Home Is a Place I’ve Never Been

The second-generation diaspora guide to loving a country through Google Earth and your grandmother’s stories

There’s a special kind of existential comedy in being homesick for a place you’ve never been. It’s like having phantom limb syndrome—except the missing limb is an entire continent, and instead of seeking medical attention, you follow more African TikTok accounts and convince yourself that counts as cultural connection.

I am a citizen of nowhere and everywhere, the holder of passports that unlock countries that don’t quite claim me. My emotional citizenship lies in places that live more vividly in my imagination than in any visa stamp. Welcome to the second-generation diaspora experience, where the question “Where are you from?” feels less like small talk and more like a graduate-level philosophy course.

The Geography of Inherited Longing

My relationship with “home” exists entirely through intermediaries: my parents’ stories, Google Earth, and an embarrassing number of YouTube videos titled “Walking Through [Insert African City] in 4K.” I can describe the architecture of neighborhoods I’ve never walked through, and confidently recommend restaurants I’ve never eaten at, based solely on vlogs and a relentless cultural hunger.

This is the math of inherited identity: I know more about the political tensions in my parents’ homeland than my peers know about their own city councils, yet I panic when a customs officer asks, “What’s your connection to this country?” I’m a foreign policy analyst with no field experience, a cultural ambassador who’s never been to the embassy.

The Accent Archaeology

Nowhere is the absurdity of my in-between existence more obvious than in my language. I understand my grandmother when she calls, but I respond in English—punctuated by half-remembered phrases that make me sound like a tourist who bought a phrasebook but never opened it.

My parents speak to me in English, but revert to their native tongue when angry. The result? I’m fluent in African disappointment, conversational in guilt, and utterly useless when it comes to ordering food without pointing at pictures. My accent shifts depending on geography, but never fully belongs anywhere. It’s not an identity—it’s an archaeological site.

The Inherited Trauma Travel Agency

Growing up, “home” was painted as both a paradise lost and a war zone survived. My parents’ stories came with beautiful landscapes and buried trauma. One minute, it’s lush fields and mango trees. The next, it’s military checkpoints and the sound of doors being kicked in.

This duality gifted me with a case of emotional whiplash: deeply proud of where I’m “from,” and quietly grateful I’ve never actually had to live through it. I call it inherited nostalgia—a longing for a pre-conflict, pre-exile version of home that may never have existed. It lives in the gaps between what was, what is, and what might’ve been.

The Cultural Consumption Guilt

In an effort to feel closer, I’ve become an obsessive consumer of my own culture. I buy books by African authors like I’m personally funding the literary revival of the continent. I binge Nollywood movies like it’s academic research. I attend cultural festivals armed with enthusiasm and awkwardness, nodding too hard during elders’ speeches and asking questions that confirm I’m not really from here.

I am, in short, a well-meaning tourist in my own cultural inheritance. I’m here with good intentions, but no road map.

The DNA Test Dilemma

Genetic testing has only deepened the existential spiral. I know my exact ethnic breakdown to the decimal point—but I still couldn’t locate my ancestral village on a map without a GPS, three aunties, and divine intervention.

Science says I’m 67% West African, but lived experience says I’m 100% confused. My DNA is authentic, but my cultural fluency is… improvisational. Which makes me feel like the star of a very niche academic study or a soul-searching indie film that ends with me staring wistfully at a sunset I’ve never seen in real life.

The Social Media Archaeology

Instagram has become my cultural telescope. I follow African photographers like I’m curating a virtual homeland. I double-tap sun-drenched villages, urban street style, and food I’ve only tasted through my mother’s Western-adapted recipes.

I’m patriotic in the comment section. I’m emotionally present in hashtags. I express belonging through likes, retweets, and curated playlists. It’s vicarious citizenship—and while it might be shallow, it’s also survival.

The Reverse Culture Shock Readiness

Here’s the great irony: I’m probably more prepared for culture shock in my parents’ homeland than they were for the West. I’ve researched it like it’s a final exam. I know which slang to avoid, which rideshare app to download, which gestures get you labeled “foreign.”

Still, no amount of prep can compensate for the gut-punch of being both insider and outsider. When I finally do visit, I’ll be armed with logistics but lacking lineage. Fluent in maps, but not in memory.

The Belonging Equation

Over time, I’ve learned that belonging for people like me doesn’t rely on GPS coordinates. It lives in the small, defiant acts of cultural continuity: the recipes recreated in foreign kitchens, the names we refuse to anglicize, the prayers spoken in dying dialects over long-distance calls.

My identity isn’t stitched to a flag—it’s built from fragments: my father’s voice when he watches the news, my grandmother’s herbal wisdom passed down with reverence, my own stubborn refusal to forget where we came from, even if I’ve never been.

The Future Nostalgia

The strangest thing about homesickness for a place I’ve never been is that I’m also nostalgic for a future that hasn’t happened yet. I dream of visiting a homeland I’ve only imagined—of family reunions with people who know me by name but not by face, of walking through streets that have lived in my imagination longer than they’ve existed in reality.

I’m saving up for a version of home that might not recognize me—but that still feels like a missing piece waiting to be found.

The Plot Twist

And here’s the twist: maybe the fact that I’ve never been “home” is exactly what keeps the idea of home alive. Maybe longing is its own form of belonging. Maybe the ache is proof that connection exists—even if it’s still searching for a physical form.

I carry home in my grandmother’s lullabies, in my mother’s jollof that never quite tastes like hers did back home, in the way I pronounce certain words that don’t belong in any one country but belong to me.

Home is not a destination. It’s a memory, a future, a pull. It’s not something you earn—it’s something you inherit. And you get to decide what to do with it.

The Love Letter to Liminality

So here’s a love letter to all of us who live in the hyphen. We are not lost—we are locationally creative. Not displaced—just multiply placed.

We love countries through secondhand stories and WhatsApp calls. We carry passports and parables. We are patriotic about places we’ve never pledged allegiance to. We are the walking proof that home is more of a verb than a noun.

And maybe, just maybe, the most beautiful part of never having been “home” is that it remains perfect—uncorrupted by disappointment, still shimmering in possibility.

So until we get there—if we get there—we’ll keep loving from afar. We’ll watch the vlogs, plan the trip, add another Afrobeat playlist to our Spotify libraries. The algorithm might be confused, but our hearts know exactly where they’re headed.