I have loved the French language for as long as I can remember. In school, I excelled at it, breezing through the conjugations and greetings and necessary memorizations. I liked the way the language sounded, the sophistication of it. And as a dreamy teenager, when I realized that I wanted to study aeronautical engineering, and that Airbus, one half of the passenger aircraft manufacturer duopoly, was headquartered in France, my romanticization of the language deepened. One day, I would live and work in France, putting together flying miracles.

It took about a decade for that dream to take flight. In August 2024, I finally arrived in France for the first time. From the moment the Boeing 737 took off from Murtala Mohammed International Airport in Lagos, I was brimming with excitement about the journey that would propel me closer to my dream. On the layover in Morocco, I began to practice, ordering a croissant and a bottle of water in French at a cafe even though the attendant had spoken in English to someone before me. On the flight from Morocco to Bordeaux, I enthusiastically took to conversing in French with the two Ivorian boys seated beside me. Even then, there were moments I stumbled, but I was happy to. This was the real deal.

Before I left, when people would ask how I felt about moving, I’d say I was five parts excited and three parts scared. I was finally going to study my Master’s programme in France, the country that represented the apex of my dream of being an aeronautical engineer. I had left Nigeria before for the UAE for three years, but this was different. The UAE wasn’t quite as close to my dream, and English was very much a lingua franca there. Now, I was going to a country where my inchoate understanding of the language and way of life would probably deal me some profound blows.

On my arrival day, I was nearly felled by such blows shortly after I landed. I had opted not to buy a SIM card from the single network provider present at the airport, since it wasn’t one of the ones recommended to me. But it was fine, since my mobile data from my Nigerian network provider was oddly working, so I could book a ride home. The weather was what the French would call ‘beau’, bright and sunny, not like the numbing cold I thought I would be thrust into, so I took this as a good sign.

But when I landed at my apartment building, the network disappeared, as oddly as it had appeared in the first place, leaving me stranded. I stood at the front door for a good few minutes, marvelling at the sheer hilarity of the fact that I was starting my French sojourn with a small bout of homelessness. Then I approached the single neighbour I found standing in his balcony, explaining my situation in the rustiest French known to man. Thankfully, the man understood a little English and helped me call my agent, who explained that since my inventory appointment was for 4 o’clock, she couldn’t come with the key till then. I had about three hours to kill, three hours of having to ask strangers for directions to a restaurant, pastry shop or something, since I couldn’t simply open Google Maps.

The recurring response—‘Sorry, I don’t speak English’—turned my happy stumbling into a frustrated tangle. I thought I spoke French, but these French people spoke like they were rapping a sick flow, their words running out of their mouths faster than my brain could catch them. Still, I had no choice but to speak what little I could and do my best to catch their words. And I would soon learn that it was this lack of choice that would precipitate my learning.

However, before the precipitation came a lot more stumbling, and sometimes even the sense of being crippled. I love being Black. I love being African. In the apposite words of Beyonce, ‘the amount of swag is just limitless…It’s just so much damn swag.’ There is so much beauty, so much of just my kind of humour. But initially, being in France as an Anglophone African with minimal knowledge of the language meant that a shared sense of Blackness or Africanness had to take a back seat in my forging of connections. Instead, what took the front seat was the shared knowledge of English. And this is not to say I didn’t love making friends with people of other races, but I was truly aching to speak with more of my people. Yet, language stood as a barrier, a hindrance to making deep connections.

The first Francophone African I connected with was my flatmate, a Togolese man named Mohammed, who quickly taught me that even though the non-African agent had said I could drink the water from the tap, it was an absolute no-go! ‘Il y a beaucoup de calcaires’, he said, the English words evading him like they often would. My brain scrambled for what ‘calcaires’ meant, and I settled on chemicals as he explained that it upset his stomach. It was not until a week later that I would remember to check the dictionary and learn that ‘calcaire’ meant limestone. There was too much limestone in French tap water. Mohamed showed me where to get essentials at discounted prices and—what I’m most grateful for to date—where the African food markets were. Yet, with Mohamed, there was a limit to how far conversations could go, at least with the version of me he met, since he would relocate to Paris just two weeks after my arrival.

At the university, I would want to speak with the Black students in my classes, but be stopped in my tracks by my rapidly mounting language insecurity. What I knew to say, I would stumble to say, and there was a world of words I did not know to say. So, what was even the point? I stayed in my comfort zone, with the pressing longing for more.