Migration and the African Brain Drain

Adedayo Agarau reviews Ajibola Tolase’s poetry collection “2000 Blacks.”

By Adedayo AgarauOctober 30, 2024

• Poetry

• Cultural Studies

SINCE THE INCEPTION of colonial and imperial influences on its empires, the idea of Africa has been defined and redefined by strangers through the lens of slavery, migration, fugitivity, and escape. In Decolonising the Mind (1986), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o invites us to reclaim African languages and storytelling traditions, redefining African identity beyond colonial impositions. V. Y. Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa (1988) further interrogates Western constructions and misrepresentations of Africa, advocating for a deconstruction of external perceptions. Achille Mbembe, in On the Postcolony (2001), illuminates the complexities of postcolonial African societies, emphasizing their dynamic and multifaceted nature. Ajibola Tolase’s new collection 2000 Blacks brings a new cloud over the landscape of this long-throttled discourse—a meditation on the spaces where Black identity is constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed, often under conditions of displacement and violence.

My first encounter with Ajibola Tolase’s poetry was at Artmosphere, a vibrant literary hub in Ibadan, Nigeria, that has since dissolved following the diverging paths of its conveners, Femi Morgan and Servio Gbadamosi. On that particular evening, the air was thick with anticipation for Tade Ipadeola, the headlining poet. Dami Ajayi had just concluded his reading, leaving the audience in a contemplative lull. At this moment, Tolase took the stage, his presence unassuming yet magnetic. Despite being in the early stages of his poetic journey, Tolase’s words resonated with a boldness and careful craftsmanship that set him apart. His verses, raw and unfiltered, stood in stark contrast to the conventions I was pursuing as a new writer who had just found poetry. His delivery had an undeniable authenticity. Tolase was a strong member of the Ibadan literary community, having lived and formed in Ibadan, forging meaningful relationships with Samson Kukogho, Servio Gbadamosi, Gbenga Adesina, Adeeko Ibukun, and Olumide Bisiriyu among who pioneered the first installment of the rejuvenation of poetry and language across Nigeria.

Tolase’s 2000 Blacks scrabbles around the African experience, both on the continent and in the diaspora, documenting life through the lenses of migration, memory, and identity, with a particular focus on Ibadan. By knotting historical and contemporary narratives of Black existence, Tolase crafts a narrative that resonates on both personal and political levels, conjuring the spectral presence of the transatlantic slave trade and wrestling with modern phenomena such as the African brain drain, the most significant discussion about African postcolonial migration, usually defined as the emigration of skilled Africans from Africa to “more prosperous” landscapes in search of a “better life.” As a fellow poet hailing from Ibadan, I find an uncanny reflection of my own life in Tolase’s verses; we both share a birthplace and a childhood marred by floods, kidnappings, and ritual killings, an adolescence haunted by the wraith of police brutality, and a parallel journey across the Atlantic in pursuit of our literary aspirations in the United States.

The book’s title is a nod to Fela Kuti’s collaboration with Roy Ayers, “2000 Blacks Got to Be Free,” immediately situating the work within a lineage of African musical and political resistance. Kuti’s legacy leads and permeates the collection, most notably in the poem “Kalakuta Show,” which takes its name from one of Fela’s albums:

The spark from the cannister,
a false light of dawn,
woke me. I moved through smoke
like a ghost moves through cloud
to a heaven with no angels.

The poem echoes themes from Kuti’s 1977 song “Zombie,” performed with his band Afrika 70, which criticizes the Nigerian military. Similarly, the poem addresses more recent incidents involving the Nigerian military, including the 2018 confrontation with Shiites in Zuba, Abuja, as well as the 2020 #EndSARS protests. During the latter, soldiers opened fire on young Nigerians singing the national anthem at the Lekki toll gate, where protestors had gathered to demonstrate against police brutality.

To fully understand Tolase’s work, it is essential to frame it within the broader context of migration theory. One foundational perspective is Everett Lee’s concept of “push and pull” factors from his 1966 paper “A Theory of Migration.” Lee posits that migration is influenced by a combination of factors that either push individuals away from their home countries—such as political instability, lack of economic opportunity, and social upheaval—or pull them toward destination countries with better economic prospects and perceived political stability.

Tolase’s poetry reflects these dynamics, with a profound awareness of complexities beyond mere economic incentives. In the poem “Refuge Sonnets,” he writes:

I step into the new world and people stare at me. They want
to ask how I arrived here, and if it’s true I brought desert sand
with me, but they are afraid I don’t speak clearly or they are afraid
I’ll ask the same of them.

Here, the push factors include a deep-seated sense of alienation and historical displacement. At the same time, the harsh realities of racial prejudice and cultural dissonance in the West undercut the pull factors. The poet’s identity is suspended between two worlds, neither fully acknowledging nor accommodating his presence. This tension is emblematic of what Homi K. Bhabha describes as the “third space” in The Location of Culture (1994), a space of hybridity where identity is negotiated but never fully resolved. In his opening poem, “Transatlantic,” an abecedarian, Tolase catalogs the fragmentation of Black identity. The line “A is for Atlantic, Africa, of course, Ancestor, America, too” collocates continents and identities, suggesting history marked by the violent disruptions of the transatlantic slave trade. The poem functions as an alphabet of erasure and reclamation, where each letter represents a fragment of a fractured identity struggling to reassemble itself. While the form excels at describing the tension between home and home, it lands the poem in a larger discourse about the poetics of fragmentation, which sometimes overtures Tanure Ojaide’s poetry, resonating with Paul Gilroy’s concept of the “Black Atlantic,” which challenges the notion of a singular, coherent African identity. Gilroy argues that Black identity is forged in the crucible of the transatlantic movement, encompassing both the historical experience of slavery and ongoing exchanges between Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Tolase’s “Transatlantic” echoes this sentiment: “I struggle to shut my mouth full of wounds. I relinquish the / Task of teaching people to say my name right and inquiries about / University education in Africa.”

“My mouth full of wounds” signals the body’s ability to stash a generation full of history of unspeakable traumas haunting descendants of the enslaved and contemporary migrants alike. Here, Tolase is a descendant of a beginning (of slavery and fugitives) and, at the same time, a participating body existing within the realities of this new world where these historical injustices continue to shape the lives of Black people across the diaspora. Even Saidiya Hartman, discussing “the afterlife of slavery” in Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007), argues that the legacy of slavery persists through systemic racism, economic disenfranchisement, and social exclusion, which Tolase explores in several of the poems from “Transatlantic” to “As You Already Know.” In the latter poem, the speaker confronts such exclusion when subjected to the scrutiny of US Customs and Border Protection:

The poem could take off
with the talker on
the plane asking
what my business is
in the U.S. Or
the immigration
officer who asked
for an address.

In a recent interview, Kemi Badenoch, a British politician born to Yoruba parents, said, “We need to make sure we are thinking about the next generation, not just who’s going to wipe bottoms for us today.” With the way the politician wields authority and policy, you would think Badenoch, whose name also includes Olufunto Adegoke, is thoroughly British. She spent the majority of her childhood, however, in Isale Eko, Lagos. This example further clarifies Tolase’s point that conversation on the power of ownership is often wielded, too, by people of similar color. Considering the immigrant life, in “Refuge Sonnets,” Tolase writes:

He sends dollars home since the exchange rate is good. His father,
an unpaid professor in a West African country calls him a horse
which would have been funny if he doesn’t work too hard.
He has worked since his first job at the convenience store
at seven. Now, you might have seen him in your neighborhood,
curb mining on weeknights.

This portrayal of an overworked, underappreciated migrant demonstrates W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness,” an idea he introduced in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) as a sense of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” This psychological duality arises from the experience of being both Black and American (or, in Tolase’s case, African and a resident of the West), two identities often perceived as incompatible by the dominant culture. Tolase extends this idea, exploring how the African migrant’s consciousness is complicated by the conflicting expectations of success in a structurally hostile society and maintaining ties to a home country that views their departure as both betrayal and necessity. Masimba Musodza’s short story “Black Tax” discusses this notion in tandem with Tolase’s tenets about African life abroad and the expectations from home. Tolase often takes up the role of a critic in 2000 Blacks, like Fela Kuti. In another poem, he critiques Western economies’ systemic exploitation of African labor and intellect. In “Commutative Properties of Black Bodies,” he writes:

Textbooks define a blackbody

as an idealized physical body
that absorbs all incident radiations.

Black bodies are blackbodies.

By equating Black bodies with the scientific concept of a blackbody—absorbing all radiation and emitting none—Tolase indicts the Western academy’s objectification and exploitation of Black intellectual and physical labor. The brain drain becomes a continuation of colonial patterns of extraction and exploitation, and this starkly reminds us of Achille Mbembe’s concept of “necropolitics,” by which living beings are transformed into “material.” The migrant, like the colonized subject, is rendered a resource to be utilized rather than a human being with agency and aspirations.

The poems are intent on making their impact on chaos—bold, even in their narrative, which positions Tolase as both brilliant and conventional. His poetics shift focus from the heavy metaphors already associated with African poets into language that is close to Ibadan, imaginable, tender, and easy to chew. Several poems in this collection follow music or are followed by music, interweaving the bluster of urban life, the rhythmic cadences of African languages, and the haunting echoes of historical trauma. The verses pulse with the syncopated rhythms of Nigerian Pidgin in poems like “Brotherman,” where lines such as “this life no balance. Person wey chop / say na god. Hungryman no got fit stop / to complain” capture the staccato flow and tonal inflections of street speech while also alluding to the pop-cultural language of suffering since Pidgin has been regarded as the common man’s language. The poet’s deft use of alliteration and assonance creates a melodic undercurrent throughout the work, as seen in “Transatlantic,” where “A is for Atlantic, Africa, of course, Ancestor, America, too” rolls off the tongue with a lyrical ease that belies its weighty subject matter. In “Kalakuta Show,” the percussive quality of Tolase’s language mimics the “rhythm made by their feet,” evoking the violent raid on Fela Kuti’s compound with visceral immediacy. The collection’s soundscape extends beyond human voices to encompass environmental noises: the hiss of rain in “Midwest in the Spring,” the muffled explosions in “Justice,” and the eerie silence in “4’33”” that paradoxically amplifies the ambient sounds of mortal life. Through this auditory richness, Tolase creates a multisensory experience that not only speaks to the ear but also resonates deeply within the body, making the reader feel the vibrations of diaspora, displacement, and resilience that animate the collection.

Perhaps Tolase’s most profound stylistic choice in 2000 Blacks is his deliberate misalignment of form, which creates the logic of tension between the migrant and the road and of the dissonance of the diasporic experience. The collection’s formal diversity operates as a map of cultural collision and synthesis: in “Victoria Island, Lagos,” for example, Tolase employs a fragmented structure with asterisks separating vignettes, mirroring the pulses of urban Nigerian life. Tolase’s “White Girls Guide to Dating Black Boys” takes the form of an instructional list, its seemingly lighthearted structure belying the sharp critique of racial fetishization. In “Nomad,” he experiments with the acrostic format of the abecedarian, each line beginning with successive letters of the alphabet. The sonnet “Lampedusa Disaster” subverts the form’s traditional associations with love, instead using its strict structure to contain the chaos of tragedy. Through “Kalakuta Show,” Tolase demonstrates how free verse can capture the frenetic energy of political resistance. This interplay of diverse forms—from traditional to experimental, Western to African—arrives after subversion, flexibility, and the liberty to write into and out of form.

Several writers have argued that Nigerian poetry needs to be more Nigerian. For instance, Oris Aigbokhaevbolo, a Nigerian critic and blogger, announces the “death of Nigerian literature,” linking its decline to MFA programs, emigration, and brain drain. However, 2000 Blacks puts that argument to rest. It directly addresses Aigbokhaevbolo’s imprecise argument on the state of poetry in Nigeria in the year that several Nigerian poets, including Gbenga Adesina, Kanyinsola Olorunnisola, Salawu Olajide, and Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto, have announced their debut collections. Tolase’s 2000 Blacks tenderly observes the folios of small lives, the political nest the country finds itself in, the reasons young people emigrate, and their experiences in their newfound countries. Tolase documents disdain in its rawest form. In “Break Out,” he writes, “My sister was the first to hate / our father who lied to us / before he left. Hating him / was a tough job she couldn’t get / away from.” The precipitation of hatred heavily influences the verses across this collection. This hatred is also in conversation with the act of defiance constituting the history of Kuti’s life. In this spirit of protest, Tolase also invokes one of the most traumatic stories of jungle justice in modern Nigeria, the Aluu Four—victims of mob violence in Nigeria. Ugonna Obuzor, Lloyd Toku Mike, Chiadika Biringa, and Tekena Elkanah were accused of theft and lynched in cold blood. Tolase’s poetry both protests and advocates.

As the reader traverses the final pages of 2000 Blacks, they find themselves irrevocably altered, bearing witness to a profound psychic rupture. The collection’s gravitas lies both in its adherence to conventional narratives of enslavement and in the nuanced renegotiation of contemporary migration, rendered with a linguistic deftness that elevates the discourse surrounding diasporic experiences. The poems add tenderness without compromising chaos, expanding the canon of migration literature, each verse a node in complex diasporic consciousness. Tolase’s collection operates on multiple cognitive and emotional levels and demands from the reader both empathy and a fundamentally revised understanding of migration, identity, and the lingering effects of historical trauma.