An American professor, Pablo Segun, and his Nigerian-American wife, Aanu, known on social media as Familia PablAnu, have explained why they left the United States with their five children and settled in Ondo State, after an earlier attempt to build a life in Uganda.
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The couple spoke to Ayoola Olasupo about their courtship, their relocation and what the move has meant for their children.
“We Wanted A Sustainable Life”
Pablo said he was born and raised in the United States, studied in Spain and became a professor, teaching Spanish-language linguistics for almost a decade.
He said the decision to leave grew out of the conditions the family faced. “We have five children together and have experienced a lot in the US, which led us to look for other ways of living and places where our children could thrive. The US was expensive and didn’t seem like a safe or healthy place for us. We wanted a sustainable life with more time for our children.”
He added: “We didn’t want to only work, work, and work. I also had colleagues from Africa, including Tanzania and Nigeria, who told me that farming was their side job, even after earning PhDs in the US. That aligned with what we wanted, so we looked at East Africa and eventually went to Uganda.”
Settling there proved difficult. “We wanted to settle there, but finding land was difficult,” he said. While working on that, the couple made their first feature film, “My Love from Another Land,” which they wrote, produced and acted in. It was his wife’s idea, and they worked with a filmmaker in Uganda to develop and produce it.
They later visited Nigeria. “For me, it was a great experience finally coming to the continent and trying to assimilate into the culture,” he said.
“You Mean Lagos?”
Recalling how they met, Pablo said the encounter took place at a social gathering in the university town where he taught and where his wife had completed her professional degree.
“I was a bit shy. I wanted to talk to her but didn’t know how to approach her,” he said. “She was with an older woman who called me over and asked who I was. I said, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ because in my culture, when an older person calls you, you come.”
He said he learnt she was Nigerian and asked whether she was from Lagos, mispronouncing the name. “She smiled, then her face fell when she heard how I pronounced Lagos. She said, ‘You mean Lagos?’ I had never heard it pronounced that way.”
He then left for Mexico for the summer without her number. “I spent the whole summer thinking about her and wondering if I would ever see her again. When I returned, I thought she was gone, but she showed up at another gathering.”
He said the second meeting settled it. “I tried to play it cool. When she walked in, she lit up the room. It was like a bright light had come in.” He invited her out, and she declined because she was slaughtering a rooster for soup.
“I thought she was a city girl, very prim and proper, so I was surprised. She even sent me a photograph,” he said. “I had never talked to my mother about girls before, but when she was visiting, I told her, ‘Mum, you’ve got to meet this girl. This girl’s amazing.'”
He said he sought her father’s contact so he could assist her properly, and that she was hesitant. “As we got closer, I told her I didn’t want to play around. After a few months, I knew she was the one I wanted to be with. I proposed, and we got married about six months later. It was roughly one year from when we first met to our wedding.”
They have been married for almost ten years.
“Nigeria Is Where We Fit In The Most”
On what made adaptation easier, Pablo cited pace and food. “Ugandans are more laid-back and calm. They no get wahala. Time is also relative. If someone gives you a specific time, you might allow another hour or two. Our family has always been like that.”
He said tropical foods were already part of the family’s diet growing up in the Midwestern United States, even though they were not cheap there.
On race, he said Uganda differed from the United States. “People might call you oyinbo, but it wasn’t intense. You could be any kind of person, and they would simply say, ‘Oh, okay, interesting.’ If you were friendly, they were friendly.”
He said the family’s final choice was clear. “Uganda was calm and relaxing, but Nigeria is where we fit in the most. Nigeria is the first place where I truly feel at home. I think part of that is because my family feels at home. Aanu and the children really enjoy it here. They know the culture, language, and food. When we asked if they wanted to move from Uganda to Nigeria, they said yes immediately and packed their bags.”
Asked what he had imagined his life would look like, he said he had always been flexible. “I never had a particular picture of what my life would look like. I could go anywhere. I wasn’t planning on staying in the US, but when I met Aanu, I had a stable job and thought maybe this was what I could do for her. I did well as a professor, but it was stressful because the US isn’t an easy place to live. Even saving money is difficult.”
On his fears about relocating, he said there were few. “For me, it was almost the opposite. It was my idea to come to Africa. I had wanted to come to Nigeria to teach for about a year and have my family spend that time here. I was more interested in opportunities and how they suited our family.”
“One Face, One Language”
On the languages spoken in the home, Pablo said he learnt Yoruba deliberately.
“I wouldn’t say I speak Yoruba fluently, but I try. When Aanu and I started thinking about marriage and children, I knew I needed to learn her language so I could communicate with the children,” he said, adding that he took courses at the university where he worked for about a year to get the basics.
He explained the method the couple adopted. “After our first child was born, Aanu spoke Yoruba to the children from birth, while I spoke Spanish to them. We’ve followed the ‘one face, one language’ approach. As a linguistics researcher, I know that children can learn five or six languages without being confused. Because of that, I couldn’t use much Yoruba at home because it would break that pattern.”
He said the first real opportunity to practise Yoruba came on a Christmas visit to Nigeria about three years ago, and that since the permanent move a year ago the opportunities have multiplied.
“For the children, Yoruba is now very strong. I try to keep Spanish strong as well. They understood English from infancy, although we don’t require them to speak it. The older ones started learning it in Uganda because English is widely spoken there. They learnt very quickly.”
Why They Went Online
On the family’s social media presence, he said it began as a way of keeping relatives informed.
“We started because we were leaving the country and wanted both families to stay connected with us. We wanted them to know what we were doing step by step without constantly calling or sending videos and photographs,” he said. “We thought we could monetise it in the future, but the main reason was family connection. When we call them, they already know where we are and what we’re doing.”
On Adjusting To Nigeria
Pablo said much of the culture matched his own upbringing. “A lot of Nigerian culture fits with my background in the southern US, where we also place importance on respecting elders. We say, ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, sir,’ ‘Yes, ma’am’ and ‘No, ma’am.'”
One difference stood out. “In Uganda, people saw me as light-skinned and a foreigner, but they were relaxed about it. Nigeria was different because of the strong colourism. There’s a belief that lighter skin means beauty and goodness. I had never experienced colourism before coming here, so it was new to me.”
“Finally, They Will Leave Me Alone”
Aanu said her family had been pressing her about marriage before she met her husband.
“I was so happy that my parents would finally leave me alone because they were hinting that I was getting to that age when I should bring home a prospective suitor. They were even suggesting someone who had a son in the US,” she said.
“They felt that, as Nigerians, we needed to stick together in the US. So when I brought Pablo home and they saw that he was cool-headed, I thought, ‘Finally, they will leave me alone.’ We liked each other, and it worked out.”
“They Won’t Fit Into A Specific Box”
Asked what she wants preserved in her children, she began with her own position.
“Even I am a Nigerian-American, and sometimes I still struggle with an identity crisis. I’m not Nigerian enough for Nigerians here because I’ve lived away for so long. In the US, too, I’m not American enough because my accent sometimes gives me away. I feel like I don’t quite belong in one category, and that’s okay. That’s going to be the same situation for our children.”
She continued: “They won’t fit into a specific box. We want to preserve everything we can, keep the good and leave the bad. They will retain the languages so that if they decide to go to South America, the US, Africa, or anywhere else, they will have the tools to excel. We want to preserve all aspects of who they are, because that’s their identity.”
“They Would Rather Stand Than Sit Beside Me”
Asked about her own experience of racism in the United States, Aanu said there had been many incidents, and that her husband had been unaware of most of them.
“When I met him, I started telling him about them. He was oblivious. He didn’t know a lot of these things, and I had to say, ‘Did you know that’s racism right there?’ Then he would say, ‘Wow.’ He never had to leave the house and think about these things because he had that privilege.”
She recalled her undergraduate years. “I tried to make friends with my classmates, and one guy told me, ‘It’s not you; it’s just that your skin tone is too dark for me.’ I was like, ‘How did we get here? What do you mean my skin is too dark?'”
In graduate school in Indiana, she said, the daily bus ride became an ordeal. “As soon as I was seated and more people entered, if they saw me sitting there, they wouldn’t want to sit next to me. Sometimes all the seats would be taken except the one beside me. I had already moved my bag away, thinking, ‘Come on, there’s a seat right there.'”
She continued: “But they would rather stand than sit beside me. Even when they sat next to me, they made sure their bodies didn’t touch mine. They acted as if I was disgusting, like a piece of dirt. You could tell from the way they looked at you that they were looking down on you.”
After the marriage, she said, came the stares. “They would look at us and look at Pablo as if he was doing something wrong by being with me.”
The Chestnuts And The Police
She described one incident in the small, mostly white town where the family lived.
“There was a particular time Pablo was not there. I took three of our children to pick chestnuts. I had asked the owner of the property for permission to gather them because they were simply wasting away on the ground. He said yes. All of a sudden, I saw the police show up. I thought, ‘Oh, somebody called the police on me; for what?’ They were looking in my direction and were about to come towards me.”
She said she telephoned her husband. “He said, ‘Just stay calm. If they come to ask you questions, put me on the phone.'”
She added: “I hadn’t done anything wrong. I was simply picking chestnuts with my children. But anyone with my skin tone walking there, even though I lived in the neighbourhood, could be seen as homeless or as someone who didn’t belong. I stayed on the phone, picked what I needed, and told the kids, ‘Let’s go.'”
After that, she said, she avoided the place unless her husband was with her. “You just know you’re not safe because anything can go wrong. I’m a woman, which is probably less threatening to them. If my skin is this dark and I were a man, forget it. I would have been shot dead long ago.”
She said strangers commented on her children. “Even in supermarkets, people would look at my children and say, ‘Oh, what a pity.’ As if, by having me as their mother, I had ruined their lives. Here, people are always happy to see our children. Over there, it was like, ‘Why would you bring them into this world? It’s going to be difficult for these children.’ I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?'”
She also described her workplace. “I worked in a doctor’s office. Sometimes, when I went to attend to patients or draw blood, they would say, ‘No, I want someone else.’ As soon as they saw me, you could tell they didn’t want to deal with me. I would tell a colleague, ‘Do you want to take this patient? They don’t want me to attend to them.’ Many experiences like that left me frustrated and depressed. It was awful.”
“Why Would You Go Back To That Country?”
Notwithstanding those experiences, Aanu said she resisted the idea of returning to Nigeria.
“My parents live in the US, and they believe it is a land of opportunity, but everything I saw was contrary to that. You work endlessly,” she said. “When we got married, we had four children, and Pablo said, ‘Why don’t we move to West Africa, maybe Togo or somewhere?’ I was like, ‘Why would you go back to that country? At this point, there’s nothing good about Nigeria in my head.'”
She explained the shift in her own thinking. “Even though I was facing discrimination and racism in the US, something in my mindset had shifted since I left Nigeria. I loved the food and music, but I believed Nigeria had insecurity and too many problems. Even my parents said they would never want to come and live here.”
When Uganda was proposed instead, she agreed readily. “I didn’t even know where Uganda was on the map. I was like, ‘Let’s go. It’s Africa, right? As long as it’s not West Africa or Nigeria, I’m fine.’ That’s how we ended up in Uganda.”
Her family objected to the move altogether. “When we told my parents we were leaving the US for Africa, they were like, ‘Are you crazy? You’re leaving this opportunity.’ I said, ‘What opportunity? We’re struggling. Everyone there is struggling.’ They almost disowned me, but this was what we wanted for our family.”
The reversal came later. “We tried Uganda but eventually realised it wasn’t working. When my parents saw our situation, they said Nigeria might actually be better. That changed their perspective. We then started thinking about Nigeria. Here, you can farm and grow food. The children can eat tropical foods, speak the language, and connect with their roots. So we eventually relocated to Nigeria.”
She said both her parents are from Ondo State, though she grew up in Ogun State.
“It’s A Shame That Some People See Returning Home As A Failure”
Asked about the biggest misconception she wished people would drop, Aanu answered directly.
“A lot of people think we came here because we failed abroad or did something wrong. That’s not true. It’s a shame that some people see returning to your home country as a failure,” she said.
She added: “Some still believe America or other foreign countries are lands flowing with milk and honey, even when people are working three or four jobs. We found that Nigeria works better for our family than Uganda, and we didn’t know that before coming here.”
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