Wrt the phenomenon of diaspora Africans traveling back "home" during this pandemic, I think we should talk about what home actually is and represents to us. Because there's some uncomfortable dishonesty I keep seeing. https://twitter.com/TravelNoire/status/1352617185366204417

This piece about Zimbabwe being a "haven of stability" during COVID in comparison to Britain: the government just announced a strict lockdown, hospitals are struggling with lack of resources, but the author almot brags about her safari holiday https://twitter.com/guardian/status/1351157784717348865?s=20

Too many of us like to go home because our pounds and dollars afford us a degree of power, access, and freedom that we can't otherwise claim here in the West. We go "home" to live out our classed fantasies while not having the same constraints of white supremacy as here.

I desperately want to go home and squeeze my family and spend time kumusha. Despite the fact Zim constrains me in certain social (and structural lol) ways, I'm also keenly aware of the kind of freedom US dollars can buy me.

Even if we're going to a place that's familiar, we still treat the continent like a play place. Our real and imagined nostalgia for the "motherland" doesn't not magically disappear the very real classed politics that meet us upon our arrival.

So when I see "stop travel shaming," I think about the fact that Zimbabwe built a COVID hospital *for tourists* in the suburbs in Harare while the facilities for nationals are badly resourced and PCR tests are USD$60.

Too many of us treat "home" the same way white people do, perhaps we treat it even worse because we claim that we love it.

When I was in Windhoek trying to get a 3-month extension on my tourist visa (I thought I'd be in lockdown in Namibia so they were permitting extensions), it was my first time in Home Affairs. I told my mother it was the first time no one cared about my blue passport.

And it forced me to really realize and acknowledge the kind of deferential-preferential treatment I had become accustomed to as a diasporan even though I have/would never seek it out. But it's there, and too often we exploit it. How do we do that to places we call "home"?