On 5 September 2026, I sat down to write this so that I would not forget a discussion I witnessed earlier in July. At the end, it became a reflection on my own identity.
I completely forgot about this until a discussion I had on 19 September 2026 at a party to celebrate one of our friends.
Just as I waited to be picked up from Lagos Island to travel back to Ikeja on the mainland, I had a short discussion with another old schoolmate, a very thoughtful man whom we call Prof because he carries himself like one. The subject of our discussion was identity, belonging and the rapid change going on everywhere, regardless of whether it is Nigeria, the UK, America, etc. I will not go into that discussion, but it reminded me that I had an article waiting here to be completed.
At a BBQ earlier that summer, I witnessed an interesting debate about identity between two people.
The first was a Black British woman of Nigerian heritage. If you met her, you would probably not know that she was of Nigerian heritage unless she told you. She grew up in England and visited Nigeria for the first time only much later in life. A very successful woman, but I will resist the temptation to describe her profile so that folks in our circle of friendship can have reasonable doubt about who I have in mind. đŸ˜‚
The other person was a man I was meeting for the first time, whom I guessed was Eastern European, although he refused to disclose his heritage.
The woman said that she felt rejected by England and that, as far as she was concerned, her Nigerian heritage was what really mattered. She believed that where you come from is fundamental to who you are. So she had consciously embraced her Nigerian identity.
The man disagreed. Heritage, he argued, does not matter that much, and not everything we inherit from our heritage is necessarily good. He preferred to focus on where he was now rather than where he or his ancestors had come from.
As I listened to them, Jacques Lacan’s three registers, the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real, came to mind.
Their conversation obviously involved the Symbolic: nationality, ethnicity, names, countries and the categories through which societies define us. But what fascinated me most was the work taking place in what Lacan called the Imaginary.
The Imaginary is the realm of images, identification, resemblance and the ego: the ways in which we construct a coherent picture of ourselves and of other people. Both of them, it seemed to me, had done a considerable amount of identity work in this realm.
The woman had constructed a powerful Nigerian identity for herself. She had even built a home in Nigeria. Interestingly, she said that her husband did not share her enthusiasm for the Nigerian project. What made this particularly striking was that her husband, although probably also born in Britain, had actually grown up in Nigeria.
The identity work the woman had done was deep. At one point, she said that even the name her parents had given her showed that she was destined to return to Nigeria.
I asked her what the name was. It was a beautiful Yoruba name associated with royalty, but there was nothing in the name itself that I could see as meaning that she would one day return to Nigeria.
That moment fascinated me. The Imaginary is remarkably flexible. We take memories, names, experiences, disappointments, aspirations and fragments of our histories and arrange them into a coherent story about who we are. The story need not be false. But neither is it simply sitting there waiting to be discovered. We participate in constructing it.
The man had done something very different. He refused to disclose his heritage because, as far as he was concerned, it did not matter. Rather than embracing his ancestry, he appeared to have decided that it should not determine his present identity.
He then began puncturing holes in the image of Nigeria that the woman was constructing.
If Nigeria was so wonderful, he asked, why were so many Nigerians emigrating to Britain? Why did Britain have such intense debates about immigration while Nigeria did not face anything comparable in terms of large numbers of British people desperately trying to settle there?
The woman fought back. She pointed out that she knew people who had wanted to travel to Nigeria for a wedding but had been denied visas.
I found that response surprising because it seemed to miss his larger point. Whatever Nigeria’s attractions, and there are many, the overall movement of people is overwhelmingly in the other direction. Far more Nigerians seek to settle in Britain than Britons seek to settle permanently in Nigeria.
As I listened, I realised that I had encountered versions of this argument many times before.
People often make sweeping generalisations about Nigeria, a vast and extraordinarily complex country of well over 200 million people.
At one extreme are those who describe Nigeria almost as one enormous slum in which everybody is starving and nothing works.
At the other extreme are some expatriates and Nigerians in the diaspora who have bought homes in attractive gated communities. They fly into Lagos, are driven from the airport to those communities, spend most of their time within relatively privileged environments, and then return to Britain or America describing Nigeria almost as paradise.
Neither picture adequately captures Nigeria. Those of us who travel there and interact with different parts of that complicated ecosystem encounter something much harder to compress into a simple story. There are enormous differences of class, region, wealth, opportunity, security and everyday experience. Several Nigerias exist alongside one another.
Eventually, after listening for some time, I asked whether I could contribute to the discussion. I told them that, despite appearing to be on opposite sides of the argument, I thought they had actually done something remarkably similar.
Each had taken the raw material of experience and constructed a story about what that experience meant.
The woman had experienced Britain in a way that led her to place greater significance on her Nigerian heritage. She had taken that heritage and made it central to the person she understood herself to be. Kemi Badenoch, the leader of her majesty’s opposition who grew up in Lagos and came back to England in her teen age years tell a different story.
The man had apparently reached almost the opposite conclusion. Whatever experiences he associated with his own heritage had led him to minimise its importance and emphasise instead the life and identity he had constructed in the present.
Their conclusions were different, but the underlying psychological work was similar.
Each had interpreted experience. Each had selected some things as significant and pushed others into the background. Each had constructed a coherent account of who they were and where they belonged.
This, perhaps, is one of the fascinating things about identity.
Two people can pass through very similar experiences and arrive at radically different conclusions about what those experiences should mean for the rest of their lives.
We do not merely possess identities. We also imagine, interpret, narrate and continually reconstruct them.
NB: Reflexivity
I am very much aware of my own identity work, and it is anything but straightforward. My formative years were in Nigeria. Nigeria made me. In Nigeria, I was educated. Yes, I was properly educated in Nigeria before I alighted on the shores of the UK.
In 1998, we started thinking about investing in Nigeria. Between 2004 and 2008, we made a significant investment in Nigeria. It is not just our pen that is in Nigeria, neither is it just our mouth. Our money and our hearts are there too.
Yet, as a Nigerian who has spent more than half of my life in the United Kingdom, and as a Christian who became born again in Nigeria but has lived out most of that faith abroad, I often find myself situated at the intersection of different worlds of meaning.
Lacan’s three registers, the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real, provide an interesting way of thinking about this.
At the level of the Imaginary, there are the images and identifications through which I recognise myself and through which others may recognise me, attached to identities such as Christian, Nigerian, Yoruba, British, immigrant, professional, husband and father. These identities provide a degree of coherence. They allow me to construct a picture of who I am. Yet none of them, on its own, quite captures the whole person.
Then there is the Symbolic: the languages, institutions, traditions, religious teachings, social expectations and cultural categories into which I have been inserted. I was formed within Nigerian and Yoruba cultural worlds, became a Christian in Nigeria, and then spent much of my adult life living, working and worshipping in Britain. Each of these worlds comes with its own vocabulary, assumptions and rules about what is normal, desirable, respectable or true.
This means that my identity is not simply something I possess. It is continually negotiated within overlapping symbolic systems. Nigerian cultural assumptions do not always sit comfortably with British ones. Yoruba cultural memory does not always align neatly with the forms of Christianity I have encountered. Even Christianity itself is not experienced in a cultural vacuum: the Christianity I first encountered in Nigeria and the Christianity I have experienced in British churches sometimes place different emphases on community, authority, spirituality, Scripture and the individual.
And then there is what Lacan calls the Real: that which resists being completely captured by our categories and stories. However carefully I describe myself as Nigerian, British, Yoruba or Christian, something always escapes the description. There is no final label capable of containing the whole of a human life.
Perhaps this is why identity work never really ends. We construct narratives that make our lives intelligible, but those narratives are always provisional. We inherit identities, choose identities, reject some, rediscover others and reinterpret them in the light of new experiences.
In my own case, I am neither simply the Nigerian who left Nigeria many years ago nor simply the British person shaped by decades of life in Britain. I am not merely the Christian who became born again in Nigeria, because my understanding and practice of Christianity have also been shaped by living and worshipping abroad.
I live, instead, in the nexus of several meaning systems.
And perhaps that is not a problem to be solved. It may simply be the condition of a life lived across cultures: constantly negotiating between the images through which we understand ourselves, the symbolic worlds that give those images meaning, and the Real that always resists being completely captured by the identities we construct to describe ourselves.
Some of my fellow Christians love to talk as if their Christian identity is their only identity. I am not so sure because if you pay close attention, their other identities are as visible as daylight.
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