Every February, I celebrate a history that is mine by colour but not lineage

< warm>This number one mortal tower is written by Dozie Anyaegbunam, who lives in Calgary. For sir thomas more information about First Person stories, see the FAQ.

For the first two years after I immigrated to Canada, I would nod at almost every Black person I passed on the street, in the mall, anywhere. I don’t remember when or why I started doing it. But it felt instinctive, like something I was supposed to do. 

Then one day, I mentioned it offhand to a friend. And he goes, “Oh, you’re doing 'The Nod.'” 

And so, some 24 months and more after the immigration officer had warmly told me and my family, “Welcome to Canada,” I found out that “The Nod" was a thing. A subtle, non-verbal way of acknowledging other Black folks, an intimate way of saying, “I see you.”

Somehow, my subconscious had understood something my conscious mind was still catching up to.

You see, I grew up in Nigeria, where skin colour was a complexion thing. Being Black wasn’t a thing. We were all Black, yes. But that never registered. I was fair-skinned. Some friends of mine were dark-skinned. 

The categorizations that mattered were different. I was Igbo — that’s people of the southeastern part of Nigeria — and I worshipped at the Catholic church. The idea of race was something I saw only in Hollywood movies or stumbled upon while being forced to watch CNN in passing with my dad or uncles for the many reasons young boys like me are forced to sit down and get a talking to.

Writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who grew up in Nigeria, once said she, too, "became Black in America" after moving there for her education.

I understood what she meant when I immigrated to Canada in 2021 and was absorbed into the flow of everyone who looked like me. The system had already decided who I was: Black. And all I could do was get on with the program and join the struggle, no questions asked. 

Black History Month was one of those programs. And while all the stories that drive the events matter, my grandmother never had to deal with all those atrocities of slavery and its aftermath. 

My family tree’s survival happened elsewhere — in a country that gained independence from Britain in 1960, following the Nigerian civil war that rendered the families of my dad and mom penniless. Just a few years earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. And the Women’s Political Council called for the Montgomery bus boycott after Rosa Parks was arrested. 

While in both cases it was a fight for equality and rights, my history happened under a different context. One that is so different from the long shadow of American slavery that shapes so much of what Black History Month commemorates. The Underground Railroad didn't carry my ancestors. Africville wasn't my family's home.

When I arrived in Ottawa and then moved to Calgary, I felt like a guest at a family reunion for a family I had married into rather than one I was born into. I participated in everything. I honoured the stories of Black resilience and enduring contributions to systemic change. I taught them to my children. Yet when I stood in that history, I was standing on borrowed ground. There was always this invisible distance between me and the celebrations. 

What closed that gap for me was eventually understanding what “The Nod” had been trying to tell me all along. 

Teju Cole, another Nigerian writer who moved to the U.S., describes a slow recognition that happens to those of us who arrive later. It takes a while, he writes, to understand that the condition of Black life in North America is a constant. The present doesn’t ask where your ancestors came from. Like the lady who assumed I was the security guard at a mall even though I wasn’t wearing a uniform and was actually trying on a shoe when she approached me. In the eyes of systems built on certain assumptions about who belongs where, all Black histories collapse into one.

My subconscious knew this before my brain did. I believe that’s why I started nodding instinctively. Meeting and acknowledging other Black people taught me over time that I didn't need to have identical ancestry to share in what it meant to be Black in Canada.

So I’ve come to accept that Black History Month isn't only about remembering what happened. It's about acknowledging what continues to happen. It’s about the present we all share as Black people.

I’m raising two boys in Calgary. They'll learn about Viola Desmond. They’ll learn about Bromley Armstrong and the Dresden “sit-ins.” They’ll learn about the ancestors I’ve borrowed since arriving here, about the histories that have become mine by geography rather than blood through the continuously growing catalogue of books in my library.

But they’ll also learn about my mother’s stories of being victims of the Nigerian civil war. About what it meant for her and her siblings to move on from the destructive after-effects of the war and start their lives over in a country where Igbo people like my family were viewed with suspicion by people from other Nigerian tribes. 

My boys won't have to choose between their inherited histories. They won't feel the gap I felt standing at those early Black History Month events, unsure whether I belonged. They’ll combine everything together into something new. Viola Desmond and their grandmother. 

This, I think, is the future of Black Canada. One where we create room for the borrowed ancestors and the ones we brought with us. I still do “The Nod.” I know what it means now. It means we're in this together. It means the past is complicated and the present is shared and the future belongs to all of us.

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Freelance contributor

Dozie Anyaegbunam is the host of the podcast, The Newcomers, as well as a creative director and amateur filmmaker who lives in Calgary.

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