Excerpted story from Generation1.ca’s AfroRise2050 Fellowship’s inaugural publication Our Dreams for Africa, envisioning diverse pathways to a stronger Africa by 2050 and beyond. Be on the lookout for the entire anthology!
The Portable Country: From Personal Grief to Pan-African Sovereignty
by Djamila N. El S. Diatta
The distance was always supposed to be temporary, a bridge to a bigger future. I left home with a safety net woven from two constants: my mother’s boundless, immediate support and the quiet, immovable certainty of my father’s strength. They were the ground beneath my feet, even thousands of miles away in this new country. I could afford to stumble, because I knew they were always watching.
Then, the ground dissolved. Losing them both while I was still abroad was not just a loss of people; it was the sudden, shattering collapse of my entire infrastructure. There was no gentle transition into adulthood; there was only a violent entry into absolute self-reliance. I had to learn, in the cruellest silence, a profound and undeniable truth: you are responsible for yourself, and you are no one’s priority. The world does not pause for your grief, and the support systems you relied upon, the mother who would counsel you through a tough choice, the father who would simply listen, are gone forever. The luxury of being someone else’s immediate concern had vanished.
When I finally returned two years later for my mom’s funeral, I expected the familiar embrace of the earth itself to heal me. I craved the smell of the air, the noise of the streets, the sense of being home simply by physical proximity. But the country felt subtly different, and I was definitely different. The people and places I loved were still there, yet the two people who made it my country were not. That was when the second, more difficult realization settled in: the country does not make the person; it is the connections that matter. My physical presence was irrelevant to my root system; the root system was the conversations, the shared history, and the unconditional love that had been stripped away.
Being here did not automatically make me belong again; it only highlighted the void. That visit taught me that the truest form of connection is portable: you can take a country with you. But in the wake of such a deep loss and these new revelations, portability requires immense, proactive effort. To feel rooted again, I realized I could not rely on osmosis. I had to intentionally seek out my country through new channels; dedicating time to the news of the diaspora, engaging with activists and storytellers, and making conscious choices to care from afar. My loss did not just force me to grow up; it redefined what it meant to fight for and belong to the place I came from.
This personal journey of redefining belonging soon collided with a different set of stories through my work as a Wolof interpreter. Suddenly, I was sitting on the phone for hours with real Senegalese people in the US and Canada; people who had fled their homeland, struggling under the weight of racism and xenophobia, frustrated by rudeness and systemic exclusion. My initial, detached judgment: Why leave a country where everyone is like you? Why would anyone risk their lives over this? crumbled. Speaking to them in the intimate, shared language of Wolof, I heard not the voices of those who “give up,” but the desperate hope of those with dreams that a broken support system at home could not sustain. Their migration was not a choice of leisure but a search for the tools needed to build the life they deserved. This was the true power of story: it shattered my internal narrative and exposed the systemic failures that push our most ambitious people away, demanding a look at the deeper wounds.
The deep wounds revealed by the stories of our people -the lack of support, the necessity of fleeing, the systemic failure to provide opportunity- are not accidents. They are symptoms of a failed architecture, a post-colonial project designed for extraction, not empowerment. If my personal transformation taught me that I must create my own support system, my work as an interpreter taught me that our nations must, collectively, do the same.
We stand today at a crossroads defined by a bold, necessary Pan-African urgency. We must liberate our countries from the final, most insidious form of control: economic dependency. For decades, our resources, our currency, and our potential have been controlled by the shadowy hands of external “slave masters” and the local puppets who enable them. This structural weakness is what pushes our most ambitious youth out, forcing them to seek dignity and opportunity abroad.
The blueprint for resistance is not new, but the fire is being re-lit by a new generation. We look back at the radical courage of Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso, who showed us that self-reliance is not merely an economic policy, but a form of national honour. And today, we watch the mantle being taken up by a new guard—men like Ibrahim Traoré, whose bold actions embody a refusal to be subservient, turning the promise of Burkina Faso into a contemporary declaration of sovereignty.
This collective defiance is not just happening in military transitions; it is being forged at the ballot box. The recent elections in Senegal sent a seismic message to the established order: The new generation and the young diaspora are not falling for the ‘weakness’ of the continent and are not going to facilitate this neo-colonialism. Critically, the subsequent actions of the new leadership, focused on holding powerful figures accountable, affirm that this movement is fundamentally about transparency and the ethical management of our resources. Our refusal to accept the status quo is the clearest sign that Senegal belongs to the Senegalese, and Africa must, unequivocally, belong to Africans.
This is the vision we demand:
We want to build nations that function as the ultimate support systems our people deserve: the collective, stable infrastructure that my parents once provided for me, translated onto a national scale. This demands aggressive investment in the future, particularly in robust, equitable education systems that foster critical thought and innovation, ensuring that the wealth of the continent lies not only beneath the ground but within the minds of our citizens. We envision countries where people from the diaspora do not merely consider returning, but wish to come back, drawn by genuine opportunity and dignity. We demand spaces where those living within our borders do not feel trapped by limited horizons, but rather privileged to be part of a thriving, self-determined African future.
Our fire is fueled by both memory and hope: the memory of what was lost in our personal and collective histories, and the hope for a future where independence is more than a flag, it is the reality of economic power and systemic justice, enforced by accountability.
I am Djamila, an international student from Senegal studying Business Marketing at Humber, graduating in December 2025. My academic journey started at UofT in International Development, but led me here. I am deeply passionate about social justice and the power of storytelling, aiming to work in cause-based marketing.
