Madiop’s metaphor of the closed door reminds me of an event in 2013 when news made the rounds about a young boy who had found his way into the wheels of an aeroplane going from Lagos to Benin. He was only a couple of years younger than me, but even then, everyone understood his plight. He had hoped for an international flight. He had hoped for the United States. More than a decade later, it’s 2025, and there’s an interview of the same boy, now in his mid-20s, being asked about his escapade 12 years prior. Unsurprisingly, he still wants to go to his dreamland, the USA. Yet, the unquenched enthusiasm of this stowaway might quickly fade away in the elsewhere if he ever reaches there just like Farouq, a Moroccan immigrant character in Teju Cole’s Open City, who also echoes this desire for a utopian elsewhere: ‘When I was doing my undergraduate degree in Rabat, I dreamed of Europe; we all did, my friends and I.’ However, Farouq, who at the moment of the conversation resided in Brussels, continues, ‘But I have been disappointed. Europe only looks free. The dream was an apparition.’ Both Madiop and Farouq inadvertently echo the Ghanaian-British artist and filmmaker, John Akomfrah’s sentiments about postcolonial migration of Africans as an investment made by the African diaspora in the utopian possibilities of elsewhere. He calls it a kind of ‘immense faith in the elsewhere, which is in many, many ways wasted on the elsewhere’.

For people who get behind the door, arriving by whatever means; boat, marriage, study, or work, it may be hard to tell if the sentiment that elsewhere may not be worth it, eventually is truly the case. For one, more people keep coming. And for many that come, they might find that life elsewhere is much preferable to life at home. A few people become successful by every conventional measure. Still, for many people who leave voluntarily to change their lives, to invest elsewhere, for greener pastures, they find that they may have bought into the overromanticized idea of the elsewhere, propelled by the media. This mirrors Madiop’s observation about the half-truths shown on television.

James Baldwin, in his essay, ‘A Question of Identity’, writes of the American Student colony in Paris. He infers that they have been seduced by the media through which lens, a quaint room becomes a world of endless possibilities. They tarry, clinging to the unrealizable, nonexistent image they have of Paris, and refuse to recognize the real Paris. Both Baldwin and Madiop speak on the ability of the camera and media to romanticize even ordinary domestic living rooms. While the West is romanticized, Africa, and particularly Africans, as Okwui Enwezor, the curator and art critic, puts it, ‘Always appear at risk, on the margins of life itself, at that intersection where one is forced to negotiate the relationship between man and animal.’

Naefia, whom I met in her Springfield, Massachusetts home, expresses the same sentiment when I asked about the portrayal of Africa compared to the portrayal of America.

The media show the vulnerable children struggling to eat. Some of the sick children or some of the sick adults. Those things that they portray break my heart. You barely get a television to watch, but when you watch one and you see that you’re like, ‘Oh my god.’

But the portrayal of America, oh, America is everything. Like, if you come here overnight, your problems are solved. That was how I took it. Because everyone’s like I want to go to America. You have all this money to care for this, to buy this, to do this. You live in a dream in your head, that when you come, everything will be fine, but you have to come and work.

If the media plays an important role in the extreme portrayal of the West as a haven in the mind of the African, we might also assume that the same media largely has a role to play in the making of the self-perception of Africans. And although Africans eventually co-opted the tool of the colonizers to reinvent their own identity, this happened even as the West kept pushing the same images of the African as a creature on the margins of life and Africa as a place where ‘nothing good ever happens.’ It is possible for the African to develop a self-identity that is not afropessimist in nature while still seeing Africa as a place where nothing as good could happen as elsewhere. The image of Africa by the West isn’t dispelled even as the self-identity of Africans is being reinvented. When I sat with Andrews and his wife, Florence, both Ghanaians I had met in a church group, in their Northampton home, and asked him about his experience moving, his relationship with family, and familial expectations of him, he said:

The perception that we have back home is different from when we travel here. And the realities of life are different from being back home. So, those back home always think that there’s more money here. Everybody is on you. But you being here, you know the realities of the world.

It’s not very easy to come by money. When you are travelling for the first time, you also have that perception that when you come here, it’s very easy to get money. When I was leaving, I signed my whole chequebook for my brother to withdraw money from every month. When I moved here, it was difficult for me to get money. I called my mom back home, telling them to change some of the money in my own account into dollars for me to use. You know what she told me? Oh, it’s okay. What about those who take the ships to come to the country? They survived, so you’re gonna survive. Now, social media is helping a lot, and people get a chance to travel. Sometimes, I talk to some of my friends, and then they know that it’s not easy.

Andrews had moved first in 2009 with a visa lottery and filed for his wife, who moved in 2018. His views paint a picture of the perception of utopia that migrants and their kin often imagine to be elsewhere. This perception is quickly dispelled in the mind of the migrant, but not in the minds of their kin. This new reality that confronts the migrant may add to the isolation they feel, even from their kin, while they navigate new realities.

However, not everyone who leaves does so in expectation of utopia. Survival is one reason why many leave, no different from migration within Africa itself, where people choose exile to countries where they believe that the system is better, even if only marginally. Adzele T. Jones in Togo on My Mind writes about his family’s journey to the United States, largely inspired by the political unrest in Togo in 1994 and further made possible by the academic opportunity his father had gotten in the United States. Isidore Okpewho, in Introduction: Can We ‘Go Home Again’?, also writes about leaving Nigeria even after becoming a full professor just so he could continue his research. According to Okpewho, ‘some of us decided to leave our country and go where we might continue to make whatever difference we still could.’