specific.

I think about the three months I spent designing my outfits. The hours in Balogun Market finding lace for my bridesmaids. Coordinating tailors in Lagos, payments, shipping everything back to the UK in time. I think about how much the eru iyawo list mattered to my mother, not as paperwork, but as a statement about who I am and how I was raised, about what kind of family was handing me over.

I think, too, about my husband’s family, stepping into all of this for the first time. They bought the eru iyawo, I sold them aso ebi and explained, patiently, what it meant. They showed up in it with genuine joy. That’s the part I’d never trade away, tradition shared with and celebrated by people who didn’t grow up inside it. If anything, that’s the version of cross-cultural exchange I want more of, not less.

But sharing a tradition and standing inside its central role are not the same act. None of what my family carried is replicable by someone standing in for a role they were never handed. I don’t say that to gatekeep. I said yes to sharing every part of the culture I could, generously. I say it because I now understand, having lived it, how much is skipped when a wedding borrows the aesthetic and leaves the inheritance behind: months of preparation, a family’s name staked publicly on how well they’ve raised you.

A traditional wedding without a Nigerian bride isn’t a lesser version of the ceremony. It’s a different thing altogether, wearing the same clothes. I understand why it photographs beautifully, why scrolling past it looks like nothing more than fabric and dancing and joy. But having just come out the other side of it, I can tell you it was never just that for me. It was months of my mother’s care and my family’s name, staked on my behalf. That isn’t something you can borrow for a weekend.

You can wear the aso oke. You can tie the gele beautifully. But the gele was never the thing that made me the bride.

She has since said she isn’t “in favour of any form of circumcision that is forced upon an individual.” Read that sentence again. It’s true, and it’s also nothing. Nobody, anywhere, frames FGM as something they’re forcing on a consenting adult. The entire argument has always been about whether a five-year-old or an infant can consent at all. Saying you oppose force while declining to say the practice itself is harmful isn’t a moderate position. It’s a script that lets you keep both audiences, survivors and soweis, happy at once.

I want to use her case as the entry point into something bigger, because the story isn’t really about one woman’s choice of words. It’s about what a legal ban can and can’t do once it exists, and why the existence of a law was never the end of the fight, just the start of a much longer one.

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Why ambiguity from the top is never neutral

Here’s the thing about power: it doesn’t have to act to have an effect. Silence and hedging from someone in Bio’s position function as cover, whether or not that’s the intention. When the highest office in the country tells the cutters not to be afraid, that provides permission, dressed up as restraint.

Sierra Leone has no law criminalising FGM. A national survey found 83% of women there have undergone it. The ECOWAS Court of Justice has already ordered the government to criminalise it, and the country’s own 2025 Child Rights Act was written without FGM provisions in it. So, the absence of a law isn’t an oversight, it’s a choice repeatedly made by people who have the power to close that gap and keep declining to.

This is the case for legal protection. Without a law, there’s no floor. Advocates have nothing to point to except moral argument against an entrenched social institution. The Bondo and Sande societies, whose leaders (the sowei) hold real local political weight. When ambiguity from the top meets a total legal vacuum, you get exactly what Sierra Leone has: one of the highest FGM rates in the world, sustained mostly by inertia and discretion at every level of power.

But a law isn’t a wall. It’s a position you have to keep defending.

Now look at The Gambia, which did exactly what Sierra Leone hasn’t, banned FGM outright, back in 2015.

In March 2024, the National Assembly voted 42 to 4 in favour of advancing a bill to repeal that ban, arguing it violated religious and cultural freedom. Every lawmaker who spoke in that debate was a man. Five of Gambia’s parliamentary seats belong to women, and none of them were given the floor. The repeal nearly went through. It took a sustained campaign by Gambian feminist organisers, including a fact-finding trip to Al-Azhar University that confirmed FGM has no basis in Islamic scripture, to flip enough votes. In July 2024, parliament rejected the bill, 34 to 19.

That should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t.

Having lost the legislative route, the same lawmaker, Almameh Gibba, teamed up with religious leaders and took the fight to the Supreme Court instead, arguing the 2015 ban itself is unconstitutional, a violation of religious and cultural rights. In January 2026, the case was was heard. One witness, a prominent religious leader, told the court that FGM is part of Islam and isn’t harmful. When he was asked about two infants who’d died from being cut the previous year, said it was God’s will, adding that the practice usefully reduces women’s sexual desire, which he framed as a problem for men to be managed. That is now sworn testimony, in the country’s highest court, as a constitutional argument.

So, the ban exists. The ban survived a parliamentary vote. However, the ban is still under direct threat, just through a different door. And in the meantime, advocates report that survivors and women’s rights defenders are choosing to stay silent rather than face the harassment that comes with being visibly on the “wrong” side of an ongoing court case.

The structure isn’t the law. It’s who keeps showing up to defend it.

This is the part I think gets missed in how we talk about wins and losses on this issue. We treat a ban as a finish line, Gambia banned it in 2015, so surely that chapter’s closed. But a law is only as durable as the willingness of someone, somewhere, to keep fighting for it every time someone with power and a grievance finds a new venue to relitigate it in.

Sierra Leone shows you what happens with no law at all: ambiguity from the top fills the vacuum, and the practice persists basically unchallenged at the level of formal power.

Gambia shows you something almost more unsettling: even with a law, a determined and well-resourced opposition can keep the fight alive indefinitely. Parliament this year, the Supreme Court next, enforcement gaps after that. Yet, the people defending the protection have to win every single round just to hold the line they already won once. Lose any one of those rounds, and the floor disappears.

This shows that legal mechanisms are not a wall you build once, but a ground you have to keep holding.

Why this matters beyond West Africa

I teach Economics as my main subject but also lead PSHE (Personal, Social, Health, and Economic education) provision to the whole school. FGM education is a statutory part of the curriculum in UK secondary schools, it has been since the Children Act 2004 and is folded into safeguarding duties every school is legally required to deliver. So, this isn’t an abstract West African policy story to me. It’s directly relevant to a classroom of British teenagers, some of whom have family ties to communities where this practice happens, some of whom may be at risk themselves.

What I want people to understand isn’t just “FGM is illegal and harmful,” which is true but thin. I want them to understand that the law existing doesn’t mean the fight is over. Protections for women and girls are contested globally, repeatedly, by people with real institutional power, and that the only reason any of those protections hold is because somebody kept showing up to defend them. That’s true in Banjul, and it’s true here. Safeguarding isn’t a box you tick once a law passes. It’s a position you keep, round after round, against people who haven’t stopped trying to take it back.

Bio’s ambiguity isn’t an isolated lapse from one woman in one country. It’s what happens in the gap a law leaves open. The Gambia’s court case is what happens even when that gap is closed. Both are the same fight, at different stages, against the same opponent: organised power that has decided girls’ bodies are a negotiable line item, and will keep finding new venues to argue that until somebody with equal staying power tells them no, again.

Sources:

1. “Sierra Leone’s first lady refuses to condemn FGM without ‘reliable data’ on harms” https://newyorkmetropolitan.com/sierra-leones-first-lady-refuses-to-condemn-fgm-without-reliable-data-on-harms/

2. “Sierra Leone First Lady Faces Scrutiny Over Alleged Support for Female Genital Mutilation” https://eurweb.com/fatima-maada-bio-fgm-comments-advocates-letter/

3. “The Gambia votes to reverse landmark ban on female genital mutilation” https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/19/the-gambia-votes-to-reverse-landmark-ban-on-female-genital-mutilation

4. “Gambia Moves to Overturn Ban on Female Genital Cutting” https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/gambia-moves-overturn-ban-female-genital-cutting

5. “Inside the campaign that stopped The Gambia reversing its FGM ban” https://www.opendemocracy.net/inside-the-campaign-that-stopped-the-gambia-reversing-its-fgm-ban/

6. “Gambia’s Supreme Court to Decide on FGM Ban” https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/02/02/gambias-supreme-court-to-decide-on-fgm-ban

7. “Gambia’s Supreme Court to Decide on FGM Ban” https://www.ipsnews.net/2026/01/gambias-supreme-court-to-decide-on-fgm-ban/

8. “Today in Africa https://www.okayafrica.com/today-in-africa-january-9-2026-uganda-vote-under-un-fire-gambias-fgm-ban-faces-court-test/1410384

The comments were full of women saying this is my life. And not just Nigerian women; diaspora women, women from entirely different cultural contexts recognising the same shape of experience in their own relationships.

This isn’t a coincidence. And it isn’t just about individual men making individual bad choices.

I want to make it clear that I am a Nigerian woman from the diaspora that has no experience of dating Lagos men. However, these patterns and behaviours are something many women, including myself, easily recognise. There is a theory for this. Several, actually. And once you see them, you cannot unsee them.

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First: What Is Feminist Political Economy?

Before we get into Lagos specifically, let me explain the framework.

Feminist political economy is a way of analysing society that asks: how do economic systems and power structures shape the way gender works and vice versa? It pushes back against the idea that intimate relationships exist in a vacuum, separate from money, class, politics, and history. It says: the way a man behaves in a relationship is not just about his personality. It is shaped by the world he lives in, the pressures placed on him, and the social rewards and punishments that world offers him for different kinds of behaviour.

In other words, the personal is political. And in Lagos, the personal is also deeply economic.

The Ideal: What Does It Mean to “Be a Man” in Lagos?

Every society has an image of what the ideal man looks like. In academic language, this is called hegemonic masculinity, a term coined by Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell. It doesn’t mean the most common kind of man. It means the most celebrated kind, the version of manhood that the culture holds up as something to aspire to and be measured against.

In Lagos, that ideal has a name in popular culture: the Odogwu.

The Odogwu is economically powerful. He is visibly wealthy. He walks into a room and commands it. He pays lavishly, publicly, without hesitation. He takes care of his woman, his friends, his family. He has social prestige and cultural legitimacy. He is the man everyone sees and respects.

You can see this ideal everywhere: in Afrobeats lyrics, in Nollywood films, in the “Hunts Game Show” where female contestants openly say they are looking for an Odogwu. The ideal is not hidden. It is aspirational and it is broadcast.

Here is where it gets complicated.

Lagos is also a city of extreme economic inequality. It is one of the most expensive cities in Africa, sitting inside one of the most unequal economies in the world. Structural adjustment programmes hollowed out the formal employment sector. Inflation is brutal. The middle class is precarious. And yet the Odogwu ideal does not bend to accommodate this reality. The standard stays fixed. The money is supposed to be there. The performance is supposed to be consistent. This is clear evidence of the patriarchy harming the very men it supposed to be benefiting.

Most men cannot sustain it. But they are still expected to perform it.

The Love Bomb: A Political Economy Explanation

So what happens at the start of a relationship?

A man who has absorbed the Odogwu ideal (consciously or not) understands that his worth, his desirability, and his status are tied to what he can provide and perform. The early stage of courtship is therefore not just romantic. It is also a public performance of masculine legitimacy.

The clubs and lounges are not just fun, they are his stage. The lavish gifts are not just generosity, they are proof. The confidence, the presence, the way he commands a room: all of it is communicating: I am the right kind of man. I am someone worth choosing.

There is even a specific academic concept for this Nigerian pattern: conspicuous redistribution, developed by anthropologist Daniel Jordan Smith. He observed that Nigerian men, especially those aspiring to the middle class, are culturally rewarded for being seen to spend. Spending publicly signals not just wealth, but social and moral worth. It says: I am not selfish. I am generous. I am powerful and good.

The love bombing is, in part, this conspicuous redistribution directed at a woman. It is also an anxious performance. Research on the Odogwu ideal notes that men sometimes pile on gifts out of a fear of being rejected or “ghosted,” which means the spending is not purely confident. It is also scared.

The Collapse: Why Gaslighting Follows

Here is the structural problem. That performance is expensive for both parties; financially, emotionally, and energetically. And in a context of economic precarity, it is often impossible to maintain.

When the performance starts to crack, the man faces a masculine identity crisis. If his sense of self-worth is built on being the provider, the spender, the Odogwu; what happens when he can no longer be that? He has two options: he can be honest about his limitations, or he can protect the image.

Protecting the image is what the culture rewards.

This is where the control, the gaslighting, the emotional manipulation enter. The relationship dynamic shifts from “I will impress you” to “I will manage you.” The woman is no longer an audience to be won, she becomes a threat to be contained, because her expectations, her observations, her voice are now a mirror showing him who he cannot be.

Feminist urban scholars describe cities like Lagos as operating through layered patriarchies, not just in the home, but in public life, in social spaces, in who gets to take up space and how. The nightlife economy of Lagos is itself a theatre of this public patriarchy. Women in those spaces are simultaneously audience, prize, and prop. Their role is to affirm masculine status, not challenge it.

When a woman challenges it by noticing the inconsistency, by asking questions, by withdrawing her validation, the response is often to gaslight rather than to be accountable.

What About UK Men? (And Why the Parallel Holds)

The woman in the TikTok was describing a Lagos-specific flavour of something that exists much more broadly. Many women watching recognised the shape of it in their own experience, across cultures, across countries.

This is because the mechanism is the same, even when the materials differ.

In the UK, the hegemonic masculine ideal looks different. It is less about conspicuous spending. In fact, as a culture, there is almost an inverted status signal in men who do not spend, who are “not flashy,” who play it cool. The love bombing in the UK context tends to be more about emotional intensity and availability early on, then withdrawal. The gaslighting similarly follows when a woman’s expectations challenge the man’s sense of self.

The underlying structure is identical: a man whose sense of masculine worth is tied to an ideal he cannot consistently sustain, managing the gap between that ideal and reality through control of the relationship dynamic rather than honesty.

The difference is that in Lagos, the spending is the performance. In the UK, the withholding of both money and emotion is the performance. Both are performances of a masculinity under pressure.

So Who Is Responsible?

Understanding the structural roots of this behaviour is not the same as excusing it. I am not in the business of excusing male behaviour. These are frameworks for analysis, not absolution.

Men make choices. The man who gaslit you made a choice. The man who love bombed you and then disappeared made a choice. Individual accountability matters.

But feminist political economy also asks us to look at the conditions that make certain choices feel available, rewarding, or even necessary to certain people. It asks: what kind of world produces this pattern so reliably? What economic conditions, what cultural ideals, what absence of emotional infrastructure teaches men that performing dominance is safer than showing vulnerability?

When we understand that, we can name it properly. We can stop asking “why does he do this?” as if it is a mystery, and start seeing it as a predictable output of a particular set of structural inputs.

We can also be clearer-eyed about what would actually need to change for the pattern to change and it is not just a matter of individual men doing better, though they absolutely should. It is about challenging the Odogwu ideal, building cultures of masculine accountability, and taking seriously what economic precarity does to intimate life.

To Conclude

The woman in that TikTok was not just venting. She was, without knowing the academic language for it, doing a feminist political economy analysis of her own life. She had traced the love bombing back to its function. She had connected the performance to the precarity. She had named the gaslighting as a management strategy, not a mystery.

That is exactly the kind of analysis that gets dismissed as “bitter” or “generalising.”

It is not. It is correct.

Sources

Academic and theoretical works:

• Connell, R.W. (1995). Masculinities. Polity Press.

  • Foundation text on hegemonic masculinity and gender hierarchy.

• Connell, R.W. & Messerschmidt, J.W. (2005). “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.” Gender and Society, 19(6), 829–859.

  • Revised and updated framework, widely cited across gender studies.

• Smith, D.J. (2017). To Be a Man Is Not a One-Day Job: Masculinity, Money, and Intimacy in Nigeria. University of Chicago Press.

  • Ethnographic study of masculinity, money, and intimate relationships in Nigeria; develops the concept of conspicuous redistribution.

• Smith, D.J. (2023). “Conspicuous Redistribution: Money, Morality, and Masculinity in Nigeria.” Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 42(2).

  • Extends the framework of conspicuous redistribution and its moral dimensions in Nigerian male identity.

• Dosekun, S. (2022). “The Problems and Intersectional Politics of #BeingFemaleinNigeria.” Feminist Media Studies.

  • Analysis of Nigerian feminist digital discourse; examines how class shapes whose gendered experiences are centred.

• Nwobi, C. et al. (2026). “Theorizing ‘Odogwu Masculinities’: Nigerian Popular Culture and the Construction of the Empowered ‘Odogwu’ Ideal Male.” ResearchGate.

  • Most recent theoretical framework on the Odogwu masculine ideal in Nigerian media and popular culture.

• Apenda, A.Z. & contributors (2014). “Gender and Urbanization in Nigeria.” ResearchGate.

  • Feminist urban studies framework applied to Nigerian cities; covers public and private patriarchies in Lagos and Abuja.

• Uchendu, E. (2007). Masculinities in Contemporary Africa. CODESRIA.

  • Broader African context for understanding how masculinity is performed and contested.

I have just finished reading Second Class Citizen by Buchi Emecheta. If you haven’t read it, the short version is this: Nigerian woman arrives in 1960s London, navigates racism, poverty, a marriage that is frankly its own special disaster, and documents all of it with the kind of precision that only comes from lived experience.

What has been sitting with is the simple fact of her presence. That Buchi Emecheta was here in London in the 1960s, and she was not alone.

My dad was born in Paddington in this same era. A fact that barely registers in the dominant story of who built Black Britain, because that story, as it is most often told, has one ship, one date, and one community at its centre.

The HMT Empire Windrush. 22nd June 1948. Caribbean.

And that story is real. It is important. It deserves every monument, every commemoration, every piece of curriculum space it gets.

But it is not the whole story. And the gap between what happened and what gets remembered is worth sitting with.

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Who Was Actually Here

The Caribbean community came in larger numbers, came with more visibility, and built the cultural infrastructure of Black Britain in ways that are undeniable and profound.

jtsaidit stated the fact that West Africans were here too, and was met with fierce resistance.

Nigerians and Ghanaians were in London in the 1950s and 1960s, drawn primarily by education. They came on family money, on colonial scholarships, with the expectation that they would qualify and return home to build newly independent nations. They worked in the NHS. They studied at UCL and SOAS. Some of them cleaned trains and the Houses of Parliament before going to lectures. One oral history project recovered testimony from Nigerian men who arrived in the 1940s and 50s. These stories, as one researcher put it, sounded like Hollywood scripts but were happening in Cheetham Hill in 1949 and Didsbury in 1951.

And before all of them, there was an institution in Camden that most people have never heard of.

Evidence of the Erasure of African Contributions to Black British History

In August 1925, a Nigerian law student named Ladipo Solanke and a Sierra Leonean doctor named Herbert Bankole-Bright founded the West African Students’ Union (WASU) in Camden Town, London.

Over the next three decades, that building became one of the most politically significant spaces in the Black world. It was a hostel, a debating chamber, a publisher, a lobbying organisation. It maintained a parliamentary committee of Labour MPs to advance West African interests in the House of Commons. It produced a journal distributed across Europe and Africa. It trained Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president and Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president on British soil, years before either man led their countries to independence.

One of WASU’s earliest donors was Marcus Garvey, who helped them secure their first meetinghouse.

There are 172 English Heritage blue plaques in Camden. Not one of them is on a former WASU building. This provides evidence of Africans shaping Black British history way before the Windrush generation.

A more contemporary signal of Black British history is the MLE (Multicultural London English) accent.

The accent the media spent years calling “Jafaican,” the one you heard in the playgrounds of Hackney and Lewisham, the one that has been slowly replacing Cockney as the sound of London? Researchers are clear that it carries Caribbean influences, yes. But it also carries West African ones. The phonological patterns of Yoruba and Twi speakers learning English as adults (heir rhythms) fed into the linguistic melting pot that produced the way young Londoners sound today.

It has just never been credited.

The Divide, And Where It Actually Came From

Something else Second Class Citizen does, which I did not expect, is document the tension between West Indian and African communities in 1960s London directly. Emecheta writes about it because she lived it. I also recently watched a video from a 50/60 something year old British man of Caribbean descent talking about growing up in London during this period. He remembered the Africans being there. He talked about the divide: Africans getting picked on, but also Africans keeping to themselves. Both things true at the same time.

That tension had structural roots that are worth understanding, because it did not come from nowhere.

Caribbean migrants came as labour. Recruited by the NHS, by London Transport to fill gaps left by the war. They came to work and, for many, to stay. They were building a life in hostile territory and they built an entire parallel world to do it: community, church, culture, sound systems, political organisation.

West Africans in the same period came mostly as students. The intention, or at least the story they told themselves, was temporary. Get the degree, go home, build their newly independent nations. That difference in relationship to Britain created a real social distance. One community was putting down roots. The other was supposed to be passing through.

Stuart Hall, himself Caribbean, observed that Caribbean people didn’t even discover themselves as “West Indian” until they arrived in Britain and faced racism together. Islands with completely different histories and cultures forged a shared identity because Britain gave it to them through collective hostility.

The same pressure landed on Africans. But the class position, the temporary orientation, the different cultural reference points. This meant solidarity did not automatically follow from shared suffering. And so the divide that gets performed online today, the one that looks like personal beef, actually has colonial roots. Different migration patterns, different class compositions, the specific conditions of 1950s and 60s London all layered on top of each other.

Understanding the roots does not dissolve the friction. But it does mean you stop mistaking inherited history for individual character.

What This Is Not About

This is not an argument that African contributions were more important than Caribbean ones. The Caribbean community built the visible, breathing, fighting infrastructure of Black Britain. Carnival, sound system culture, the political formations of the 1970s and 80s, the literary tradition, the music that shaped everything that came after it. That is not in question.

This is an argument about addition, not substitution. About the gap between what happened and what gets remembered. About the fact that when the story of Black Britain gets told, certain ships get named and others don’t. This means the communities on those unnamed ships disappear from a history they helped make.

Buchi Emecheta was here. The men who trained Africa’s future presidents were here. The workers and students and families who quietly fed into the sound and the shape of this city were here.

We were here.

If this piece made you think, share it with someone who needs to read it. And go and find jtsaidit, she is the reason this exists.

Sources & Further Reading

Kowalski, J. (2025). Africans and ‘the Windrush Generation’ 1948–1973.

Emecheta, B. (1974). Second Class Citizen. Allison & Busby.

Warmington, P. (2014). Black British Intellectuals and Education. Routledge.

Adi, H. (1998). West Africans in Britain 1900–1960: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Communism. Lawrence & Wishart.

Sherwood, M. (1995). Kwame Nkrumah: The Years Abroad 1935–1947.

Cheshire, J., Kerswill, P., Fox, S. & Torgersen, E. (2011). The emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 15(2), 151–196.

Kerswill, P. (2014). The objectification of ‘Jafaican’. In Androutsopoulos, J. (ed.), The Media and Sociolinguistic Change. De Gruyter.

Hall, S. (1995). New Cultures for Old. In Massey, D. & Jess, P. (eds.), A Place in the World? Oxford University Press.

Fryer, P. (1984). Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. Pluto Press. Owusu, K. (ed.) (2000). Black British Culture and Society: A Text Reader. Routledge.

She is a loyal wife. He has been cheating and then leaves. Often for someone wealthier, or younger, or simply less devoted. She suffers. Sometimes she is vindicated. Sometimes she just continues suffering, and that is, apparently, the point.

Someone on TikTok recently described these videos as “Cocomelon for our parents,” and it is one of the most precise cultural observations I have seen this year. Cocomelon works on toddlers because it is high-contrast, repetitive, and neurologically low-demand. You know exactly what is coming. There is no ambiguity to resolve. These AI Nollywood stories function identically, except women are the target audience. Often targeting those from a certain generation, who sit down after a week of work and need their nervous system to be somewhere completely predictable.

The joke lands because it is true. But like most accurate jokes, it contains something that deserves to be unpacked.

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This storyline did not emerge from nowhere. Nollywood scholars have spent years documenting the gender architecture embedded in Nigerian film. Research has consistently found that female characters in Nollywood were disproportionately depicted as dependent on men, as enduring abuse or infidelity as a moral obligation, and as deriving worth primarily from domestic roles and relational loyalty. A 2025 study published in Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal examined the concept of “toxic womanhood” in Yoruba Nollywood, arguing that films like Tade Idan construct female suffering not as tragedy but as virtue. The protagonist’s silence, restraint, and unflinching loyalty despite repeated infidelity are framed as proof of her moral maturity and womanhood. Her husband’s misconduct, meanwhile, is trivialised and softened through humour and spiritual framing.

This is not incidental. These narratives were produced within and for a patriarchal cultural order that required women’s emotional labour to be invisible, limitless, and unpaid. What cinema did was make that invisibility aspirational.

Now consider who is watching these AI stories. The algorithm is not neutral. The audiences being targeted, and this is legible from both the aesthetic choices and the comment sections. They are predominantly women from Nigerian and broader West African backgrounds, many of them in the diaspora. These are women who are, in aggregate, performing enormous amounts of unpaid and underpaid labour: caregiving, household management, emotional sustenance for families and communities, often alongside formal employment.

Tithi Bhattacharya’s framework of social reproduction theory is useful here. Bhattacharya argues that capitalism depends on a vast range of life-making activities. Such as cooking, childcare, emotional care, which make up the physical and psychological maintenance of the workforce. Since this takes place outside the formal economy and are therefore invisible to it. This work is disproportionately performed by women, and disproportionately by women of colour. It does not appear in macroeconomic metrics. It is rarely acknowledged as work at all.

The women consuming these AI stories are, in many cases, precisely the women whose labour is most structurally invisible. They are not watching because they are naive about the storyline. They are watching because the storyline mirrors something, not aspirationally, descriptively. A woman who gives everything and is unseen by the people she serves. The AI video cannot offer structural change. But it offers recognition, wrapped in melodrama, delivered in the aesthetic language of childhood memory.

That is not nothing. That is, in fact, a significant emotional service which someone is monetising.

This is what tends to get missed when these videos are being dismissed as low-quality content. The emotional raw material being processed here is African women’s specific experience of loyalty, sacrifice, and invisibility. The familiar pidgin in a robotic register and its particular dramatic register, is cultural memory. And it is being fed into a content pipeline, generated at near-zero cost, uploaded at scale, and monetised through platform advertising.

This is not a new structure. It rhymes with patterns we have seen before in how African cultural production gets appropriated and commodified. The labour and the cultural knowledge are extracted; the financial value flows elsewhere. What is new is the automation. The AI does not need to understand why this aesthetic is emotionally effective. It only needs to replicate the pattern that generates watch time.

I want to be honest about my own captivation. I know what I have just described. I also find myself watching. And I think that honesty is important, because the argument here is not that these audiences are passive or manipulated in some simple sense. The need to have your specific experience of exhaustion and invisibility reflected back at you is real. It is not a flaw in the viewer. It is a symptom of how much goes unseen.

The question I keep returning to is not “why do women watch this?” The answer to that is clear. The question is: who built the machine that profits from the answer?

SOURCES

1. Bhattacharya, T. (Ed.) (2017). Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. Pluto Press.

2. Jemilyi, O. (2025). “Performing Toxic Womanhood: Patriarchy, Infidelity, and the ‘Good Woman’ Trope in Yoruba Nollywood.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal (Ahead of Print). DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2025.2520324

3. Nwabuzor(2015). Content analysis of Nollywood films finding 90.1% of scenes presented female characters in dependent roles .

4. Okunna, C.S. (1996). “Portrayal of women in Nigerian home video films.” Africa Media Review, 10(3).

5. Anueyiagu, T. and E. (Nollybabes). Referenced in: “Nollywood or Bust: How Social Media is Revitalising...” The Face, June 2021.

6. Cybernews Research / Forensic AI Report (2025). “TikTok is full of anti-immigrant, misogynistic AI slop.” Cybernews, December 2025. Documents scale of AI content farms on TikTok; notes that over 55% of AI-generated content is not labelled as such, and that only 0.1% of people in a 2024 study could correctly identify all deepfake/AI-generated material.

7. MIDiA Research (2025). “YouTube, AI, and the Social Content Balancing Act.” September 2025. Documents how AI content farms operate on YouTube: low-cost, high-volume, flooding platforms with generated content to extract advertising revenue.

Before Ada moved from Nigeria to London. She built her income, her status, her savings. She funded her husband’s move to London; her dream, his ticket, her bill. She paid her in-laws’ school fees from thousands of miles away. She sent money home month after month, held the entire family structure together, and watched everything she produced get consumed faster than she could build it.

This is a real pattern. But Ada specifically is a character. From Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen, published in 1974.

Fifty years ago. And we are still living her story.

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The Harm Is Real

I want to be clear about something before I go further, because I know how these conversations can go: I am not here to tell you the problem doesn’t exist.

I grew up watching my mum field phone calls from relatives. Watching money leave our household and not come back. Watching investments made in people who didn’t treat them as investments. For a long time I didn’t have the language for the frustration I felt: I am a better investment. The return would be greater here.

In my adult years I have been able to say that out loud. To act on it, with my mum. That took time, and it took trust, and it took her believing that redirecting that flow was not a betrayal of where she came from.

Not everyone gets that conversation.

Right now, somewhere in Dagenham, there is a couple living in a one-bedroom flat, seven months pregnant with their second child, and £67,000 has just been sent to Nigeria to build a mansion that nobody in that flat will live in any time soon. There are children of the diaspora going back to the village and filming, bewildered, at where their father’s money actually went. There are women in church halls and WhatsApp groups and kitchen tables across this country doing the quiet arithmetic of what they’ve sent and what came back and trying to make the numbers make sense.

The harm of wealth flowing horizontally, away from the nuclear household, away from savings, away from compounding, is real. I am not dismissing it. Ada would not dismiss it. Emecheta wrote it into existence with forensic precision because she lived inside it and refused to look away.

So when I say what I’m about to say, understand that I am holding both things at once.

The Article

There is a piece circulating right now (written by a non-African writer) that argues this dynamic is the primary explanation for Africa’s lack of economic development. That “kinship culture is wealth-destroying”. That African societies are, in essence, structurally allergic to accumulation. That the funerals, the redistribution, the obligation networks, all of it amounts to a civilisational drag on growth.

The comments under the article are full of jokes about Ghanaian coffins.

I need you to understand what is happening there. Because the move the article and the comment section makes is a specific one: it takes a real wound and calls it a character flaw. It takes a pattern forged under conditions of structural insecurity and offers it up as the explanation for that insecurity. It uses Ada’s story without earning it.

What the Argument Gets Wrong

Here is the question the article never seriously asks: why are these kinship networks so load-bearing in the first place?

The reason your family is your pension, your credit union, your emergency fund, your first and last resort, is not because African people have a peculiar cultural attachment to obligation. It is because the formal infrastructure that was supposed to do those jobs was either never built, or was deliberately taken apart.

Structural adjustment programmes, imposed across sub-Saharan Africa from the late 1970s through the 1990s under conditions set by the IMF and World Bank, gutted public services on a continent-wide scale. Healthcare. Education. Social protection. Price subsidies on food and fuel. Gone, in exchange for loan access and debt restructuring. The kinship network didn’t expand to fill that vacuum out of sentiment. It expanded because there was nothing else.

Before that, colonial land dispossession had already broken intergenerational wealth at the root. The ability to pass land, livestock, accumulated assets across generations (the basic mechanism of wealth compounding in agrarian societies) was disrupted or destroyed across most of the continent. You cannot build a savings culture on land you do not own.

And the extraction has not stopped. Billions in capital leaving is the continent annually through trade mis-invoicing alone. Illicit financial flows, through transfer mispricing, tax evasion by multinationals, debt servicing, run into the hundreds of billions annually. The wealth going into the ground at funerals is real. It is also a fraction of what leaves the continent through mechanisms that never appear in articles about African cultural pathology.

The kinship network is not the cause of the poverty. It is the response to it. And there is a meaningful difference between those two things.

What the Argument Borrows Without Credit

There is also something worth naming about the intellectual lineage of this argument.

The claim that African societies must “graduate” from kinship loyalty into individualism and impersonal institutions before development can happen, that modernity requires the loosening of communal bonds, is not a new idea. It is essentially the argument of mid-twentieth century modernisation theory, which African scholars spent decades systematically dismantling. Thandika Mkandawire, Claude Ake, Walter Rodney, thinkers who actually studied African political economy from within it, identified exactly this move: taking structural outcomes and encoding them as cultural deficits.

The piece does not engage with any of them.

It also does not engage with the fact that some of the most economically successful societies of the last century built their growth through dense kinship and network structures. For example, South Korea’s family-based chaebol, the clan networks underpinning Chinese capitalism, which makes the neat story of kinship-versus-development considerably harder to tell.

What it does instead is gesture at a few studies, reach for loaded words like “parasitical” and “pathological” and “poisonous,” and arrive at a conclusion that the comment section can then illustrate with a coffin GIF.

What I Actually Think

I think the obligation economy causes real harm to real people. I have seen it. I feel it. Emecheta documented it with a precision that has not dated in fifty years, which tells you something about how durable the pattern is.

I also think that framing this as the explanation for African underdevelopment is intellectually dishonest, historically illiterate, and practically useful only if your goal is absolution. Absolution for the structural forces that created the conditions in which these networks became the only available infrastructure.

You can love your people and name the trap. You can know the harm of horizontal wealth flows and still refuse to let that harm do the explanatory work that structural analysis should be doing. You can read Second Class Citizen and come away angry at the right things. Angry at the system that left Ada carrying everything, that built no infrastructure for her to put it down, that extracted from her at every level and then offered her story as evidence of her culture’s inadequacy.

Ada was a better investment. She knew it. Emecheta knew it. The tragedy is not that Ada’s community made claims on her wealth. The tragedy is that a world organised differently would have meant those claims never needed to be so total.

That is the discussion I want us to be having. Not the one with the coffin jokes underneath it.

Good. I have everything I need. Here is a clean, verified source list with honest notes on what each source actually supports.

SOURCES

Primary text Emecheta, Buchi. Second Class Citizen. Allison & Busby, 1974.

On structural adjustment and the gutting of public services in Africa Michigan Journal of Economics, “Structural Adjustment’s Complex Legacy in Sub-Saharan Africa” (2024) SAPs were introduced in over 40 countries in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, with conditions including the cutting of public support for social services, privatisation of public sector companies, and elimination of subsidies. URL: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mje/2024/04/29/structural-adjustments-complex-legacy-in-sub-saharan-africa/

On illicit financial flows from Africa Global Financial Integrity, Trade-Related Illicit Financial Flows in Africa, 2013–2022 (2025) The report highlights how over the last decade, vast sums have been illicitly drained from African economies, with the continent effectively becoming a net creditor to the world as cumulative illicit capital flight has exceeded Africa’s external debt stock. Nigeria alone lost $77.7bn to trade-related IFFs over the decade studied. https://gfintegrity.org/report/trade-related-illicit-financial-flows-in-africa-2013-2022/

On colonial land dispossession and intergenerational wealth “Colonial origin, ethnicity and intergenerational mobility in Africa” (2022) colonialism transformed the economy, altering the structures of economic opportunities and economic relations, with implications for current African economies that are still to be fully understood. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305750X22000316

On Mkandawire and the critique of neoliberal development theory Mkandawire, Thandika. “Thinking about Developmental States in Africa.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 25, no. 3 (2001): 289–313. Mkandawire criticised the predominant neoliberal development theories of the 1990s, arguing they lacked an African perspective, and became globally recognised for his work on the harmful effects of structural adjustment programmes. https://www.lse.ac.uk/africa/hub-for-african-thought/thinkers/thandika-mkandawire

On South Korean chaebol as family-based growth structures Council on Foreign Relations, “South Korea’s Chaebol Challenge” The traditional chaebol corporate structure places members of the founding family in ownership or management positions, and chaebol have relied on close cooperation with the government for their success over decades of state-led development. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/south-koreas-chaebol-challenge

On the Senegalese mobile income study (cited in the original article) Jakiela, P. and Ozier, O. “Does Africa Need a Rotten Kin Theorem?” Journal of Development Economics (2016) The actual paper behind the Senegalese women and hidden income finding. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304387818304887

Growing up, I was not a fan. Every time my mum made it, I would groan. The deep, earthy smell hitting me before I even got to the kitchen, that dark brown swallow I could not appreciate no matter how many times I was told it was good for me. I endured it. I did not love it.

Then, at a birthday party in my late teens, someone handed me a bowl with gbegiri and ewedu. Abula, the way it’s meant to be served, and something shifted. The bitterness of the ewedu, the creaminess of the bean soup, the way the amala held everything together without demanding your full attention. I did not go back. I became obsessed.

So when I read an interview with Bibi Bakare-Yusuf in The Republic recently, and she described amala as “intelligent food”, full of fibre, protein, micronutrients, texture, I felt vindicated in a way I was not prepared for. Our food was not simple. It was not primitive. It was considered.

The science agrees with her. A peer-reviewed study on yam flour found that a standard serving adequately supplies recommended dietary intakes of zinc, cobalt, and magnesium. It has a lower glycaemic index than white rice or white bread. It is high in dietary fibre, which supports digestion, reduces LDL cholesterol, and has anti-inflammatory properties. And this is just the swallow, before the gbegiri, which is plant protein, before the ewedu, which is a leafy green. The meal as a system is nutritionally remarkable. The ancestors were not guessing.

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Bakare-Yusuf makes a wider argument in that interview that I have not been able to stop thinking about. She says that veganism, far from being a Western lifestyle category, is a return to something that was already ours. Long before it was branded and sold back to us in the form of oat milk and overpriced supplements, African food cultures were predominantly plant-based. Animal protein was occasional. Ceremonial, even.

The archaeology backs this up. A 2022 University of Bristol study analysed residues from 3,500-year-old pottery fragments from Nok culture sites in Nigeria and confirmed that ancient meals combined vegetables, pulses, leafy greens, and underground storage organs. Research on African dietary history more broadly shows that traditional diets were rich in whole grains, legumes, vegetables, and fermented foods, with low red meat intake as a defining characteristic. Pearl millet, cowpea, African yam, fonio, African rice, all domesticated in West Africa, all plant-based staples, all thousands of years old.

This is where I start to get genuinely angry.

There is a 2025 article in the Journal of African Cultural Studies with the most devastating title: “A ‘Meat-Hungry’ People: Nutrition Science and the Colonial Discovery of Animal-Protein Malnutrition in Nigeria.” Backed by archival evidence, it argues that colonial doctors and scientists systematically pathologised African diets as deficient in animal protein, and that this was inseparable from the colonial push for cattle capitalism. They did not just observe African eating habits. They diagnosed them. The British colonial government established domestic science centres and curricula specifically to train women and girls to increase the animal protein content of their cooking. Cookbooks and food education programmes were deployed throughout Nigeria to reshape what people put on their tables.

Historians have since argued this was politically convenient. Diagnosing African populations with protein deficiency located blame in African culture rather than in colonial impoverishment. The message was: the problem is what you eat, not what we took from you. This is the context in which a plant-based diet came to be seen as lack. As poverty. As something to be corrected.

Every African household has a version of this. Someone, usually a sibling, lifting the lid of the pot and counting how many pieces of meat are in the stew. Negotiations. Accusations. The particular injustice of finding one small piece while your brother’s plate suspiciously holds two. We grew up treating this as normal, as a feature of African family life. But the obsession with meat, with its quantity, its presence, its status as the centrepiece of every meal, is not ancient. It is not inherent to our cultures. It was put there.

The shift is documented and traceable. Until the 1980s and 1990s, sub-Saharan Africa had a remarkably low incidence of cancers and metabolic diseases. Then came market liberalisation, urbanisation, and the explosion of processed food. The diseases followed. Type 2 diabetes cases in sub-Saharan Africa rose by 490% between 1980 and 2021.

Black African women, specifically, are living with the consequences of this shift in their bodies. A 2025 case-control study confirmed that women in the highest red and processed meat consumption group were nearly four times more likely to develop PCOS than those in the lowest. The Black Women’s Health Study, one of the largest prospective studies of Black women’s health ever conducted, found that unprocessed red meat intake was associated with increased colorectal cancer risk in Black women, the first study to confirm this link in this specific population. A separate study comparing African American diets with those of rural Africans eating traditional high-fibre diets found that high meat and fat intakes were associated with significantly higher cancer risk markers, while high-fibre African diets were associated with low risk.

This is not to say that meat causes everything, or that one dietary change fixes systemic health inequity. It is more complicated than that. But the connection between the Westernisation of African diets and the rise of non-communicable disease is now well-documented. PCOS, colon cancer, cardiovascular disease, conditions that disproportionately affect Black women, track, in part, to dietary patterns our grandmothers would not have recognised as theirs.

We inherited someone else’s plate. And it is making us sick.

I am not saying everyone should be vegan, or that eating meat is morally bankrupt, or that the solution is an oat milk latte and a wellness subscription. What I am saying is that the framing, the one that positions plant-based eating as modern and Western while treating plant-heavy traditional African food as nutritionally lacking, is exactly backwards. It is the inversion of history.

Bibi Bakare-Yusuf called amala intelligent food. She is right. Our ancestors understood nutrition long before it was renamed science.

I said what I said. #teetoldyou

Sources

Bakare-Yusuf, B. (2026). Interview. The Republic (RPUBLC). https://rpublc.com/story/2026/03/22/culture-and-society/first-draft-bibi-bakare-yusuf (subscription required)

Dunne, J. et al. (2022). Archaeobotanical and organic residue analysis of West African pottery. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences. Summary: https://theconversation.com/chemical-traces-in-ancient-west-african-pots-show-a-diet-rich-in-plants-177579

Amagloh, F.K. et al. (2025). Africa’s contribution to global sustainable and healthy diets: a scoping review. PMC. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12083016/

Famuyide, I. (2025). “A ‘Meat-Hungry’ People: Nutrition Science and the Colonial Discovery of Animal-Protein Malnutrition in Nigeria.” Journal of African Cultural Studies, 37(2), 209–226. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13696815.2025.2474925

Nott, J. (2021). “’No One May Starve in the British Empire’: Kwashiorkor, Protein and the Politics of Nutrition Between Britain and Africa.” Social History of Medicine, 34(2). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8162845/

Eleazu, C.O. et al. (2018). Proximate and mineral composition of Nigerian yam chips, flakes and flours. Food Science & Nutrition / PMC. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5756181/

Springer Nature (2025). Yam as functional food: bioactive properties, health benefits, and applications. Food, Nutrition and Health. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44403-025-00022-3

Vajdi, M. et al. (2025). Meat consumption and polycystic ovary syndrome: a case-control study. PMC. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12007253/

Hurley, T.G. et al. (2022). Red and processed meat intake and colorectal cancer in the Black Women’s Health Study. Journal of Nutrition / PMC. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9071344/

O’Keefe, S. (2014). Colon cancer risk in African Americans and dietary modification. PMC. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4073094/

Goedecke, J. et al. (2024). Incident type 2 diabetes in sub-Saharan Africa: results from the AWI-Gen study. PMC. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12079105/

I then spent weeks translating that research into a four-part TikTok series on Nigeria specifically; distilling years of scholarship into something accessible, grounded, and urgent. I verified every claim. I cross-referenced every date. I sourced every statistic.

Follow me on TikTok - teetoldyou

And then the comments came in. Mostly from men. Telling me that actually, one-party rule in Nigeria might not be such a bad thing and there is no evidence of democratic backsliding.

I want to say something about that dynamic first, and I’ll keep it brief because it is not the main event: there is a particular kind of confidence required to watch someone present months of research on a subject and respond not with a question, not with a counter-source, but with a vibe. An instinct. A feeling that maybe authoritarianism is fine actually. I’ll leave that observation there.

Now, to the substance. Because I am open to the challenge, and I mean it.

Yes. In theory, one-party rule can support development. This is not a radical claim. Developmental state literature has made this argument for decades, pointing to cases like South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore. These contexts show how a dominant party or authoritarian government presided over rapid economic growth. The argument rests on a specific condition: that the ruling elite has an incentive structure that makes them productive rather than extractive. That their political survival is tied to economic performance. That they need the population to thrive in order to remain in power.

This is the argument. It is a serious one and it deserves a serious answer.

So here is the serious answer: show me the evidence that Nigeria’s current ruling class meets that condition.

Because what we have seen consistently, across administrations, across decades is an elite that extracts. That concentrates wealth. That uses state resources to entrench itself rather than develop the country. The APC consolidation happening right now is not being driven by an ideological project for Nigeria’s development. It is being driven by access to patronage, proximity to federal power, and political survival. Those are not the incentives of a productive developmental state. Those are the incentives of a rentier class protecting its position.

If you want to argue that one-party rule could work for Nigeria, you need to first explain why this particular ruling coalition would suddenly become the exception to everything we have observed.

Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o addressed this comprehensively in his 1992 Journal of Democracy essay “Africa: The Failure of One-Party Rule”, written after decades of watching exactly this pattern play out across the continent. The evidence was damning then. It has not improved.

The series was about democracy. But if you want to argue development, bring your evidence. I’ll be here.

SOURCES

Anyang’ Nyong’o, P. (1992). Africa: The failure of one-party rule. Journal of Democracy, 3(1), 90–96. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.1992.0005

Angwaomaodoko, E. (2026, April 3). 2027: Is Nigeria sliding into one-party democracy? Punch Nigeria. https://punchng.com/2027-is-nigeria-sliding-into-one-party-democracy/

Omotola, J. S. (2015). Trapped in transition: Nigeria’s first democratic decade and beyond. In N. Cheeseman (Ed.), Democracy in Africa: Successes, failures and the struggles for political reform. Cambridge University Press.

Cheeseman, N. (2015). Democracy in Africa: Successes, failures and the struggles for political reform. Cambridge University Press.

Punch Nigeria. (2026, April 8). #OccupyINEC: Atiku, Obi, Kwankwaso, others join ADC rally over INEC decisions. https://punchng.com/occupyinec-atiku-obi-kwankwaso-others-join-adc-rally-over-inec-decisions/

Punch Nigeria. (2025, February 20). Abiola won June 12 election, but annulment was my toughest decision — Babangida. https://punchng.com/abiola-won-june-12-election-but-annulment-was-my-toughest-decision-babangida/

Council on Foreign Relations. (2019, October 4). The legacy of Nigeria’s 1999 transition to democracy. https://www.cfr.org/blog/legacy-nigerias-1999-transition-democracy

The Republic. (2024, September 23). Nigeria: Trapped in a militarized democracy. https://rpublc.com/vol3-no2/nigeria-trapped-in-a-militarized-democracy/

Wikipedia. (2026). Fourth Nigerian Republic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Nigerian_Republic

Wikipedia. (2026). 1993 Nigerian presidential election. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Nigerian_presidential_election

The standard story frames this as a marketing triumph. The real story is a political economy of women’s time.

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The Labour Shock Nobody Named

To understand Indomie’s conquest of Nigeria, you have to start in 1986, not 1988. That year, General Ibrahim Babangida’s military government signed onto the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programme. SAPs (as Nigerians came to know it and despise it) mandated currency devaluation, subsidy removal, and aggressive public sector contraction. It did what structural adjustment always does: it compressed household income and pushed women into the paid labour force at scale.

This was not liberation. It was compulsion. Male wages could no longer sustain families alone. Women entered formal and informal paid work not because new opportunities had opened, but because the alternative was hunger. By 1988, approximately six million Nigerian women had entered the workforce. Their time had become scarce in a way it had never been before.

This is the labour shock that made Indomie possible. Not the product. The constraint.

What Was Actually Being Sold

Traditional Nigerian starch cooking (pounded yam, eba, amala) is extraordinarily labour-intensive. It requires hours of preparation, significant physical and mental effort that assumes the cook has time to give. It also requires ingredients whose prices, under SAP-driven inflation, had become increasingly volatile.

When both time and disposable income compress simultaneously, a cheap, fast carbohydrate doesn’t just find a market. It becomes structurally necessary.

But here is the critical point that the marketing story misses: Indomie was not competing with rice or yam in any conventional sense. It was not winning a taste competition. It was winning a time allocation competition. For a woman working a second shift in the informal economy (trading, hawking, domestic service) the operative question was never “what do I want to eat?” It was “what can I produce in three minutes that my children will accept as dinner?” Instant noodles had no real competitor in that market because that market had not previously been legible as a market at all.

This is what social reproduction theorists would recognise immediately. The feminist economist Tithi Bhattacharya, building on a long tradition of Marxist feminist thought, argues that the labour involved in reproducing the workforce (feeding families, raising children, maintaining households) is structurally invisible in capitalist accounting, while being absolutely foundational to it. Capital depends on this labour. It simply prefers not to pay for it.

What Indomie did, in 1988 Nigeria, was commodify a sliver of that labour. It did not eliminate the burden of feeding a family. It sold women a time-saving input into a task that remained entirely theirs. The cooking was still their responsibility. The exhaustion was still their reality. Indomie simply inserted itself, at a price point designed for compressed household budgets, into the gap between the time women no longer had and the hunger that remained.

That gap was created by structural adjustment. Indomie did not create it. They simply arrived, with remarkable timing, to sell it back to women as convenience.

Pattern Recognition, Not Charity

The Salim Group, Indomie’s Indonesian parent company, had done this before. Indofood (their food processing arm) had watched instant noodles expand in Indonesia precisely during periods of rapid female labour force entry. They were not guessing when they entered Nigeria. They were reading a demographic and economic profile that they recognised: high female labour force growth, compressed household incomes, weak fast-carbohydrate incumbents, and a food culture built around starch.

Nigeria was not a bet. It was pattern recognition applied to a new geography. The conditions that created demand were conditions of structural stress on women, and the Salim Group knew it because they had seen those conditions before.

The Unresolved Tension

None of this is a straightforward condemnation of Indomie. The product served a genuine need at a moment of genuine crisis. Women feeding their children quickly and cheaply during a period of IMF-mandated austerity were not being duped. They were being practical. The contempt that elite food discourse sometimes directs at instant noodles is a class politics problem, not a nutritional one.

But the political economy is worth sitting with. The women who drove Indomie’s market creation, were not the beneficiaries of the value their circumstances generated. Their compressed time and constrained budgets made the product essential. The profit was captured by a foreign conglomerate and its Nigerian joint venture partners. The labour conditions that made the product indispensable were conditions created by international financial institutions whose headquarters sit in Washington.

Indomie is a product that served Nigerian women’s time poverty while profiting from the structural conditions that produced it. That is not a contradiction. That is how markets work.

The invisible labour of Nigerian women built one of the most successful FMCG (fast-moving consumer good) stories in African economic history. That story is usually told as a triumph of Indonesian entrepreneurship and Nigerian consumer appetite. It is more accurately told as what happens when global capital learns to monetise the gaps that structural adjustment leaves behind.

SOURCE LIST:

On Indomie’s Nigeria entry and Dufil Prima Foods

Wikipedia, Indomie: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indomie

Dufil Prima Foods, About Us: dufil.com/about-us

Wikipedia, Indofood and Salim Group: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indofood

On Nigeria’s Structural Adjustment Programme

Tokas, Chetan. Feminization of the Labour Force as a Response to Neoliberal Economic Policies: A Case Study of the Nigerian Informal Sector. ECAS Conference, 2013. nomadit.co.uk/conference/ecas2013/paper/16243

President Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Programme and Inflation in Nigeria. researchgate.net/publication/298532019

The Structural Adjustment Programme and Its Lasting Impact on Nigeria. historicalnigeria.com

Theory

Bhattacharya, Tithi (ed.). Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentring Oppression. Pluto Press, 2017. (Focus on chapter “How Not to Skip Class”) plutobooks.com/product/social-reproduction-theory

Boserup, Ester. Woman’s Role in Economic Development. Allen & Unwin, 1970. Reprinted Earthscan/Routledge, 2007.

A few weeks ago, I made a TikTok. Not about Real Housewives of Potomac itself, not about the drama or the reunions - simply about Tia Glover’s accent, and the discourse surrounding it. It was a specific, relatively contained cultural observation. What I did not anticipate was what happened after the second reunion aired and the video found a new audience - one far less interested in accents, and far more interested in relitigating whether Tia Glover’s Blackness is valid at all.

The comments that followed told a story I wasn’t expecting to write about, but cannot ignore.

“But this is America and how she lives now discredits her upbringing. That would work if this were a UK based show. America is a country without a monarchy; it’s the home of rags to riches not riches to middle class there’s no cookies for that here. It didn’t land.”

“Black Brits have a lot to learn about the Black American social hierarchy.”

“I’m still wondering why Black Americans have to make so much space for Black Brits in our entertainment spaces? Don’t you guys have anything going on in the UK?”

“Well here in the United States... Gizelle’s uncolonized upbringing is superior to Tia’s. If it wasn’t for the work of Gizelle’s father and men like him, Tia wouldn’t even be allowed to live in the United States or become a citizen.”

I have sat with these comments for a while now. Not because they are surprising exactly, but because of what they reveal when you hold them up to the light. A discussion about a British woman’s accent became, almost immediately, a referendum on whether she belongs. Whether her Blackness - shaped by a different country, a different history, a different relationship with race - is legible enough to be accepted. The answer, according to these corners of the internet, appears to be no.

This Is Not About Tia

Tia Glover is simply the most recent example of a pattern that Black British women navigating American spaces will recognise immediately.

In 2024, comedian and presenter London Hughes spoke openly about her experience filming Eat, Slay, Love. The hostility she encountered from castmates Eva Michelle and Tammy Rivera began early and appeared, by London’s own account, to be rooted significantly in her Britishness. What struck me most about London’s retelling was not the conflict itself but the nature of it - there seemed to be little interest in understanding her, and considerable investment in misunderstanding her. The British accent, the dry humour, the cultural references that didn’t quite land - all of it was read not as difference but as deficiency. As otherness. As something to be suspicious of.

On camera, audiences who had little frame of reference for Black British culture watched London navigate a defensive position she had been forced into before filming even properly began. What they saw was not who she is. What they saw was a woman trying to exist in a space that had already decided what she was.

Two Black British women. Two very different contexts. The same essential question being asked of both: why are you here, and do you really belong?

The Hierarchy Nobody Voted For

What the comments on my video are articulating - whether they realise it or not - is the existence of a Black cultural hierarchy, one in which the African American experience is positioned as the authoritative, default, most politically legitimate form of Blackness in the Western world. All other expressions are measured against it. And when they do not match, they are found wanting.

There is something deeply strange about this to me. Not because the African American experience is not profound, political, and worthy of enormous respect - it absolutely is. But because Blackness is not a monolith, and it never has been. The idea that there is a social hierarchy to learn, a correct way to be Black that must be absorbed before you are permitted to occupy space, is not solidarity. It is gatekeeping dressed in the language of cultural authority.

What is particularly revealing is the assumption embedded in these comments, that Black Brits are somehow ignorant of African American history and therefore unqualified to exist in American cultural spaces. This requires a remarkable lack of curiosity about what growing up Black in Britain actually looks like. We were taught about the Little Rock Nine, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King in British schools. We grew up watching That’s So Raven, My Wife and Kids, and The Proud Family - American exports that shaped our childhoods precisely because of the reach of American cultural dominance. Black British people have spent their entire lives consuming, respecting, and engaging with African American culture and history. The idea that this is a one way street of understanding - that we owe a debt of knowledge that is never expected to be repaid - says less about Black Brits and more about the limits of American centrism.

The Complexity Deserves Honesty

I want to be careful here, because this is not a simple story with clear villains.

There are real and meaningful differences in how anti-Blackness operates in the United Kingdom and the United States. The specificity of American racism - its legal history, its generational trauma, the particular violence of its construction - is not identical to the British experience. Black Brits navigating American spaces do sometimes arrive without fully appreciating the weight of that specific context, and that is worth acknowledging.

Transatlantic Black solidarity is complicated. It always has been. The tensions are not entirely without origin or reason.

But acknowledging complexity is different from accepting hierarchy. And what I am observing in these comments is not a nuanced conversation about different experiences of Blackness - it is a dismissal. It is the assertion that one geography, one history, one way of being Black is more legitimate than another. And that, I think, is worth naming clearly.

An Open Question

I started this piece not entirely sure where these attitudes come from, and I am going to end it in the same place. I have my instincts. But I am wary of diagnosing something this layered with false certainty.

What I am sure of is that the pattern exists. That Black British women keep being asked to audition for an identity they already hold. That the comments on a TikTok about an accent can, within days, become a window into something much older and much more unresolved.

That conversation - the real one, the uncomfortable one - is worth having. I just hope we are brave enough to have it honestly, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Then came Zambia. And the wolf showed up again, this time without the costume.

What USAID Was And Wasn’t

Chihombori-Quao’s critique sits within a long tradition of Pan-Africanist thought: that aid dependency keeps African nations structurally weak, politically malleable, and economically stunted. Her challenge was direct: “Show me one country that USAID was in and education improved. Show me one country where USAID was in and healthcare improved.” She argued that of the billions of US taxpayer dollars given to USAID, only a fraction ever reached the African people it was meant to serve.

This is a contested claim. USAID funded critical HIV treatment through PEPFAR, malaria programmes, and maternal health initiatives across the continent. In Zambia alone, the US had funded roughly 49% of the country’s main HIV regimen. The debate is not whether some good was done, it is whether the structure of the relationship served African sovereignty or undermined it.

The Zambia Deal: What the Leaked Documents Reveal

A leaked draft memorandum of understanding (MOU), reviewed by The Guardian and confirmed by Reuters, reveals the architecture of America’s new aid model. The headline figure is $1.012 billion in health funding over five years; covering HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, and disease surveillance. But the terms attached to that money are striking.

Zambia must grant the US access to its citizens’ health data for 10 years longer than any other country has negotiated. It must also share data on new or emerging pathogens for 25 years, despite the MOU itself only running for five. And buried in the agreement is something veterans of US global health diplomacy describe as “uncharted” and “first of its kind”: the health aid is explicitly contingent on Zambia opening its mining sector to US commercial interests, with the government required to report monthly to the US Embassy on trade and investment progress.

Zambia is Africa’s second-largest copper producer after the DRC. It also holds cobalt, nickel, graphite, lithium, and rare-earth elements; minerals central to the global race for EV batteries and tech supply chains. The connection between those resources and a “health” deal is no accident.

Asia Russell, director of the HIV advocacy organisation Health GAP, put it plainly: the US is “conditioning life-saving health services on plundering the mineral wealth of the country. It’s shameless exploitation, which is immoral.”

The Fired Minister and the Silence

The most telling moment in this story came on 15 February 2026. Zambia’s health minister, Elijah Muchima, went on national television and denied that the health deal was linked to mining concessions. Three days later, President Hichilema fired him without explanation. No reason was given. Civil society groups who sought transparency were warned by officials against pursuing legal action over the data-sharing provisions. The government has declined to publish the full text of the MOU.

Josiah Kalala, director of the Chapter One Foundation, a Zambian human rights organisation, described it as the government “signing away the right to access health data of its citizens to another country.”

https://businessday.ng/news/article/nigeria-us-seal-5-1bn-five-year-health-cooperation-deal/

Africa Is Divided And the Stakes Are Real

The continent is fracturing in its response. Zimbabwe pulled out of its $367 million deal, calling the terms “clearly lopsided” and incompatible with national sovereignty. Kenya’s $1.6 billion deal is frozen pending a High Court challenge over data privacy and the bypassing of Parliament. Nigeria and Uganda, however, have signed. Seventeen African nations have now concluded agreements with the US under this new model.

Africa CDC Director-General Dr. Jean Kaseya voiced the underlying principle at stake: “We want to own our data in Africa. We want to own our future. We cannot accept not owning our data.”

But the human cost of walking away is not abstract. Following the initial USAID halt, 32 HIV treatment drop-in centres across Zambia were closed, according to UNAIDS. Julius Kachidza, a Zambian civil society leader living with HIV, was direct: “If the HIV programme in Zambia is distorted or disrupted, I’ll be the first casualty, as well as hundreds of thousands of other people.” The April 1 deadline written into the MOU (after which all funding is terminated if no deal is reached) adds a pressure that is not accidental.

The Real Question

A US State Department spokesperson made the new doctrine explicit: “The administration believes that American foreign assistance must demonstrably advance American national interests.” Secretary Rubio has put it even more bluntly: foreign assistance “is not charity; it is designed to further the national interests of the United States.”

Chihombori-Quao was right that the old model was broken, that aid dependency is not development, and that sovereignty cannot be purchased on someone else’s terms. But the Zambia deal forces a harder question: is a system that openly trades health funding for mining access and medical data actually an improvement on the one it replaced? Or has the wolf simply stopped pretending?

The old model hid its agenda behind humanitarian language. The new one writes the agenda into the contract. That honesty does not make it just. It makes it legible. And legibility, at least, gives African civil society, and African governments willing to hold the line, something to fight.

Sources: The Guardian · Reuters · Al Jazeera / The Bottom Line · Health Policy Watch · Emily’s Bass Substack · UNAIDS

My FYP is currently in Brazil.

Everyone is in Rio. Everyone is at a rooftop party. Everyone is dancing under coloured lights at 4am. The men have dyed their hair blonde. The beaches look cinematic. The bodies are oiled. The vibes are unashamedly sensual.

But beneath the samba edits and yacht clips, something about this moment is fascinating.

Because while TikTok is selling Brazil as a playground, some of the same feeds are also showing robberies, tourists being targeted for money, people assaulted, stories that end in hospital beds and wheelchairs.

And the shock in the comments is loud.

Wait, Brazil is dangerous?

Wait, there’s racism?

Wait, it’s not all carnival and colour?

Brazil is an upper-middle-income developing country. It has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world. It carries the legacy of slavery more deeply than most countries in the Americas. It received more enslaved Africans than any other nation. It has entrenched racial hierarchies, spatial segregation between wealthy neighbourhoods and favelas, and documented issues with urban violence.

https://wid.world/news-article/10-facts-on-global-inequality-in-2024/

None of this is hidden information.

But tourism has a way of editing structure out of the frame.

When Nigerians travel home for Detty December, we don’t pretend Nigeria is Switzerland. We joke about power cuts. We move carefully. We don’t flash our phones recklessly. We know to expect chaos and brilliance in equal measure.

We hold Nigeria to a high emotional standard (we love it deeply) but we are not naïve about its institutional weaknesses.

Yet when people fly to Brazil, some expect Miami infrastructure with Ibiza safety and European policing.

Why?

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Because Brazil has been branded differently.

It has been framed as exotic rather than unstable. Sensual rather than unequal. Free rather than fragile.

But structurally, Brazil and Nigeria share more similarities than many are comfortable admitting. Both are post-colonial economies shaped by extractive institutions. Both struggle with elite capture and deep inequality. Both contain breathtaking wealth beside visible poverty.

The difference is narrative.

We have been trained to anticipate dysfunction in African states. We are rarely shocked when Nigeria “happens” to someone.

But when Brazil, a country outside Africa yet still firmly in the Global South, reflects similar structural issues, people feel betrayed.

The fantasy collapses.

This is not an argument against visiting Brazil. It is not fear-mongering. Brazil is culturally powerful, historically rich, musically influential, and globally significant. Rio during Carnival is spectacular.

But spectacle is not structure.

TikTok compresses entire nations into aesthetics. It sells colour, bodies, music, and nightlife. It does not sell institutional weakness. It does not sell inequality. It does not sell racial stratification. It does not sell crime statistics.

The danger is not in going. The danger is in going without context.

What fascinates me most is this: we intellectually understand that developing countries are complex, unequal, and sometimes volatile. But emotionally, we still expect certain countries to perform stability for us.

Perhaps the real question isn’t “Why is Brazil like this?”

Perhaps the question is: why did we assume it wouldn’t be?

FOMO is powerful. But selective imagination is even more powerful.

Brazil is not your fantasy.

It is a country.

And like ours, it contains contradictions.

Notes & Sources

Development & Classification

• United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Human Development Report – Brazil Country Profile. (Human Development Report (latest edition). Brazil categorised under high human development, but with persistent inequality.
  https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/specific-country-data#/countries/BRA

Income Inequality

• World Bank. World Development Indicators – Gini Index (Brazil).
  https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?locations=BR

• OECD. Income Inequality Data – Brazil.
  https://data.oecd.org/inequality/income-inequality.htm

Slavery & Racial Legacy

• Slave Voyages Database. Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database – Brazil Estimates.
  https://www.slavevoyages.org

• Telles, E. E. (2004). Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil. Princeton University Press.
  https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691127922/race-in-another-america

Crime & Urban Violence

• United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Global Study on Homicide.
  https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/global-study-on-homicide.html

• Amnesty International. Brazil Reports (Police Violence & Racial Disparities).
  https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/americas/south-america/brazil/

Spatial Inequality & Informal Settlements

• World Bank. Brazil Poverty & Equity Brief.
  https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/brazil/overview

There is a particular trend on TikTok currently circulating among affluent Nigerian youth.

The camera pans.
The lighting is casual but deliberate.
The caption is nonchalant.
The car, house, or designer accessory is “just there.”

And it is all set to the now-viral “HOW FAR” sound.

It is meant to feel effortless. It is not.

Many Nigerians are frustrated. In a country grappling with inflation, currency instability, and deepening poverty, these displays feel tone-deaf. According to the World Bank, over 40% of Nigerians live below the national poverty line, while wealth remains highly concentrated among a small elite.

So why does it continue?

More importantly, why are some Nigerians in the comments cheering it on?

To understand this moment, we need to talk about how wealth operates culturally in Nigeria.

Nigeria is marked by extreme inequality. But inequality does not only produce resentment; it also produces aspiration. In a context where economic mobility feels structurally blocked (high youth unemployment, high living costs, etc), wealth becomes more than consumption.

It becomes protection.

Protection from power cuts.
Protection from poor healthcare.
Protection from state failure.

When institutions are weak, private wealth becomes the ultimate insurance policy.

This produces a peculiar cultural dynamic: wealth is infantilised. It is stripped of its structural roots and presented as charm, personality, even innocence. The wealthy child becomes a lifestyle character rather than a beneficiary of inherited advantage.

And here lies the paradox.

When critics say these nepo babies should “read the room,” they assume the room is unified in resentment.

It is not.

Part of the room is aspirational.
Part of the room is hopeful.
Part of the room sees proximity to wealth as proximity to safety.

Social media algorithms amplify this dynamic. Opulence performs well. Luxury content travels. The aesthetic of effortlessness is rewarded.

So why would they stop?

If outrage drives engagement.
If admiration drives clout.
If the culture continues to treat wealth as neutral rather than political.

The issue is not simply that wealthy Nigerian youth are flaunting their lifestyles. It is that we lack a consistent public conversation about how wealth is produced, protected, and reproduced in Nigeria.

Until wealth stops being romanticised (and starts being interrogated) the “soft launch” of privilege will continue.

They are not failing to read the room.

They are responding to it.

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Notes:

World Bank (2023). Nigeria Poverty Assessment. https://www.worldbank.org

Oxfam (2017). Inequality in Nigeria: Exploring the Drivers. https://www.oxfam.org

National Bureau of Statistics (Nigeria). Labour Force Statistics. https://www.nigerianstat.gov.ng

IMF (2023). Nigeria Article IV Consultation Report. https://www.imf.org

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The Real Housewives of Potomac has never just been about champagne and shade. It’s about status. Performance. Social hierarchy. And this season, somehow, it’s about an accent.

Tia Glover has found herself at the centre of online discourse, with co-stars and viewers questioning whether her British accent is “real,” “forced,” or “put on.” At the reunion, when she made a comment about Stacey “marrying up,” the scrutiny intensified. Suddenly, her voice wasn’t just a voice, it was evidence. Of pretension. Of performance. Of social climbing.

But here’s the thing: accents are never neutral. And the reaction to Tia’s accent reveals far more about classism and racial bias than it does about her authenticity.

Not All British Accents Are Created Equal

When some British viewers say, “She doesn’t sound like us,” what they often mean is: she doesn’t sound like the average British person they know.

But Britain is one of the most accent-stratified societies in the world. A cultivated, boarding-school, privately educated accent (often associated with elite institutions) is not something you “pick up” from walking around your local high street. It comes from immersion in specific social environments.

If Tia’s parents sent her to boarding school in the 1980s, as she has implied when describing her affluent upbringing, then yes (in a sense) they paid for her accent. Not in a theatrical way. Not as performance coaching. But through education, social capital, and proximity to a particular class culture.

In Britain, accent is class currency. It signals schooling, social circles, inherited wealth, and cultural capital. To pretend otherwise is naïve.

The irony is that many critics are flattening British identity into a single sound. There are absolutely British people who sound like Tia. They’re just not evenly distributed across the socioeconomic spectrum.

Why Does It Feel So Suspicious?

This is where race enters the conversation.

When Lisa Vanderpump speaks in her distinctly posh British accent on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, no one demands linguistic proof of authenticity. No one insists she is exaggerating for status.

But when a Black woman presents with a similarly polished accent, it becomes suspect. Performative. Strategic.

We saw similar discourse around Chelsea Lakani from Selling Sunset. Viewers questioned whether her accent was “real,” as though Black Britishness must always align with a particular tonal expectation.

There is an unspoken assumption at play: that certain accents are natural for white bodies and aspirational for Black ones.

That assumption is racialised. And it is classist.

Code-Switching as Proof of Authenticity

One of the most telling elements in Tia’s and Chelsea’s speech is the subtle code-switching that emerges in moments of emotion or informality. The tonal shifts. The rhythm changes. The softening or tightening of certain consonants.

You cannot fake that consistently.

Code-switching is learned behaviour developed over years of navigating different social spaces. It reflects layered identity, not theatrical performance. If anything, those flickers of variation are evidence of authenticity, not deception.

When Black Audiences Police Each Other

What has been particularly frustrating is watching some Black commentators dismiss the nuance entirely. Reducing the conversation to “She’s putting it on.”

But internalised class hierarchies exist within Black communities too. We are not immune from reproducing the same biases that marginalise us.

In Britain especially, accent has long been a gatekeeper. Received Pronunciation has historically been positioned as “intelligent,” “refined,” “educated.” Regional or working-class accents have been stigmatised. For Black Britons, navigating this terrain can be even more complex. Respectability politics, assimilation pressures, and survival strategies all shape how we speak are heard.

So when we flatten someone’s accent into fraudulence without interrogating the class structures that produce it, we miss the bigger picture.

The Real Issue Isn’t Her Accent

The real issue is discomfort with what her accent represents.

A Black woman who sounds elite disrupts expectations. It complicates the narrative. It refuses the simplicity some viewers prefer.

Tia’s voice is not just sound. It is a marker of class mobility, inherited privilege, and transatlantic identity. And that makes people uneasy.

Accents are social passports. They open doors. They signal belonging. They provoke suspicion.

But the question we should be asking isn’t: Is her accent real?

It’s: Why are we so invested in proving that it isn’t?

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Notes

1. The Real Housewives of Potomac – Season 10 Reunion Coverage
   Bravo TV. The Real Housewives of Potomac.
   https://www.bravotv.com/the-real-housewives-of-potomac

2. Lippi-Green, Rosina (2012). English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States.
   Routledge.
   https://www.routledge.com/English-with-an-Accent-Language-Ideology-and-Discrimination-in-the-United-States/Lippi-Green/p/book/9780415559119
   (Foundational text on accent discrimination and linguistic ideology.)

3. Bourdieu, Pierre (1991). Language and Symbolic Power.
   Harvard University Press.
   https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674516717
   (Introduces the idea of linguistic capital - essential for understanding accent as class currency.)

4. Devlin, Kate (2018). “Why do we judge people by their accents?” The Guardian.
   https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jul/01/why-do-we-judge-people-by-their-accents
   (Accessible overview of accent bias in Britain.)

5. Levon, Erez (2016). “The voice of authority: Accent and social power in Britain.” Journal of Sociolinguistics.
   https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/josl.12183
   (Explores how accent is linked to authority and social hierarchy in the UK.)

6. Sharma, Devyani & Rampton, Ben (2015). “Lectal focusing in interaction: A new methodology for the study of style variation.” Journal of Sociolinguistics.
   https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/josl.12117
   (Relevant to understanding code-switching and style-shifting as authentic social practice.)

Seventy-nine vehicles. A petrol station. Properties.

On paper, this looks like something many citizens across Africa have been asking for: elite accountability. A court ruling that says powerful families must explain their wealth. A legal system that is not intimidated by proximity to power.

But in Zambia, as in much of the continent, accountability is rarely just about law. It’s about politics too.

So what’s really happening here?

diamondtvzambia.com

Is this normal for Zambia?

Short answer: no. It’s not common.

Zambia, like many African nations, has long struggled with corruption allegations at high levels. There have been past attempts to prosecute elites (including former President Frederick Chiluba in the 2000s) but outcomes have often been mixed, delayed, or politically complicated.

Historically, powerful individuals have not routinely lost assets at this scale through domestic courts.

That’s what makes this moment significant. The court used a non-conviction-based forfeiture process. This means the state doesn’t need a criminal conviction to seize assets if it believes they are proceeds of crime and cannot be reasonably explained by lawful income.

In theory, this is a strong anti-corruption tool.

In practice, it depends entirely on whether it is applied consistently.

edition.cnn.com

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The political context matters

This ruling comes under President Hakainde Hichilema’s administration, which came to power in 2021 after defeating Edgar Lungu in a highly contested election.

That election was heavily shaped by youth turnout and economic frustration, with rising debt, cost of living pressures, unemployment.

The current government campaigned on restoring rule of law and fighting corruption.

Supporters argue this seizure is evidence that those promises are being kept.

Critics argue it is selective justice, that the former president’s family is being targeted in a politically charged environment.

In African politics, both things can be true at once:

• Anti-corruption efforts can be real.

• They can also occur within power struggles.

The real test isn’t whether elites are investigated. It’s whether investigations apply across political lines.

Why this matters beyond Zambia

Elite accountability is one of the hardest governance challenges in developing economies.

Institutions, such as anti-corruption commissions, courts, asset forfeiture laws, often exist on paper. However their enforcement can be inconsistent.

When powerful families are forced to surrender assets, it sends a signal:
No one is untouchable.

But when enforcement appears selective, it sends a different message:
Power has changed hands, but the rules haven’t.

Zambia now sits at an interesting crossroads.

If asset recovery continues across parties and administrations, this could mark a shift toward stronger institutional credibility.

If it remains confined to former ruling elites, scepticism will grow.

The bigger question

For a country that saw high youth mobilisation in 2021 and a peaceful transfer of power, moments like this matter.

Young voters didn’t just vote for economic reform. They voted for governance reform.

The seizure of Dalitso Lungu’s assets is not just about one family. It’s about whether Zambia is building institutions that outlast personalities.

Is this accountability becoming normal?

Or is it just politics by other means?

The answer won’t come from one court ruling.

It will come from whether the law continues to apply, even when it becomes inconvenient.

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Notes

1. AFP, “Son of Zambia’s ex-president Lungu ordered to surrender assets,” Yahoo News, 2026.

2. Brian Mwale, “Son of Zambia’s ex-president Lungu ordered to surrender 79 cars, petrol station,” The Star (Kenya), 2026.

3. “Court orders forfeiture of Lungu assets in major proceeds of crime ruling,” Zambian Observer, 2026.

4. “Lungu family files appeal in South Africa over repatriation of former president’s remains,” Lusaka Times, 2026.

5. “FDD fires at judiciary, presidency, says Dalitso’s travails product of witch-hunt,” Zambia Monitor, 2026.

6. Bertelsmann Stiftung, “BTI 2022 Country Report: Zambia,” 2022.

7. Centre for International Asset Recovery (CIFAR), “Asset Recovery in Zambia,” 2022.

8. Xan Rice, “Zambia clears ex-president Frederick Chiluba of corruption,” The Guardian, 17 August 2009.

9. Muna Ndulo, “Shifting Legitimacy: The Trials of Frederick Chiluba,” in The Politics of Transitional Justice in Africa, Cambridge University Press.

And all I can think is - the audacity.

Because not that long ago, Britain (and her European cousins) were spectacularly unconcerned with anyone else’s borders. They packed up, sailed off, and took entire countries. Not just countries; land, labour, gold, cocoa, palm oil, and, crucially, the right for those countries to develop on their own terms.

Walter Rodney Was Right

Walter Rodney didn’t mince words in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972):

“Colonialism was not merely a system of exploitation, but one whose essential purpose was to repatriate the profits to the so-called mother country.”

Underdevelopment was not a natural state, it was manufactured. And when you zoom into the late colonial period (the 1930s onwards) the hypocrisy becomes crystal clear.

Colonial “development initiatives” were laser-focused on expatriates and settler needs. Historian Frederick Cooper describes this as the “racial geography of investment”. European-only districts with good housing, electricity, and roads, while African towns were left to swell without sanitation or schools.

Gold from South Africa filled the vaults of the Bank of England, while Africans were literally pushed off their land in Kenya. As the Carter Land Commission of 1932 admitted, land was alienated from African farmers to “meet the needs of European settlement.”

And African labour? The 1945 Colonial Office Labour Circular openly stated that low wages were “justified” because African workers were “maintained by their subsistence plots.” Translation: you don’t need to pay people fairly if their families back home are your welfare system.

The Big Post-War Push (for Europe, not Africa)

After World War II, Britain ramped up colonial “development”, but again, it was really about Britain. The 1940 and 1945 Colonial Development and Welfare Acts were hailed as progressive, but as historian Anthony Low put it, they were designed “less to transform African economies than to stabilise colonial rule and supply Britain’s recovery.”

Infrastructure was built where exports were, not where Africans lived. If you happened to be sitting on a gold mine or a palm oil plantation, lucky you, you got a railway. If not? Good luck with that footpath to the clinic.

And Now?

Fast-forward to today, and we see Britons marching in the streets about migration, calling for the very people whose wealth funded their prosperity to “go home.”

The irony drips. Britain became wealthy precisely because it “didn’t stay home.” It went out into the world, extracted resources, and systematically underdeveloped others. The fact that many former colonies now face poverty, conflict, and weak institutions isn’t some moral failing - it’s the predictable outcome of colonial policy.

So, when today’s protesters shout about protecting Britain’s future, I can’t help but think: whose future got sacrificed for Britain’s past?

I am in the middle of Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall currently, and I am about 10% into the chapter titled “Black Girls Don’t Have Eating Disorders”. If I got to that chapter 6 months earlier I would have crumbled. I want to clarify; I do not have an eating disorder. However, I have a complicated relationship with food, and an even more so with my body. I know there are many of us that can relate to this.

I can not pinpoint where my complicated relationship with food started, but there are certain moments in my childhood that flash in my mind. I remember an Auntie saying how proud she was that I ate a healthy amount of food when I was 12 (I know, that’s unheard of!). That stuck with me, because it cosigned the mountain of rice and meat stew on my plate. I was never an overweight child. Maybe that is why she could say that. My metabolism outpaced the food that was on plate.

I continued to eat without thought, as you should as a child to be honest. However, I did not really eat breakfast. I relied on a late morning snack, a home-made school lunch and a big dinner at home – that was a perfect balance for me in my childhood. There was always food at home, but I was mainly in charge of what I ate from a young age. So, I always ate what felt good.

That large dinner at the end of the day, was the piece de resistance. That was my reward for a hard day at school and still is. Food is comfort for me. I did not look at food as fuel or nutrition – it was supposed to make you feel good. I ate purely for enjoyment. It was the only thing I could really control from an early age. Mum would take us to big Tesco after church on a Sunday and leave us in charge of filling up the trolley and checking out. She did intervene, especially when she saw those horrible ready meals. Complaining that it was something that could be home made. Or she would batch cook pasta dishes with lots of veg. However, for the most part, I decided what I ate. (You may notice that I jump between the past and present tense, that’s because these issues are not completely in my past.)

Fast forward to the 2017 – I am 19/20 years old. My boyfriend at the time suggested I started going to the gym in my second year of uni to fill up my time. Then came the complicated relationship with my body. Before then, I did not spend too much time looking at my body – I was content with it. However, in that relationship I was introduced to the importance of a small waist and the danger of a Friday chippy. I started working out twice a day with hardly any food. I would eat a boiled egg and raw spinach for breakfast most mornings after a workout. For dinner I would sometimes have boiled egg and avocado. All of this to gain his approval. It was important that I looked good for my 21^st birthday holiday to Marbella, and not have a certain friend look better than me (his words). I cannot put all the blame on him. Family got more complicated at that time, so this was an unhealthy way of coping. People that actually cared about me noticed the rapid weight loss and voiced their concerns. When I shared with my then boyfriend, that maybe my protruding collar bones were not a good look, he disagreed.

Once we broke up the damage was already done. Til this day, I still struggle with my body. During and after COVID, I went the other way. You could not stop me from eating. It was back to being a child again. It was the only thing I could control. The problem - I no longer had the metabolism I was used to. I met my current boyfriend during this time. He hasn’t said this, but I know he has seen my body in different shapes during our relationship and loved every single one. He and Mum have encouraged me through these stages of frustration and loss. I realised I was mourning my pre 25-year-old body. I remember a friend telling me that as a woman, you essentially go through a second puberty in your late 20s, and I paid him no mind. IT’S REAL! This may be good news for some, but for me it came at the same time as me using food as a comfort. I hated every moment of it.

I believe I am on the other side of it now. I now recognise when I am full and stop eating. I only workout 3-4 times a week and listen to my body when it needs to rest.

I share all of this not because I have all the answers, but because I know I’m not alone. So many of us are navigating tangled histories with food and our bodies, especially as Black women – expected to be strong, grateful, disciplined, and untouched by the vulnerabilities that others are allowed to express. Reading that chapter of Hood Feminism felt like someone had cracked open a window I didn’t realise I’d been suffocating behind. It didn’t solve everything, but it named something I had never had the language for. I'm still learning how to care for myself in a way that is gentle, not punishing. How to listen to my body and not just my fears. This isn’t a neat conclusion, because this journey isn’t linear – but it is mine. And maybe, if you see yourself somewhere in this story, it’s yours too.

Last term, I worked three full 7-day weeks. I facilitated five evening talks with external speakers, each running from 7:30pm to 9:00pm. I spent seven Friday nights working beyond 10:30pm (after a full teaching day) supervising and settling 60 teenagers to bed. And all of that is on top of teaching A Level Economics to five different classes and managing a team of 18 staff in my middle-leadership role. So, yeah, I get a 24-day Easter holiday.

Something else, that isn’t considered is that it isn’t a break in the traditional sense. I live in staff accommodation (a maisonette), where my colleagues are my neighbours. Those of us that aren’t lucky enough to have an empty property elsewhere in the country or the world, are stuck here over the holidays. So, I see colleagues or pupils when I am going on a walk or at the gym. It may not seem like a big deal, but when you are trying your best to switch off from work, it can be jarring.

The legacy of COVID has meant that educators are more accessible than ever. A Level pupils have the expectation that I will be available to mark essays and answer questions. (Don’t worry, I burst that bubble with quickness before the end of the term.) Still, I check Microsoft Teams a couple of times a week, just in case any questions come through. After all, they’re in the thick of exam prep, and I want them to feel supported.

Teaching requires preparation. But teaching isn’t a job you can just walk into on day one and wing it. Lessons need to be planned—and that planning happens during the holidays. That part, I’ve accepted. In fact, after four years of teaching, I’ve found that planning the content is the easy part. What’s become more challenging is the emotional and mental preparation. The anxiety creeps in long before term starts. And while I know this isn’t exclusive to teaching—many freelance or self-employed professionals with longer breaks will relate—it’s a deep, physical anxiety that makes the ‘Sunday Scaries’ feel like child’s play.

Navigating staffroom politics. Absorbing the emotional weight of teenagers. Carrying the constant expectation to be on, to be present, to care. It’s a lot. And I think the anxiety stems from the knowledge that all of that is waiting for me again. I’ll manage it (because I always do) but I can’t shake the feeling that I’m gearing up for battle. Maybe that sounds dramatic. But it’s my truth.

So, as we inch closer to the start of term, do me a favour: check in on your teacher friends. We’re probably trying to hold it together while quietly bracing for the next round.

I always struggle with New Years, the anticipation around it sets such high expectations. In reality, the day itself is always so underwhelming. You’ve woken up from a night of New Years Eve celebrations; either a night-watch church service or an intimate party with loved ones. However, the day of the New Year falls flat.

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January is honestly the worst month in the year (in the UK at least). I could sit here and explain the January Blues and shit weather that leads to seasonal depression – but let’s keep it simple. It’s HORRIBLE! I am not in the frame of mind to set new goals for the year, let alone work to achieve them.

January 2025 was a trial period. I cannot be expected to come out of the dreads of winter and enter January anew. Nope – I need time to shake off the winter and January was that time. The best way I can describe it is a bear coming out of hibernation. The initial wake-up (January) comes with sluggish steps, a heavy haze of winter still clinging to your every move. Adjusting is slow, tentative, like shaking off a long, deep sleep. Winter 2024 was all survival for me. The bar was set at making it to work every day. But then, spring arrives. The days are longer & brighter, colours return, and energy stirs. The bear fully wakes, stretching into itself, stepping into the sun with renewed strength. And so, do I.

So, for me - spring 2025 is when my New Year starts. I have been working out consistently, got the hang of my additional responsibility at work, and bought Cowboy Carter tour tickets. If this is just the beginning, I can’t wait to see what the rest of the year holds.

I say all this to say, start afresh whenever you choose. I may have another New Year in summer. This does not require you to completely change your life and become a new person. However, the decision to embrace growth, shift your mindset, or simply begin again (no matter the season) is always yours to make.

The playlist of choice? A Spotify made Timbaland mix and of course Justin Timberlake and Nelly Furtado featured heavily. A particular song - What Goes Around.../... Comes Around (Interlude) by Justin Timberlake came on. It is a certified 2000s classic, and it is therefore no surprise I replayed it – it has that hypnotic, moody pull that just HITS!

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Why is it Such a Good Song?!

FIRST of all, the production at the hand of Timbaland's magic touch cannot be ignored. Timbaland was in his prime in the 2000s, creating atmospheric beats. The haunting strings, rolling percussion, and echoing vocal effects give the song an almost cinematic quality. Iconic.

SECOND, I feel everything Timberlake is feeling in the emotional story telling. The song taps into what we have all felt at some point in time: betrayal and heartbreak. He started off soft and wounded, then grows into a full-on dramatic explosion by the end. Singing along with him feels like free therapy.

THIRD, the Britney behind the song. I was reminded of Timberlake’s history with Britney when listening. Even though, he says the song is based on his friend being cheated on. Justin be so for real! The way he leaned into the "scorned ex" narrative (Cry Me a River was definitely about her), it wouldn’t be shocking if he channelled some personal feelings into this song too.

Why Did Timbaland, Justin Timberlake, and Nelly Furtado Make So Many Bangers in the 2000s and 2010s?

They were an unstoppable trio during that era. Timbaland’s signature sound had this way of making beats that felt ahead of their time. He blended hip-hop, electronic, and world music influences in a way that no one else was doing. He had a signature bounce and groove that made everything he touched irresistible. He worked with Aaliyah, Missy Elliott, and Ginuwine before moving into the pop world with Justin and Nelly.

Additionally, the Genre-Blending that pushed the boundaries of pop, R&B, and hip-hop. Justin and Nelly both had pop appeal but with an R&B/hip-hop edge, which made them fit perfectly into Timbaland’s production style. When you listen to tracks like Give It to Me (Timbaland, Justin, Nelly collab), you can tell they had a real creative synergy. They brought out the best in each other.

It was also perfect timing, the mid-to-late 2000s was a golden era for futuristic, synth-heavy, beat-driven music. Timbaland’s sound defined that period.