One thing that gets lost in these diaspora wars is how much Africans - especially folks from large/visible English-speaking countries like and - can be just as guilty of projecting their own country contexts onto the rest of the continent and creating flattened imaginaries.

I often talk (here and offline) about seeking out non-Nigerian/SA/Kenyan voices in discourse. Why should six or seven countries speak for 1.2 billion people? It's fair to hold folks to account for perpetuating coloniality, but how much do Africans perpetuate this stuff too?

As a Nigerian, Kenyan, Ghanaian, South African or Zimbabwean, how many times have you collapsed "Africa" or "Africans" into a narrative about *your* own country's experiences? Aren't you minimizing - if not quite erasing - people from the same African continent as you?

What do we know about Africans from other countries or regions? If we must pull up folks from other continents on lumping us into one (and I think we should), it's only right we be willing to keep that same energy for our own missteps.

This is one of the reasons I actively correct folks who reach out seeking "Africa" expertise. As I've mentioned a few times, I prefer "specialist" over "expert" and would rather be specific about my area of functional ability. I'm barely an "expert" in Nigeria, much more Africa.

I don't suppose that I have any of the answers to these seemingly intractable questions of culture and identity, but I like to think through them.

Anyway, I'm just shooting the shit as usual. I'm not sure if what I've said is coherent enough, but I think it is