By Latifah Ajetunmobi
This Monday, 25 May 2026, the world marks Africa Day—63 years since our founding fathers signed the Organisation of African Unity into existence in Addis Ababa in 1963. Sixty-three years of unity, integration, and development. Sixty-three years of a continent still rising, still healing, still teaching the world what resilience looks like.
It is also the first Africa Day since the United Nations General Assembly finally—finally—voted on 25 March 2026 to declare the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement the “gravest crime against humanity.” One hundred and twenty-three nations said yes. Three said no. Fifty-two looked away and abstained. Whatever the abstainers chose to do, history has now been put on record. The truth has a number, a date, and a resolution code (A/RES/80/250). For every African and every person of African descent, that matters.
But Africa Day for me is not only about looking back at what was done to us. It is about looking around at what is being done to our families right now — and what we are doing to ourselves.
The migration wave and the family ties hanging by a thread
Since COVID-19 swept through in 2020, the migration wave from Africa has surged. JAPA — the Yoruba word our young people have made a movement out of, meaning to escape, to flee — has become a verb, a plan, a prayer. Families are scattered across continents. Many relationships rest on a fragile balance. Some have been severed completely.
And so often, when I sit with families as a Parent & Teen Coach, the root cause is not distance. It is communication and how we have treated each other.
Children grow up watching uncles and aunts tongue-lash Mum or Dad at family gatherings. They hear the side comments, the comparisons, and the public shame. So when opportunity beckons, JAPA serves its purpose—sometimes from the country, but sometimes from the family itself.
When escape is the right answer
Let me be clear: if there is toxicity in your family and your mental health or your safety is on the line, please go. Boundaries are not betrayal. Distance is not disrespect. You can love difficult aunts and uncles from a distance, and you can refuse to let your children inherit the wounds you survived. Not all family members are toxic, but you owe it to yourself and your children to know the difference.
What I am pleading against is total disconnection from your roots.
Don’t drop your culture at Murtala Muhammed Airport
Wherever you go, carry the Africanness in you—the food, the language, the values, the clothing. Do not drop your culture at Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos, at Jomo Kenyatta in Nairobi, at Robert Mugabe International in Harare, or at any of the airports our young people are leaving through every single day. And please — please — do not let it die with you. Teach your children.
I know it is tough in the diaspora. You are working two jobs, fighting school systems, and navigating winters your bones were not built for. But this is the work. This is the assignment.
The boy who was told to “go back to Africa”
I watched a video recently that broke me. A little boy was crying when his mum came to pick him up from school. He told her his classmates had said, “Go back to Africa where you came from.” And then he said the words that should sit heavy on every parent in the diaspora:
“But Mum, I was born here. I don’t know any other country.”
And then they called him a monkey.
Mother and son wept together.
Identity crisis has devastating and long-term effects on a child’s overall well-being. The children we feel most sorry for are the ones born in the diaspora or taken there at a very young age—and the greatest gift you can give them is teaching them their culture. When the world tells them they don’t belong here, they need to know exactly where they come from and why that heritage is something to be proud of.
It is striking, isn’t it? Today’s children are interconnected through the internet, yet disconnected from their roots.
Connect them to the kings, queens, and warriors
At the appropriate age and time, let them join the right groups online. Tell them the stories that built us. Tell them about:
- The Great Kingdom of Benin—its bronzes, its walls, its sophistication that European visitors marvelled at long before colonization.
- Ogedengbe of Ilesa — the fearless Yoruba warrior whose name still rings in our history.
- Queen Amina of Zazzau (Zaria) — fierce, fearless, a 16th-century warrior queen who expanded her kingdom and built walls that still stand.
Let them participate in cultural events. Teach them how to cook your local dishes. Teach them to speak your language—even if it’s badly at first, even if they mix it with English. Every word they keep is a thread back home.
Use technology to your advantage
Schedule video calls every weekend or fortnight with grannies, aunts, uncles, and cousins back home. Twenty minutes on FaceTime can plant something in a child that no textbook ever will. They are growing up with the same phones we worry about — let those phones carry them toward family, not only away from it.
Boundaries firm, identity firmer
Yes, family ties are precious. But so is protecting your children. Build strong and firm boundaries — and inside those boundaries, celebrate them loudly. When they do something that makes you proud, let them know it. Remind them that whatever they do, good or bad, they are representing their family and their nation.
And tell them this clearly: do not place all your hope in dual citizenship. As we are seeing with the #StopMigration protests and the “go back to your country” chants getting louder in Western capitals, a passport is paper. Identity is bone. One can be revoked. The other cannot.
I am a proud African woman
I am a proud African woman. A super proud Nigerian.
9JA no dey carry last. 9JA no dey gree for anybody.
Tell your children — wherever in the world they are reading this from — never to lose sight of that.
Happy Africa Day. 🌍
Latifah Ajetunmobi is a certified Parent & Teen Coach, registered nurse, midwife and mental health nurse, and the author of The Phone-Free Teenager and Beyond the Goat Pen: An African Woman’s Journey. She works with families on the Communication Cascade Model™ — Connect, Understand, Thrive.