How your village is following you everywhere, By Abiodun Adeniyi

First, the village referred to here is the original place, easily identified as your ancestral resting place. It is the place parents told you that you hail from. It could be a place of birth, a place where you grew up from childhood, and where you heard that your forefathers are from. It is also the place where you probably did not grow up, but where your parents, or guardian, refer to as their ancestral home, a place where they originated before inhabiting a new place after migration. This village has nothing to do with geography, location, or size. It may now be a city with a bustling population or a nondescript location nested in the countryside. What matters is that it is a place of emotional connection, where real or imagined association is fostered, or where return, again, whether real or imagined, is anticipated (Anderson, 1983; Boym, 2001).

This metaphorical village is primarily a practical or non-practical beginning point. Practical in the sense of an ongoing relationship with it, or dreamt or suspended domiciliation in the place, and non-practical in the sense of those who have a distant but inherited relationship with the place, as often with second or third generation migrants (Levitt & Waters, 2002). What roles do these villages play in our social, economic, cultural, and political journeys through life? How do they shape and reshape us in everyday practices? And simply put, how is your village following you?

Within this context, too, how do we evaluate movements, or mobility through life places and spaces, and how do we remember or forget about these villages? How do the villages function in the quest for belonging, or the determination of unbelonging? The search for answers to these questions, through intersecting media, reveals the overarching question I have asked in my years as a scholar, first as a student of communication, a teacher of mass communication, a professor of communication, and eventually a professor of communication and epistemic epistemology. To be sure, therefore, the ‘’how the village is following you’’ I am referring to is not the same as how your village people are following you in the sense in which we refer to it in Nigeria. In the Nigerian sense, we are probably referring to the village as the den of sorcery and witchcraft and how they can supposedly manipulate destinies, whether temporarily or permanently.

In this sense, misfortunes are superstitiously traced to people in the village who are anti-progress and uninterested in individual and collective progress, and who are believed to spiritually affect or truncate people’s affairs (Ellis & ter Haar, 2004). Not this one. The one that concerns this research is the real or imagined association with a place as a point of association, a location of belonging, where longing persists. The longing is about nostalgia for it, about emotional ties, or about feelings for it, leading to imaginings of returns, actual returns, either occasionally or at some point in the future (Boym, 2001; Rapport & Dawson, 1998).

A future permanent return is frequently envisaged but rarely materialises, especially depending on degrees of integration in places of residence, usually urban centres, or in distant diasporic cities (Carling & Pettersen, 2014). The village’s process of following the individual always begins with the limitations of the location as a place for fulfilling life dreams. The place in the Nigerian and African context is often underdeveloped, rural, and bereft of opportunities. Citizens interact mainly with nature and define their livelihoods as essentially farming (Adepoju, 1995). Because of limited options, citizens seek opportunities elsewhere, leading to migration and/or ceaseless iteration as they move from one destination to another in the quest for opportunities and fulfilment (de Haas, 2010). In moving, factors such as education, work, improved health services, and better amenities are always the primary considerations.

The mobility, however, does not prevent the emotional ties to the source. The ties also evolve into degrees. It might be stronger at the beginning, but it thins out over time, which is also influenced by the level of awareness of the reasons for migration in the first instance. When realisation is achieved, emotional bonding with home could be reduced, but could be otherwise if less realised, sometimes leading to quicker return. In modern times as well, mediating technologies have increasingly arrived and are becoming more sophisticated in how the geographical boundaries of the village and the translocal or transnational environments of residence have collapsed, merging the two or more places and creating an effective sense of instantaneity, simultaneity, and placelessness for citizens (Appadurai, 1996; Couldry & Hepp, 2017).

Beyond the traditional media of newspapers and radio are digital social media, including platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and X, which migrants use to address the question of the village in tow (boyd & Ellison, 2007; Madianou & Miller, 2012). WhatsApp platforms are especially effective for this, given the opportunity to form groups, sleeplessly chat round the clock, irrespective of distance or location, and enable the formation of town groups and association links, where decisions and deliberations happen to no end (O’Hara et al., 2014). Through text messages, voice notes, and image exchanges, members sustain a connection, contribute ideas for village development, donate money, and volunteer time and knowledge, in what has become a virtual replacement for the physical village square (Horst & Miller, 2006; Brinkerhoff, 2009). With members from the village and beyond, the sense of distance vanishes, giving way to a feeling of co-presence (Licoppe, 2004).

Memories are revived, therefore, while belonging is fostered on the go. The media has, in this circumstance, become a springboard around which meanings are shared across distanciated territories, eventually growing or steadying emotional well-being across the board (Couldry & Hepp, 2017). This emotional well-being might witness fractures sometimes, through conflicts, misunderstandings, or violence in worse cases, but it does not diminish the commonality of psychology amongst participants, especially where the resolution of disputes is ensured. The media remains consistently sustaining and balancing, aided by the pluralisation of channels, and contributes to stabilising migrant focus, enhancing productivity at a distance, and the possible achievement of migration objectives (Madianou & Miller, 2012).