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“Re-pounding the Yams; Re-cooking the Stew”: Factors Responsible for the Education of Nigerian Immigrants in England and the United States

Michael Oládèjo Afoláyan, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Southern Illinois University, Edwardville
mafolay@siue.edu

B. Akíntúndé Oyètádé, Department of the Languages and Cultures of Africa, University of London
ao2@soas.ac.uk

Survival instinct and the quest for relevance in the job market seem to be the prime factors prompting Nigerians who reside overseas to go back to school, change their careers, and set aside their original educational training and goals for a more relevant, functional and utilitarian career. For this group, education seems to be the means to an end, not an end by itself. In this paper, we present our analysis drawn from responses of a dozen Nigerians, six of whom reside in the United States and six in England. We portray and discuss the background academic and professional trainings that they had obtained before traveling overseas, explain their dilemmas of muddling through the dirty water of overseas sojourn, and examine the factors that led them to changing their careers. We argue that against the backdrop of prevailing prejudice and pervasive xenophobia, it is survival instinct and the quest for relevance in the job market of their respective communities that prompted these Nigerians to swallow their pride, disabuse the mind from conservative cultural beliefs relating to certain jobs or positions, and to rearrange their priorities in such a way that they avail themselves of job opportunities in the new homes. We argue that their portrait is a prototype of the culture of survival and a new flexibility to adapt to new environments for Nigerians in all of the Nigerian Diasporas, and a reflection of the determination to triumph over the decadent economic conditions in the homeland, a phenomenon that has accounted for an unprecedented border-crossing of Nigerian elites.