English Archives - Rooted Routes

Why We Leave

Efemena — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 23:55:37 +0000

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“Africans Had No History”

Efemena — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 20:41:59 +0000

I was on TikTok last week when a video caught my attention, a man talking with the kind of confidence that comes from never having had to question what you were taught, explaining that Africans had no written language before Europeans arrived, that we were people without history, without systems, without anything worth knowing about until someone else showed up and handed us the tools to become human, and I watched it twice, not because I was angry exactly, though I understood why anger would have been a reasonable response, more because I was sitting with something harder to name, the specific sadness of watching a lie told so cleanly and so casually by someone who had no idea it was a lie.

I put my phone down and kept moving, of course it bothered me, but I couldn’t quite place why yet, and that night I went to sleep and I had a dream, and I want to tell you about it because I have not been able to stop thinking about it since.

In the dream the world looked like itself, which is the only way I can describe it, because it wasn’t a fantasy and it wasn’t me reimagining anything, it was simply a world that could have existed if nobody had ever decided that one part of humanity had the right to reorganise the rest of it. There were cities I recognised from history books that were never assigned to me in school. Trade routes were running across the continent and beyond, not carved out by force but built over generations by people who knew exactly what they were doing and why. The mathematics were African, written and calculated long before anyone came to teach it, the astronomy was African, mapped into the architecture of temples and the movement of entire civilisations, the medicine was African, grown from the ground and passed down through generations of people who understood the body long before it was studied in the languages we were told were the only ones that counted, and none of it was a surprise to anyone in the dream because none of it had ever been interrupted.

Of everything in the dream, the languages are what I couldn’t stop thinking about after I woke up, because in the dream nobody was apologising for how they spoke or raising their children in a tongue that was not their own because somewhere along the line the world had decided that their own was not enough, people were just speaking, Yoruba and Igbo and Urhobo and Hausa and Zulu and Wolof and Amharic and so many others, and it was just normal, nobody was making a big deal of it, nobody was trying to preserve it like something fragile, it was just life, and sitting with that feeling even inside the dream made me realise how much had been taken, because you don’t always know what was taken from you until you dream of a world where it wasn’t.

And it wasn’t just Africa, which is the thing about the dream that I keep coming back to, because every part of the world was just itself, the Americas still belonging to the people who had always lived in them and knew them, Asia trading on its own terms, and even Europe was there, just Europe, without the part where it decided that its way of doing things was the only way and that everyone else needed to be fixed, and what stayed with me was not that there was no conflict because I am not that naive, people have always disagreed and fought and failed each other, but the conflicts were their own, they stayed where they started, they were not exported or imposed or dressed up as civilisation while carrying a gun.

And then I woke up, and I just lay there for a moment before I reached for my phone, and when I did the news was still the news, somewhere a resource being fought over, somewhere a country being told what it was allowed to want, and I put the phone back down and stared at the ceiling for a while thinking about that man on TikTok who genuinely believed what he was saying, thinking about everything our forefathers knew and built and passed down that got buried under someone else’s version of the story, thinking about all the languages that are slowly going extinct, thinking about how much of what we were taught as history was really just the story that the people with the guns decided to write down.

I don’t know what to do with a dream like that except tell it, because the world I woke up to that morning is not the world I was inside that night, and I know it probably never will be, not in this lifetime, but the dream didn’t feel like an escape, it felt more like a reminder, like my mind going back to something that was real before it was taken and saying look, this existed, this was here, and the fact that it was interrupted doesn’t mean it was never true, and I think that is the thing that the man on TikTok and everyone who thinks like him will never fully understand, that you cannot erase what actually happened by telling a different story loudly enough for long enough, because the original story is still there, and it’s not just there, it’s in the languages that are still fighting to survive, and it’s not just that, it’s also in the knowledge our forefathers passed down that we are only now beginning to remember.

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No One Is Coming to Save Us

Efemena — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 11:38:39 +0000

I woke up this morning doing what I probably shouldn’t do first thing. Reading Nigerian news. Same headlines, different day. Election results that change nothing. Court rulings that surprise nobody. Budgets that don’t add up. And then somewhere in all of it, a phrase just hit me. No one is coming to save us. I put my phone down, made my coffee, and sat with it for a long time.

Because the thing is, I’ve felt versions of this before, after every election, after every strike, after every kidnapping headline, after every news cycle that ends exactly where it started, but this morning felt different and I couldn’t shake it. Frustration is an understatement, because frustration implies you still believe things could go another way. This was something else, like I’d been watching the same film for over thirty years and had finally, reluctantly, understood what it was actually about.

Nigeria turns 66 this year, and for most of those years, the conversation has been the same one, that we have bad leaders, that if we just got the right person in power things would change, that corruption is the disease and free and fair elections are the cure, yada yada yada, and for a long time I believed that, a lot of us did. But sitting with my coffee this morning, I kept thinking about a different question, not who is running the country, but who the country was built to serve in the first place.

Start with the slave trade. Before the British built a single road or drew a single border, the coast of what we now call Nigeria was already part of a system, and that system was extraction. Millions of people taken from this coastline alone, shipped across the Atlantic, their labour building economies that are still wealthy today while the places they were taken from are still recovering. And the thing that doesn’t get said enough is that it worked because of collaboration, because there were always African intermediaries willing to trade their own people for guns and alcohol and a seat at a table that was never really theirs, and when the slave trade ended, those same structures of collaboration didn’t disappear, they simply changed their purpose.

When the slave trade ended, the British didn’t leave, they stayed and called it something else. They drew borders that made no cultural or ethnic sense, splitting communities in half and forcing others together who had never been one people, not because they were careless but because the borders weren’t drawn for us, they were drawn for them, to make administration and extraction easier. And when independence finally came in 1960, what was handed over wasn’t really a country in the full sense of the word, it was a set of institutions designed to serve someone else’s interests, with a new flag on top.

Independence gave Nigeria a flag and a seat at the United Nations, but the economic architecture stayed largely intact, and over the decades new players arrived to work within it. In 1986, the IMF and World Bank pushed Nigeria into a Structural Adjustment Program that devalued the naira, cut social spending, and opened the economy to foreign competition that local industries couldn’t survive, and the poverty that followed wasn’t a side effect, it was a predictable outcome of a system designed to keep raw materials cheap and markets open. Today the mechanisms are more polished but the logic is the same. France signed an agreement in December 2025 to help digitise Nigeria’s tax collection system, while fourteen francophone African countries are still trying to escape French control of their currencies. The United States maintains military infrastructure across West Africa framed as counterterrorism but positioned precisely around oil routes. China finances infrastructure with loan terms that put national assets on the line when repayments fail. Different players, same game.

And so people leave steadily, in a way that has started to feel less like individual choice and more like a slow collective conclusion, and the people leaving are not the ones who gave up, they are often the ones who tried the hardest, the doctors who worked in understaffed hospitals with no equipment, the engineers who built things in a system that kept dismantling them, the teachers who taught in universities that went on strike for eight months because the government wouldn’t honour agreements it had signed, the parents who stopped feeling safe in their own country and couldn’t find a good reason to keep pretending otherwise, and eventually a person sits down one day and starts filling out forms for the UK or Canada or Germany, not because they stopped loving where they came from but because they finally stopped believing that where they came from would ever love them back or protect them.

What makes it harder to swallow is watching the people in power perform a different calculation entirely, because the same politicians who stand at podiums and talk about Nigeria’s potential and Nigerian resilience have been quietly making arrangements for their children that have nothing to do with faith in this country, their children are in universities in the UK and the US and Canada, getting the kind of education that Nigerian public universities have been too underfunded and too strike-ridden to reliably provide, their medical emergencies are handled in hospitals abroad, their money sits in accounts abroad, and yet they return to the microphone and ask the rest of us to believe, to invest, to stay, to be patient, as if patience is a strategy and not just another word for accepting things as they are.

And this is the question I keep coming back to, the one I don’t really want to ask but can’t stop asking, which is whether any of this was ever meant to work out differently, because when you trace it all the way back, from the slave trade to the colonial borders to the structural adjustment programs to the tax deals being signed today, what you see is not a country that tried and failed, you see a geography that was designed for extraction from the very beginning, and what we call dysfunction, the collapsed hospitals, the universities on permanent strike, the courts that protect nobody, the elections that change nothing, might not be dysfunction at all, it might be the system working exactly as it was designed to work, just not for us.

So where does that leave us, those of us who stayed and those of us who left and those of us living somewhere in between, still sending money home, still watching the news first thing in the morning even when we know it’s going to be bad, still arguing about Nigeria at dinner tables in London and Bonn and Toronto as if the argument itself is a form of love. No one is coming to save us, and I think part of me has always known that, but knowing it and sitting with it are different things, and what I’m slowly making peace with is that salvation was never going to come from outside anyway, not from the right election result, not from a foreign government with good intentions, not from any agreement signed between people in suits who have never had to live with the consequences of their decisions, it was always going to have to come from us, from inside, imperfect and exhausted and still paying attention, which is not a comforting thought, but it might be the only honest one.

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The Russian, The Spy Glasses, and What They Exposed About Us

Efemena — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 01:00:48 +0000

The videos showed up on my timeline a few days ago, and I couldn’t look away. A white man with a Russian accent and broken English, walking up to African women in Ghana and Kenya, asking their names, making small talk. Within minutes, they were leaving with him. The footage, shot from his perspective through what looked like ordinary glasses, moved from public places to private apartments to intimate encounters. Everything recorded without their knowledge, everything uploaded to a paid Telegram channel.

Social media exploded. Not just outrage about the violation, though that was there too. Something else, something very uncomfortable. The comments from African men poured in: “These same women we chase for months, and this guy gets them in just minutes? With broken English?” People started writing about poverty and desperation. Jokes, shame, finger-pointing everywhere. And underneath it all, the question nobody wanted to say out loud: Why did so many women say yes so fast to a complete stranger just because he was white?

By the time I started digging into the story, the man – known online as Yaytseslav – had already fled both countries. Ghana summoned the Russian ambassador, talking extradition. Kenya activated security agencies. Governments were moving, but he was already gone. What he left behind was worse than the videos themselves. He left behind a mirror, and nobody liked what they saw reflected back. I know I didn’t.

Let me be clear; what this man did was criminal. Non-consensual recording of intimate moments is a violation, full stop. The women in those videos are victims of a predator who used technology and trust against them. That’s not up for debate. But there’s another conversation happening alongside the rightful anger, and that’s the one I need to have. Because this isn’t really about him. It’s about us.

I watched one of the clips that went viral. Not the intimate footage. I refused to participate in that violation. But I watched the approach videos, the ones showing how he met these women. He’s walking through a public area, sees a woman, walks up to her with his thick accent. “Hello, I am from Russia. What is your name?” She smiles and they start chatting. His English is rough but she’s friendly, responding to his questions. Within minutes, she’s agreeing to meet him later, or go with him right then. Different women, same pattern. It looked easy… way too easy. And that’s what broke the internet.

The debates that followed split along predictable lines. Some African men were furious, but not always for the right reasons. “Our women failed the test,” some said. “They made us look bad.” As if the issue was national pride rather than exploitation. The women clapped back: “Maybe if you treated us better, we wouldn’t be attracted to foreigners.” Round and round it went, everyone pointing fingers, nobody wanting to sit with the real discomfort.

Then came the poverty arguments. “These women are desperate,” people said. “The economy is hard. They see a foreigner and think opportunity.” There’s truth in that, I won’t lie. Economic hardship makes people vulnerable. But here’s what bothered me; not every woman in those videos looked desperate. Some were well-dressed, clearly middle class. Some had jobs, some were even married. This wasn’t just about poverty, it was about something deeper, something we’ve been carrying for generations without naming it.

There was one video that stood out to everyone. A woman he approached who shut him down completely. She was getting something out of a nice car, well put together. He tried his usual approach, asked for help with getting a Bolt ride. She started to help, polite, trying to be kind. Then he shifted into his pickup routine and her whole demeanor changed. She looked at him like he was insulting her intelligence. She saw through him immediately.

That’s when I understood what we were really looking at. It wasn’t just about poverty or African men treating women badly. It was about something we don’t like to admit; we still see white skin as a passport to something better. Opportunity, status, a way out, safety even. He didn’t have conventional charm (at least not to me). His English was broken, he had no money to flash around in those initial conversations. What he had was white skin and a foreign accent, and it looked like for many of the women who said yes, that was enough.

This is the part that makes us uncomfortable. We want to believe we’ve moved past colonialism, that we’ve decolonized our minds and know our worth. But then a white man who admits he doesn’t speak English well walks through African cities and shows us we haven’t. We watch our sisters, our daughters, our friends light up at the accent, at the possibility of what he might represent. Not him as a person because they don’t know him, but what he symbolizes: abroad, escape, a different life. The same reason so many of us are in diaspora right now, chasing Europe, chasing America, chasing anywhere that isn’t home.

I thought about the woman who rejected him. What made her different? Was it just that she had money, that she’s well traveled? Or had she learned what many of us only discover after we migrate: that the fantasy of the West, of whiteness, of foreign saviours, is exactly that, a fantasy. That white men are just men, that Europe has its own problems, that running toward something because you’re running away from yourself never ends well.

We carry colonialism in our bodies whether we admit it or not. It’s there in the way we still call Europe “abroad” like it’s the only abroad that matters, in how we describe someone as “been to London” or “schooled in America” as credentials that automatically elevate them. It’s in our beauty standards, our language hierarchies, our ideas about what success looks like. And yes, it’s in how a white foreigner can walk through our cities and women follow him.

The women in those videos are victims twice over; first of his predatory recording, and now of public judgment and exposure. They didn’t deserve either. But their violation doesn’t erase the uncomfortable question… why did it work so easily? We need to talk about the colonial programming that’s still running in our minds, the programming that makes us see whiteness as a ticket somewhere better. Because until we name it, until we see it clearly, we’ll keep falling for it. And men like him will keep exploiting it.

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Remigration Graffiti Came to My Neighbourhood

Efemena — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 18:22:30 +0000

The first time I saw it, I was walking to the train station. Red letters on a wall, neat and precise, like someone had used a stencil. REMIGRATION. I stood there staring at it. Why here? In this quiet neighbourhood I’ve always thought of as peaceful.

I thought maybe it was random at first. Teenage vandalism, something meaningless. But then my daughter told me she’d seen it too, at the bus station. Same stencilled letters, same red paint. Then I saw it again three days ago at a T-junction. You could see where the city had scrubbed some of it away, but whoever was doing this kept coming back, writing it in different places. This wasn’t just one angry person with a spray can. This was deliberate.

I live on the outskirts of Bonn, in a community that’s always seemed peaceful to me. People here are nice and polite. They keep to themselves, but I never thought it meant anything. Now I’m not sure what I’ve been seeing all this time, or what I’ve been missing.

The word itself, remigration, I’d heard it floating around in the news. But seeing it spraypainted in the neighbourhood I live is different. It stops being abstract politics and becomes something that sits in your chest.

What does remigration actually mean? People like my family could be told to leave, even if we’re here legally, even if we work and pay taxes and speak the language. The idea is that if you’re not “assimilated enough,” if you don’t fit someone’s definition of belonging, you should go back to wherever they think you came from. It doesn’t matter that we’ve built lives here. Under remigration policy, someone else gets to decide we don’t belong.

This isn’t coming from nowhere. I’ve been watching the AfD gain ground, hearing them talk more openly about remigration. In January last year, their leader Alice Weidel said the word openly at a party congress, not hiding it anymore, making it clear this is what they want. And now it’s here, in the neighbourhood where I live with my family.

I don’t think the word on these walls is just graffiti. It’s part of something bigger that’s been building for months, something that’s moved from closed-door meetings to public rallies to campaign materials that show up in people’s mailboxes. I remember reading and writing about those fake deportation tickets.

They were designed to look like airline tickets. Deportation tickets, with “ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT” printed where a passenger’s name should be. The destination said “Safe country of origin.” The departure gate was “Gate AfD.” The date was February 23, election day. At the bottom: “Only remigration can save Germany” and “It’s nice at home too.” People found them in their mailboxes, especially in neighbourhoods with migrant families. I remember reading about it and thinking, wow, they’re actually doing this… openly.

I think about those flyers when I see the graffiti now. Things that seemed impossible months ago have become normal. Remigration has gone from political rhetoric to something spraypainted in neighbourhoods, something people see on their way to work. The place I thought I knew feels different now.

This morning, my daughter asked me something that made my stomach drop. She said seeing “remigration” everywhere makes her feel uncomfortable, like something is going to happen. And then she asked if maybe we should get cameras around the house.

Cameras? My daughter is asking about cameras. She works here, put so much effort into learning the language, trying to build a life here. And now she’s asking about cameras because of words spraypainted on walls. I never thought we’d have this conversation. Not here, not in this neighbourhood that’s always felt safe.

But here we are. The AfD keeps growing, their rhetoric keeps getting bolder, and more people seem comfortable with it. Remigration is being discussed like it’s reasonable policy, not a threat to families like mine.

I don’t know who is spraypainting these walls. I don’t know if it’s one person or many, if it’s coordinated or spontaneous, if it’s young people who’ve been radicalized online or older people who’ve been waiting for permission to say what they’ve always thought. What I know is that someone in my neighbourhood, maybe someone I’ve passed at the park, believes this message needs to be seen. Believes it strongly enough to come back after the city scrubs it away. Believes it needs to be everywhere.

What does this mean? I genuinely don’t know. I don’t know if this is the beginning of something worse. I don’t know if my daughter’s instinct is right, if we should be worried, if cameras would even help or if they’d just be a Band-Aid on something much larger.

What I do know is that I don’t feel the same about this neighbourhood anymore. That word, painted in red, has changed how I see things. I keep wondering what I haven’t been noticing, what I’ve been missing. “Peaceful” doesn’t feel like the right word anymore, or maybe it never was.

I know that my daughter is scared about what comes next. I don’t have a good answer for her, no way to reassure her that we’ll be okay here. Because I honestly don’t know.

I walked past that wall again this morning. The red letters are still there. I didn’t stop this time, just kept walking, but that word stayed with me. My daughter asked about cameras, but what are cameras going to do? They won’t change the fact that someone in this neighbourhood wants us gone. I keep thinking about that. Not whether we’ll be safe, but whether this will ever actually feel like home.

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Six Months with Women I Never Expected

Efemena — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 22:01:33 +0000

Someone once said to me, “Oh, you’re that rich, huh?” and I wanted the floor to open up and swallow me.

It happened not long after I moved to Germany. I was out with colleagues, people I was starting to consider friends, and I offered to cover everyone’s bill. One of them looked at me and said it. Back home, when you’re out with friends, you take turns paying. Sometimes you cover the bill, other times someone else does. It’s normal. But here, that gesture made someone think I was trying to prove something. I smiled and brushed it off, but inside I was caught off guard, unsure of what I’d done wrong.

That moment stayed with me for months. So when the intercultural communication workshop came around during EmpowerHer, and we started talking about cultural misunderstandings, something in me loosened. One woman shared how she’d bought fancy looking soap for a colleague here and it was taken the wrong way. Another talked about giving someone fragranced deodorant, thinking it was thoughtful, only to realize later it had been misread as an insult. Hearing others share similar stories made me realize I wasn’t alone in making these mistakes. It didn’t erase the sting, but it helped me understand it better.

When I look back at how EmpowerHer began for me, it still feels almost accidental, even though everything about it matched who I’ve always been. Community work has always been part of who I am. Back home, I was the one volunteering, organizing women’s groups, working with young people, making sure everyone had somewhere to be heard. I’ve always found myself in rooms where people gather to support each other, so saying yes to EmpowerHer felt natural long before I understood what it would become.

I signed up for a voluntary cleanup by the Rhine, and that’s where I met Suaad. We spoke briefly while picking up trash by the river. She told me about her idea for a women’s project. I told her about Rooted Routes, the platform I’m building for migrants to share their stories without being filtered or reduced. It was an easy conversation. Suaad had a warmth about her that made you want to listen, and when she spoke about bringing women together, the passion in her voice was unmistakable. I could tell she had a good heart, and our energies clicked. She wanted to build something where migrant and German women could meet, learn, and share honestly. I told her it was a great initiative and encouraged her to move forward with it. When registration opened, I was one of the first to join.

I walked into the first session with no real expectations. I wasn’t nervous or overthinking anything. I simply wanted to meet people, listen, and understand what brought them here. The room held women from Germany, Brazil, Nigeria, Yemen, Georgia, India, Ukraine, Morocco… women from all over. Some had been here for decades, others were still finding their footing. By the way, I’ve changed some of their names here. The room felt warm, open, like everyone was cautiously hopeful about what we were starting.

We were asked to bring something from home. I chose pepper soup spice. I’d thought about bringing something from my fashion work or some Nigerian currency, but pepper soup spice felt more honest. It reminded me of home, especially when I’d catch a flu – the first thing I’d make was hot pepper soup. When the other women started sharing what they’d brought, I could feel something change in the room. Someone brought a ring her parents had given her. Another had a toy her child used to play with. There was a book, a photo, things that didn’t look like much but clearly meant everything. Everyone shared a piece of themselves, and the rest of us just listened.

The language workshop came a few weeks in. The trainer was part of our group, so the room felt relaxed. We started by introducing ourselves in our native languages, then moved through games, tongue twisters, drawing pictures others had to name in German, and a speed dating exercise where we asked each other quick questions back and forth. There were so many languages in the room that day. Hearing everyone’s voice in their own language was something special.

The Feminist Law Clinic came next. I wasn’t sure what to make of the term at first because it means something different where I’m from, but the workshop ended up being useful for a lot of the women there. They asked specific questions about rights, benefits, how to handle certain situations they’d been struggling with. I didn’t have many questions myself, but watching the other women get answers they’d been looking for felt important.

I was out of the country during the art workshop, and I wish I had been there. The WhatsApp group blew up with photos and videos. Everyone looked so relaxed, laughing together. That’s also when Yena said “wowwww” in a way that made everyone crack up, and it became this running joke we’d reference for weeks.

The cooking workshop was my first day back. Walking into that room felt good because by then I’d heard about some of the stress Suaad had been dealing with behind the scenes. Trying to get trainers to confirm, space wahala. Nothing about organizing this program had been easy, but she kept going anyway. Almost everyone showed up that day. We made flatbread, salads, and rice together. I was on a cleanse at the time, avoiding carbs, but I still tasted the food because I couldn’t help myself. The chopping, mixing, and laughter reminded me of home. Back home, when there’s a wedding or a party, cooking is what brings everyone together. People sit outside with firewood, share jokes, chew meat, and shout instructions over pots. That day felt a bit like that.

The financial workshop was a reality check. The trainer joined online and went over income, expenses, investments; the things you don’t want to look at too closely until someone makes you. Somewhere in the middle of it I realized I’d been spending way more than I should have been. Not great. Nobody was saying much at that point. I think we were all doing the same math in our heads and not liking what we found. I went home that day, looked at my bank account, and honestly, I didn’t want to think about it.

The career workshop followed. There were two trainers: one focused on CVs and cover letters, and the other on being proactive in job searches. I had sent my CV beforehand, so she discussed it with me. We even did a mock interview. It made me think about how I’ve been approaching things here in Germany. I’ve applied to jobs, a lot of them actually, but the workshop made me realize I might need to be more intentional about which ones and how I’m going after them.

The anti-racism workshop was the one that surprised me the most. I’d gone in thinking I already understood racism well enough, but the session was set up differently than I expected. We did exercises like standing up if certain statements about our experiences applied to us, then talking about what it felt like to watch other people sit down while you stood. The island exercise made it even more personal. We were given a list of people with different backgrounds, professions, ages, and identities, and had to choose seven who would survive with us on an island. When we started explaining our choices, the trainer asked questions that made us examine why we’d picked certain people and not others. He wasn’t accusing us of anything. He just wanted us to think about why we made the choices we did. Something about that made me pause. I realized I’d been carrying assumptions I didn’t even know I had, and I don’t think I was the only one in the room feeling that way.

Outside the workshops, friendships started happening. We were meeting for lunch, kaffee und kuchen, just spending time together beyond the program.

When the final day came, it didn’t feel like six months had passed. Some of us wore our native attires, and we brought or made food from our home countries. The room was full of energy, everyone laughing and taking photos and trying to hold onto the moment a little longer. Suaad called each person up to receive a certificate, a rose, a postcard, and an EmpowerHer cup. I stood beside her, handing them out, watching each woman’s face as she got hers. The trainers got theirs too. My children were there with me, dancing and making friends with everyone. There was an art gallery set up in the corner where we’d all displayed something we’d created over the months. My piece was there too, “Rooted in Traditions,” sitting next to everyone else’s work. At some point we wrapped gifts together for charity. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, we surprised Maria with a birthday celebration. She’s my fellow Sagittarius, and she couldn’t stop smiling and laughing. It felt like the perfect way to end.

Leaving that day, I felt proud of Suaad. She’d taken an idea and built something real out of it. She wants to keep doing this, and knowing her, she will.

I showed up to that first session thinking I’d meet some people, maybe help out where I could. I’m leaving with friends from countries I’ve never been to and a different understanding of what it means to belong somewhere without erasing where you came from. EmpowerHer gave me a room full of women who were figuring out the same complicated things I was. And maybe that’s all any of us needed.

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Start With a Friend

Efemena — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 01:26:17 +0000

“Mum, I needed that.”

My youngest said this to me in the car, and I wasn’t expecting it. I’d just picked her and her sister up from a casual meetup with Start With a Friend (SWAF), a group that pairs migrants with locals to build actual friendships. I hadn’t gone myself that day, but I’d asked them to check it out. She’s not usually one to open up like that, so when she did, I was pleasantly surprised.

She told me they talked… Really talked. She said things she usually keeps to herself, and nobody made her feel weird about it. She didn’t have to second-guess every word or worry she’d overshared.

I’ve always believed in the power of community. Back home, I was part of mental health awareness groups for women, business collectives, even a fitness group called ShapeUp where we worked out and laughed together. It was never just about me; I wanted to be there for other women, be someone they could count on.

When I moved to Germany, I still wanted that same connection. Maybe even more than before. So I started looking for it again. I joined women’s business groups, professional circles here in Bonn, EmpowerHer. I went to a job fair once and told a coach I was trying to network and volunteer. She suggested Rotary and connected me with one of the Bonn international executives. I ended up at a clean-up day by the Rhine. That’s a whole other story, but you get the idea. I kept trying. I kept showing up, looking for people who understood what it’s like. Looking for a way to be useful again, to help people the way I used to.

Then someone at one of those gatherings mentioned Start With a Friend.

The idea is simple: bring migrants and locals together and let them actually become friends. Not through some stiff integration program, but through hanging out and getting to know each other. It reminded me of what I’ve been trying to build with Rooted Routes. A place where people can connect, share their stories, and not feel so alone.

So I signed up. And I asked my daughters to join too.

They didn’t resist, didn’t really show excitement either. Mum’s word is final anyway, at least for now. But I had a feeling it would be good for them, even if they didn’t know it yet.

The first official SWAF meeting happened just over a week before the casual meetup. People came from everywhere: Yemen, Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Iran, Colombia, Mexico, Germany. We sat in circles, awkward at first, then people started actually talking. SWAF had this speed-dating kind of setup where you moved around every few minutes and told bits of your story to someone new. People opened up faster than I thought they would.

A week later, when my daughters went to that casual meetup and came back lighter, I understood why.

That’s why SWAF matters.

When people say it’s hard to make friends in Germany, they’re not exaggerating. Many locals already have their social circles from school or university, groups they’ve known for years. And as a migrant, you’re often on the edges. Attending things, observing, but not fully inside. You’re there, but you’re not quite part of it.

SWAF creates a bridge. It does it with kindness and respect. It says, “Let’s actually get to know each other,” and means it.

My daughter needed that. I think a lot of us do.

For anyone trying to find their place here, I hope you find something like this too. Or maybe you become that for someone else. Maybe it starts with a friend, and maybe that friend is you.

The post Start With a Friend appeared first on Rooted Routes.

The Second Week

Efemena — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 17:32:27 +0000

Amina tells me about the second week like she’s back in that moment when everything changed.

“The second week actually was when I discovered that I am alone in a country. I don’t know no one. I’m literally alone,” she says, and her voice drops when she gets to that last part. “So it was a really hard feeling at first.”

She’s 28, been in Germany for nine months now, working to get her Moroccan nursing diploma recognized so she can practice here as an anesthesia nurse. That second week nearly broke her.

I ask what the first week was like, because I need to understand how she got from there to here.

Her face changes. “Actually, it was like a holiday,” she says, and there’s almost a laugh in it, like she can’t believe how different it felt. She’d come with a friend who showed her around, helped her figure things out. “I wasn’t pressed. She helped me a lot through a lot of obstacles, struggles. So I didn’t feel it.”

Then the friend left and she was alone. “I was asking myself, is what I’m trying to do really worth it?” I know that question. Most migrants do.

Work surprised her, but not in the way she expected. Back in Morocco, she’d had enormous responsibility as an anesthesia nurse, managing patients and making critical decisions with limited resources. Here, the system is completely different.

“Here it’s really developed and you can really work correctly. I mean, everything is structured. You have everything,” she says. “I felt that the stress I used to have, like to search if I find this or this. But here is everything. You have enormous of things.”

She had less responsibility here too. “When I was in Morocco, I had really a big responsibility. When I came here, actually, it was good. I mean, there is responsibilities, but it’s not that big.”

She pauses there. I wonder if there’s something complicated about that change, about what it means to have less weight but maybe matter differently. But she doesn’t go there, and I don’t push.

She did try to figure out connection, though. At work, she was the only Moroccan, surrounded by colleagues from other countries who’d formed their own groups. The language made it harder.

“So it was a little bit hard. So I tried like my best to integrate, but it didn’t work,” she says.

For a while she thought maybe she needed to seek out other Moroccans, find people who’d understand without translation. But then she reconsidered. “I am here in Germany, so I don’t want to like to meet Moroccans or something. Like, yeah, I would love to, but back then I said, okay, let’s try another place. Maybe at work it doesn’t work.”

She went looking for connection outside of work and found a group called Start With A Friend (SWAF), where people from different backgrounds and cultures could meet. Through that, she heard about EmpowerHer. “I was really happy when I found out about it. Through this, I met a lot of beautiful women.”

When I ask what that first moment of connection felt like, something in her face opens up. “It has really a big, big change in my routine. I mean, I was really excited every other week when I have EmpowerHer. So I’m gonna meet girls, I’m gonna talk, I’m gonna be me.”

Be me. That part stays with me. At work, at the store, on the train, she’s performing, translating not just language but herself. But at EmpowerHer, she could just exist.

“I don’t have like friends here. I couldn’t integrate at work in the social way. But through this EmpowerHer, I had some,” she says, trailing off because the feeling is bigger than the words she has for it in English.

I ask what made that connection different from work.

She thinks about it. “I think maybe I’m not sure, but I think we have the same passion. It’s like we are all here to know new people, to know new culture, new things. So we had this passion. So we have the same interests. You know what I mean? So maybe that helped us to connect like easier.”

The age range mattered too, she tells me. “There is this differences in age. It’s really important and really helpful. You learn from them and at the same time they learn from you too.”

What do you miss most about home?

“Mom,” she says, almost like a question, then catches herself and laughs. “Family. That’s the thing I miss actually.”

She talks to her mom every day, her brothers, and her dad.

And then she tells me about the radio show.

Every Sunday, there’s this Moroccan radio series she listens to. Old stories about villages, about traditions, about things that happened decades ago. The kind of programs older people love and young people usually ignore. Her dad used to listen to it.

“I used to hate it. I really used to hate it. It’s for old people telling old stories about every village. It’s like really old,” she says, laughing at herself.

“Now I’m following it,” she says quietly. Then she catches herself. “It’s like, oh, is that my interest?”

There it is. I know that feeling. I used to skip Urhobo music, now it’s the first thing I play. The stuff that used to bore you becomes what keeps you tethered.

I ask if she feels like she’s changing here.

“Yeah. There’s some points that I feel there was some situations that were before so important, and now I can see that this really is nothing. There’s bigger things to think about or to care about. I was at some point thinking big, and I found that there is sometimes I was wasting my time on things that was really nothing.”

Nine months in and she’s already figuring out what actually matters.

But she wants me to understand something. It’s not just Germany that’s changing her.

“This is the thing I choose,” she says, and there’s weight in how she says it. “In my life, most things were like the second chance or the second plan. I couldn’t do what I wanted.” Coming here, doing what she’s doing now, that was her decision. Fully hers. “So it was like the beginning. I feel like this is my real beginning of my career, my life.”

That distinction matters to her. Germany offers her things Morocco couldn’t, not because one country is better, but because the opportunities are different. She gives me an example: back home, her anesthesia license was only valid for two years before she’d have to renew it. Here, once she completes the qualification process, it’s permanent. She can build something that lasts.

That distinction matters to her. Germany offers her things Morocco couldn’t, not because one country is better, but because the opportunities are different. She gives me an example: back home, her baccalaureate, the diploma you get when you finish high school, was only valid for two or three years. After that, universities and schools wouldn’t accept it anymore. You’d end up on waiting lists, hoping for luck, or having to renew it just to keep your options open. Here, once she completes the qualification process, her credentials are permanent. She can build something that lasts without that constant ticking clock.

“I believe that every struggle comes to something better,” she says.

Getting here wasn’t straightforward. The diploma recognition process, the bureaucracy, obstacles she had to work around. Not everyone back home was helpful when they suspected she was planning to leave.

When I ask what she’d tell someone arriving now, someone in their first or second week, she doesn’t hesitate.

“First of all, you should not expect a lot of things. A lot of people have this idea that when they come abroad or in Germany that they will find money flying around. No. It’s actually a country where you should work, and you need to work hard.”

Then her voice gets more urgent. “The real enemy here is to stay at home. That would be more terrible. You need to use your time. Go out. Discover places. Know people. Work. Do something.”

Nine months in, and that’s what she’s doing. Going out, meeting people, working, trying to make it worth it.

*Name has been changed to protect privacy.

The post The Second Week appeared first on Rooted Routes.

She Had No Way Back. So She Built Something Forward

Efemena — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 18:26:05 +0000

Before Suaad made phone calls in Germany, she’d open Google Translate and literally write down the entire conversation like a script: what she needed to say, what they might ask, how she’d respond.

That’s what survival looked like a few years in. But it wasn’t why she came.

She arrived in 2012 to study. She’d picked a master’s program in public policy, specializing in conflict management, because she wanted to understand something that kept bothering her: Why do politicians cling to power when everything’s falling apart? The Arab Spring had just happened in 2011, and the decisions being made back home didn’t make sense to her. She thought studying conflict would help.

It didn’t, not really. “Each conflict is very unique,” she says now. “To try to solve the conflict in itself, it takes a lot of resources. A lot of effort. A lot of willingness.” The degree didn’t exactly give her answers, but it gave her time to learn German, to figure out how the professional world worked here, to learn how to exist in a place that wasn’t exactly home.

But while she was here, everything changed. The conflict in Yemen escalated. The airport closed.

“My country is in conflict. The airport was closed. There is no way back so I have to make it here,” Suaad says. “I was alone here. I didn’t have anybody to go back to for support.”

Back in Yemen, Suaad questioned things. If she didn’t like something, she pushed back, tried to change it. But in Germany, everything shifted. “It’s a different mindset, because here I need to survive,” she says. “So I did not even reach a point where I said, now I need to challenge or try to make a big change.” She had to focus on the basics first: learning the language, finding work, getting by day to day. Self-actualization could wait, survival came first.

To survive, she made herself smaller, quieter, more careful. She went from someone who spoke her mind to someone who rehearsed conversations, from pushing limits to just trying to fit in. She wasn’t herself anymore, but she didn’t have the luxury to think about that. She had to make it work.

For eight years, she worked as a project manager in migration protection, coordinating between teams and donors and partners, sitting in endless meetings. She was good at it and moved up, eventually becoming head of operations. But somewhere along the way, she realized something was missing. All those meetings, all that coordination, but she wasn’t connecting in the way she wanted to.

She wanted something different. “I wanted to broaden my horizon, have a different challenge,” she says. “I wanted to start something where I can feel like I can contribute, I can make an impact myself. I wanted to be creative and push myself out of my comfort zone.”

In early 2024, Suaad left her job. She moved to Bonn and joined a peace fellowship, a one-year program where participants had to create a practical project. She picked social cohesion, what it means to build peace in a community, and as a migrant herself, she knew where to start.

“I know how difficult it is to be in a place where you don’t speak the language and you don’t have the right social contact,” she says. “I wanted to support other women who have been through this.”

That’s how EmpowerHer started. A social initiative for migrant women and locals alike, a space to connect, to learn, to stop feeling so alone. But more than that, it was Suaad’s way back to herself. Back to the direct contact, the creativity, the impact she’d been craving.

It wasn’t as simple as it sounds. She had a lot of fears: Would women actually show up? Would she get funding? Could she pull it off the way she imagined? The timeline kept shrinking, and she was racing against limited resources, trying to build something real out of uncertainty. But she also had something she hadn’t felt in years: a sense of purpose that wasn’t just about surviving.

The workshops started and women came, but at first, it was hard to tell if it was working. Then one day, Suaad noticed something she’d been hoping for but wasn’t sure would actually happen. Women started arriving early just to talk to each other before the sessions began. They exchanged numbers and met outside the workshops. And when they walked in, they hugged.

“That’s what warms my heart,” Suaad says. She wanted them to know they weren’t alone. “I wanted them to have a space where they can connect, exchange, talk, learn. That was really the essence.”

She was giving them what she’d been missing all these years. Connection, belonging, the feeling that someone actually understood. And in giving it to them, she found it for herself.

The project rebuilt her in ways she didn’t anticipate. “It brought my confidence back,” she says. “Before, I doubted if I can make it. But now I feel like if I set up my mind, and if it is something that I really desire, I’m able to achieve it.”

Running EmpowerHer forced her back out into the world, and she became a social butterfly in the process. She went to every event she could find, networked relentlessly, talked to anyone who would listen. She learned to trust people again, to ask for help without feeling like she was failing.

“Thank God, I found lovely people around me who supported me, and who believed in the idea from day one,” she says. “They kept pushing, and they kept helping. They were telling me it’s good enough to go ahead with it.”

“There is a lot of opportunities here in Germany, if you reach out,” she says. Not everyone will help, but enough people will try that it’s worth putting yourself out there.

The experience taught her more than just networking skills. She also learned to let go, to stop expecting things to go exactly according to plan, to be okay when three or four people showed up instead of a full room. The perfectionism that came from years of trying to prove herself, trying to survive, trying to be good enough? She started releasing it. “I’m adjusting, learning, adapting,” she says.

It’s been more than a decade since Suaad first arrived in Germany. She’s worked through language barriers, unemployment, citizenship, and career changes. She’s gone from questioning everything to becoming quieter to finding something in between, from survival mode to actually creating something, from scripting phone calls in Google Translate to building a community where women don’t have to feel as alone as she once did.

When I ask what she’s taken from all of it, she stops for a moment.

“Trust,” she says. “I believe in a higher power. I believe in God. And I believe that I can overcome, if I could just trust and if you have the right community, the right people around you, the right support. Ask them. And even if it’s tough, you will make it. You will make it. Just keep going. Keep going. There’s no other way. Don’t walk back. Just keep going, day by day.”

This round of EmpowerHer is over, but it’s not the end. Suaad’s planning to bring it back next year. She spent years wishing someone had been there for her when she needed it. Now she’s become that person for others. And she’s not stopping.

The post She Had No Way Back. So She Built Something Forward appeared first on Rooted Routes.

The Red Pill

Efemena — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 20:22:49 +0000

My daughter asked me today if I regret leaving Nigeria.

Not in those exact words. She didn’t come out and ask directly. Instead, she started talking about a friend who just moved to the UK, how everyone back home thinks this friend’s life is sorted now. Then she looked at me and said, “But it’s not really like that, is it?”

Oh, I knew that look. I’ve worn it myself.

When I was younger, I used to sit around arguing about how Nigeria could be fixed in one clean sweep if only the leaders were different. More empathetic, less corrupt and actually willing to solve problems. In my head, nothing was complicated. Bad leadership creates bad countries, good leadership creates good countries, simple as that.

I really believed that. I believed most problems came from people refusing to just do the right thing.

Then I moved, and everything I thought I understood started to look different.

My dad used to watch The Matrix like it was a documentary. I never understood why until years later, finally getting what he saw in that film. The red pill. Once you take it, you can’t go back. You start seeing things you didn’t notice before, asking questions you never thought to ask.

Migration took me from one country to another, sure. But what it really did was open my eyes to how everything actually works. Geopolitics, systems, power, history… all the stuff that shapes why some places look ‘perfect’, and others struggle.

I remember the first time I heard Germans complaining about their own government. Really complaining, the way we do back home. I was confused. Wait, this is Germany. This is supposed to be the place where everything works. But there they were, frustrated about bureaucracy, about systems that don’t make sense, about politicians who promise things and don’t deliver.

I saw people falling through gaps here too. Different gaps, but gaps nonetheless. A woman at the Ausländerbehörde trying to get her paperwork sorted for months, caught in a loop of appointments that led nowhere. I’ve heard stories of professionals who couldn’t get their credentials recognized despite years of experience. Not because of corruption, but because of rules, because of how the system is structured, because sometimes bureaucracy is just bureaucracy.

So Germany wasn’t the perfect system I’d imagined. That was the first crack in my thinking.

But the bigger crack came when I started asking different questions. Not just “why doesn’t this work perfectly here too?” but “why does it work here at all? And why doesn’t it work back home?”

That’s when I began to see the connections I’d missed before.

I used to think Nigeria’s problems were just about corrupt leaders making bad choices. Now I understand how much harder it is to govern when external forces are pulling strings, when your economy is structured to serve someone else’s needs, when the global system was never designed for you to succeed on your own terms.

I started noticing things I’d never paid attention to. Which countries hold the debt? Who controls the resources? Whose companies profit from the instability? I saw how aid comes with conditions that serve the giver more than the receiver, how some problems are allowed to persist because they benefit someone somewhere else.

My grandmother used to say the frog in the well thinks the sky is only as big as the circle above its head. I truly thought if Nigerian leaders just acted right, everything would fall into place. I didn’t see how the well itself was built, or who controlled the water.

The red pill showed me that the world isn’t divided into “good countries” and “bad countries.” It’s more like a system where some places are set up to win and others are set up to lose, and that setup didn’t happen by accident. Stability has a price, and often someone else is paying it. Resources flow in one direction, opportunities flow in another. And none of it is random.

This doesn’t mean people in wealthy countries are bad, or that individuals are sitting around plotting to keep places like Nigeria struggling. Most people are just living their lives, unaware of how their comfort connects to someone else’s struggle. That’s what the red pill does – it shows you the structures underneath. The ones most people never have to see.

I’ve stopped thinking in straight lines, stopped believing in simple answers. Now I ask why things work in one place but not another, and I’m realizing the answers are never what I thought they’d be. Why do some countries have resources but remain poor while others control those resources and thrive? Why are some problems allowed to continue because they serve someone else’s interest?

Part of me misses the innocence. Life was easier when I could point at a problem and say, “This is it. Fix this and everything will be fine.” I sounded so sure of myself back then. So confident. But I didn’t know anything.

Now I know better, and knowing better is both clarifying and heavy. Once you see how the system works, you can’t unsee it or go back to thinking everything is simple, or blame just one set of leaders when you understand the forces they’re up against, the compromises they have to make, the interests they’re dealing with. Yes, corruption exists, and some leaders are genuinely terrible. But blaming only them misses how the whole game is structured.

I told my daughter this today. Not all of it; she’s still young, and some of this takes time to process. But I told her enough. I told her that leaving doesn’t mean escaping, that there’s no perfect country waiting at the end of the journey, that the world is more complicated than anyone wants to admit. I told her that understanding how things really work doesn’t make it easier; it just makes it clearer, and sometimes clearer is harder.

She was quiet for a while. Then she said something about how her friend is probably figuring that out right now too.

I think she’s taking the red pill herself. Halfway through our conversation, I could see it in her face. That realization that the world doesn’t work the way she thought it did. She’s a young adult in her 20s, and the easy answers aren’t enough anymore.

I don’t know if that’s a gift or a burden yet, maybe both.

What I do know is this: once you see the world for what it actually is, you stop waiting for someone else to fix it. You stop holding onto fantasies about perfect systems or perfect countries. You understand that change is harder than you thought, more complicated than you imagined, and tied to forces bigger than any one person or country.

But you also focus on what you can actually do. How you treat people. How you show up. How you challenge your own assumptions. How you engage with the systems you’re part of, knowing now what they’re built on.

My dad loved The Matrix because Neo had to make a choice. Stay comfortable in the lie or face the uncomfortable truth. Most of us don’t get to choose though. Migration chooses for you. It hands you the red pill whether you want it or not, and once you swallow it, there’s no going back.

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