28/06/2023
If you wake up on a Monday morning and enter a train in London and its environs, you can hardly find two people talking to each other. Everyone avoids eye contact. There is silence. The only noise you hear is the choo choo-ing of the train. Very little human interaction.
The same thing happens on buses and the streets. It is as if people have been put in a trance-like state, and they become zombies heading off to different workplaces doing work that they don't like to get the money that they like. In fact, you will see the rat race on steroids.
Nobody has time for you. Each person is wrapped up in themselves. This cycle is repeated every working day. And then, at four in the evening, there will be a wave of people, all stoic and cold, moving in the other direction. Very soon, you find that it is hard to make friends. And even if it is possible, you may not be able to maintain friendships, as the work commute takes its toll on you.
As an African immigrant, this is your first culture shock. Then you become part of the system. You get a job, and your life revolves around it. You buy a house, and you take up a second job because the mortgage is something else.
Then your biological mother visits from Nigeria, and you can't even spend five unbroken hours with her, because you have to go to your second job soon after you finished your first job. You are not even aware that you have become more committed to the rat race than to your family.
And you are thirty. You will do this for the next thirty five years. Yes, you have a lot of things that people back in Africa do not have. But is life not more than things?
Don't take for granted the warmth, noise, the hustle and bustle, and the human connection you get in Africa. Even in a bus in Lagos, commuters are not strangers to each other. In the ninety minutes it takes for them to get to their destinations, they will 'gist' and have more interactions than you have had with your English neighbour since you moved next d
