Stop Calling Us 'Diaspora'. We Live Here.

I have been called "diaspora" my whole adult life, and for most of it I wore the word with pride. It sounded expansive, connected, part of something vast — a scattered nation of Africans across the world, holding a thread back to a homeland. Lately, though, I have begun to hear it differently. And I want to say plainly what has taken me years to admit: the word can be a quiet way of telling us we belong somewhere else.

What the word was for

Diaspora comes from the Greek for scattering — a dispersal of seed. It named the condition of a people driven from a homeland and living in exile, holding memory and longing across the distance. For the generation that actually left — my parents, who boarded planes from Lagos and Accra and Nairobi with a return in their hearts — it fit. They were, precisely, scattered. Their centre of gravity was elsewhere. The word told the truth of their lives.

But I did not scatter. I was born in a London hospital. I have never lived anywhere but this island. My homeland, in the plainest geographical sense, is a wet city on the Thames. And when I am called diaspora, I feel the ground tilt slightly beneath me, because the word carries an assumption I did not consent to: that my real home is somewhere I have never lived, and that my presence here is a kind of extended visit.

To scatter, you must first have been somewhere else. I was always here. What was I scattered from?

The homeland I did not lose

Here is the tenderest part of this. I love the country my parents come from. I have spent long summers there, learned its languages imperfectly, wept at its music, felt in its markets and its churches a sense of recognition I do not always feel here. That country is a part of me and always will be.

But it is not my loss. You cannot be exiled from a place you never inhabited. When people speak of my "homeland" and mean Ghana or Nigeria, they perform a small theft: they take the country I am building a life in — with its rain and its grievances and its cornershops and its complicated love — and quietly demote it to a way-station.

My parents lost a homeland. I inherited two, and lost neither. The word diaspora, applied to me without care, cannot hold that difference. It collapses the leaver and the born-here into one condition of exile, and only one of us is actually in exile.

Who the word serves

I have come to notice who reaches for the word and when. Sometimes it is us, and then it can be beautiful — a claim of connection, a refusal to be severed from where we come from. In our mouths, it is often love.

But sometimes it is not us. Sometimes it is a form, a media caption, a politician's careful phrasing, a way of naming Black British people that avoids the more troubling admission: that we are, simply, British. Fully. Without asterisk. "Diaspora" can be a courtesy that doubles as a border. It lets the speaker acknowledge us while gently locating our true belonging offshore.

And I have watched what this does to the young. A boy in a school in Birmingham, third-generation, who has never left the West Midlands, told a workshop I ran that he was "from" a country he has visited exactly once. He said it without sorrow, as simple fact. Someone had taught him that his belonging here came with a footnote. Someone always does.

What I am asking

I am not asking us to abandon our roots or pretend the connection to the continent is not real and load-bearing. It is the opposite. I am asking that we stop letting a single word do the work of a whole complicated truth.

Call my parents diaspora; they earned the word in departure lounges and cold first winters. But when you speak of those of us born here, reach for something more honest. Black British. British-Ghanaian. Londoner. Or simply, radically: from here.

Because the deepest thing I want to say is small and stubborn and true. This is not my exile. This is my home. I did not scatter to reach it. I was born standing on it. And I am done accepting a word, however lovely, that keeps trying to send me somewhere I have never had to leave.