-By Abdul Mahmud
When Ashleigh Plumptre pulled on the green jersey of the Super Falcons, she was not just representing our country. She was performing a deeper act: an act of cultural reimagination. She was constructing a new identity. One that defies borders, blurs categories, and reclaims ancestral memory. Her decision to play for our country was not simply professional. It was symbolic. And a welcome. The same holds true for Michelle Alozie, though in a different sense. Her identity and cultural belonging are affirmed more directly. Her parents are Nigerians by birth. Their citizenship anchors her connection. Ashleigh’s case is further removed. Her story begins with her grandfather. She is third generation by blood, not by birthplace. Yet, both women, by different paths, have found their way to the homeland.
In Morocco, during the just concluded Women’s Africa Cup of Nations, WAFCON, Ashleigh wasn’t the only one who showed up. Her white friends turned up too in the final game. In green and white. In song. In spirit. The country folks in the stands showed up for her, screaming: “Oyibo, Oyibo, Oyibo”. It wasn’t performative support. It was a collective ritual. Hers was a public reaffirmation of belonging to a homeland that once felt remote, but now stood close: immediate, intimate, and deliberately embraced. This is the emerging narrative of diasporic identity. It is no longer about return in the old nationalist sense, but about reimagining connection that is chosen and not inherited. It’s about the formation of the new self. A new selfhood. Rooted not in the soil, but in memory. Not imposed by geography, but spawned by cultural will. For many years, the children of African immigrants in the West lived in the liminal. They straddled two worlds. Often, they were forced to choose between assimilation and alienation. Many chose silence. Some chose denial. A few wrestled with duality in the few emerging multicultural European states, where the opposition of far right groups to multiculturalism is growing, for instance. Over the weekend, far-right agitators marched on the major streets of London, Norfolk and Essex, fanning the flames of hate and fears.
But today, something new is happening.
This generation is not simply identifying with the homeland. They are reconstructing the homeland within themselves. They are returning, not to a physical homeland; but to an imaginative one. They are engaged in the work of cultural reimagination, taking fragments of ancestral memory, mixing it with lived diaspora experiences, and shaping a composite identity that is both authentic and innovative. Ashleigh Plumptre’s case is instructive. Born in Leicester. Raised in English schools. Trained in English football academies. She could have followed the familiar path: play for the senior women’s team in England, lean into Euro-visibility, ride the institutional comfort. But she didn’t. Instead, she turned towards our country. Not because of nostalgia. Not out of charity. But because she saw herself differently. She reimagined the story of her lineage in a manner that her reimagination and story invariably don’t end up serving as a footnote to her Britishness, but as a foundational part of her identity. Her grandfather’s Nigerian heritage became a map. She traced it backwards, then forward again, into her own body, her own future.
This re-rooting of identity is an active process. It requires intention. It requires curiosity. It requires the courage to be different. To live differently. And to live across cultural lines. Ashleigh’s identity is not a throwback. It is not mimicry. She does not need to “be more Nigerian than the rest of us” to prove belonging. Her very decision to claim the country of her grandfather’s birth on her terms, through football, is already a profound act of self-definition. Hear her: “I’ve just opened myself up to everything in the culture. I want to be able to encourage young people to do the same thing and identify with being mixed race”. And this is the core of the matter: diasporic identity today is performative, political, and deeply personal. Ashleigh’s decision is performance in the sense that it is enacted before a global audience. She performs belonging on the pitch. Her body moves in ways that express her allegiance, her pride, her conviction. But it is also political because she chooses to represent a country that has long been marginalised on the global stage. A country whose name doesn’t carry the same prestige as England’s, but whose history, culture, and resilience mean something far greater to her personal narrative.
Her act is not one of rejection, but of reconstitution.
She hasn’t abandoned England. She is reassembling our country inside herself. She is expanding what it means to be a fellow compatriot within the frontiers of cultural reimagination. Diaspora children are not just “returning” to the homeland. They are remaking the homeland in new forms: through fashion, through music, through sports, through social media discourses, through literature and academic theory. You see it in the rise of Afrobeats in London, Atlanta, and elsewhere. In the Nigerian-infused slang of Toronto teenagers. In the names proudly worn by second-generation Americans. You see it in the TED talks, the Instagram bios, our country’s flags in bios, the poetry slams, the Nollywood TikToks. You see it in how Ashleigh plays. Calm. Composed. Tactical. In the “Never-Say-Die” attitudes, “Dia-Body-Go-Hearam” and “E choke” dispositions of our younger countryfolks. The attitude of the British in training, Nigerian in expression. She doesn’t fit into the old categories. That’s the point. She is rewriting them with clarity.
For decades, the homeland treated its diasporas as lost. As footnotes to colonial displacement. The story was one of escape, of absence, of loss. But that’s not the story anymore. This generation is reimagining the diaspora not as a departure but as an extension. Not as lost children, but as bridge-builders. They are redefining what it means to belong. Not to one place. But to many. Simultaneously. What Ashleigh represents is this: post-postcolonial identity that is fluid, global, but emotionally anchored in the ancestral. She is not burdened by the nationalism of the first generation. Nor by the silence of the second. She is free to choose and she chooses this: that freedom is power. It allows her to say, “I am British, and I am a Nigerian. Not one before the other. Not one more than the other. Both. Together”.
And this is perhaps the most radical thing. In a world still obsessed with purity of culture, of blood, of loyalty, Ashleigh and others like her in our national basket teams are dismantling those myths. They are proving that identity is layered, negotiated, and dynamic. They are not confused. They are composed. They are not torn. They are woven. And our country folks must learn to embrace this. Too often, the homeland struggles with diaspora returnees. Questions of authenticity arise. “Do you speak the language?” “Do you eat the food?” “Do you know the history?” But, these are the wrong questions. Ashleigh may not speak the Yoruba tongue of her grandfather. But she understands solidarity. She understands the burden of representing a black country in a white-dominated world. She carries the flag, wears and kisses the badge on her jersey with pride. That should be enough.
Identity is not measured in jollof rice. It is measured in meaning. Then, what does it mean to claim the homeland? It means carrying its name with dignity. It means choosing it, even when it’s not the easier option. It means amplifying it on the world stage, when others are silent. Ashleigh is doing all of this. So are thousands of young people around the world. They are not waiting to be invited to adopt the identity of the homeland. They are claiming it. Reimagining it. Living it. And they are demanding that we expand the borders of belonging. That we make room for the hybrid selves. That we honour choice as much as bloodlines. That we embrace the return not just of bodies, but of imagination.
Ashleigh’s return is not simply to the homeland. It is to a narrative that was once broken by colonialism, exile, and dislocation, that is now being fixed by a new generation. A generation that refuses to forget. That refuses to be strangers. That insists on its place in our collective story. Our grand narratives. Her story is just one example. But it speaks volumes. It tells us that return is no longer a physical journey. It is a spiritual reckoning. A political choice. A cultural rebirth. An invitation that we must accept as public intellectuals to rethink the way we frame identity. To shift our gaze from the narrow lens of ethnicity, which has long anchored our scholarship, toward new formations. Toward acts of reimagination that speak to a more fluid and inclusive understanding of who we are. It invites us to craft fresh discourses. To see our country not as a fixed terrain of bloodlines and boundaries; but as an imagined space that is open, evolving, and welcoming to all who choose to belong.
Finally, and in summary, the homeland stands for more than geography. It is a place of love, of memory, of origin. It belongs to those born within its borders and to those born far away, who carry it faithfully in their hearts. Ashleigh carries it. So does Alozie. And in carrying it, they remind us of something profound: the homeland is not only a place. It is a people. It is a history remembered. It is a choice made. It is the quiet insistence that belonging can stretch across oceans and generations. In this era of evolving identities and cultural reimaginings, the homeland is also a future. One that the children of the diaspora are helping to shape through their voices, their music, their sports, and their return. One match at a time. One song at a time. One return at a time. All in pursuit of life’s many missions. Ashleigh and the girls fulfilled one of such missions. Mission X, accomplished.
Congratulations are in order, country people!