The Myth of Ancestral Land: Globalisation’s Forgotten Children

There’s a strange irony in the modern obsession with buzz words migration/immigration and the controversial remigration.

I find it ironic, that within the same nations that built globalisation, there is now growing demand retreat from it (albeit whilst still having the privilege to travel freely).

The same people who inherited the fruits of a global empire, trade routes, technology, exotic goods (most "chocoholics" exists in countries where cocoa does not grow), and cosmopolitan privilege — now rage against the human flow that empire set in motion.

They eat bananas grown in Africa, drink coffee from Latin America, wear cotton from India, and fly to Thailand for the winter sun, yet curse the immigrants who arrive on their shores seeking opportunity.

They want the world’s benefits without its responsibilities; the comfort of globalisation without the presence of the global.

It is a kind of poetic hypocrisy; to love the products of movement but despise the movers.

The Paradox of Globalisation’s Descendants

When people call for “remigration,” they speak as if globalisation were an external force imposed upon them, not a legacy of their own history. Some ask for the British Empire to be returned to it's former glory, yet fail to realise the globalisation is byproduct of former empires.

When we look deeper, we see that the loudest advocates of retreat are often the descendants of said empire: the societies that colonised, traded, enslaved, and expanded across oceans in pursuit of profit.

Their ancestors drew the maps, built the ships, and merged the worlds.

They opened the ports, extracted the labour, and named the continents.

They stitched the planet together for commerce (not a bad thing at all) but now their descendants wish to tear it apart for comfort.

It’s almost tragic. The world they helped create has simply come to their home shores.

When a British voter says, “We want our country back!” it’s worth asking genuinely, from whom? The curry house? The Polish builder? The Nigerian accountant? (Technically, I could classify as the latter).

The truth is that Britain was never just Britain. The empire made the British Isles global long before Heathrow existed. The wealth that built its cities, funded its navy, and filled its museums came from everywhere else. The world Britain conquered is the same world that now walks its streets.

Unfortunately, you cannot have global reach without global return.

The Homeland That Never Was

Even if one accepted the remigration fantasy, that everyone should “return to their homeland”, there’s a more fundamental question:

What homeland?

Most modern nations are not ancient entities but colonial or political inventions, born out of conquest, trade, or administrative convenience.

From my own ancestry for example: Nigeria, for instance, did not exist before 1914. The British created it by merging the northern and southern protectorates to simplify governance and taxation. They welded together regions that had never coexisted peacefully (technically, they still don't), Yoruba kingdoms in the southwest, Igbo republics in the southeast, and Hausa-Fulani caliphates in the north and called it a nation.

So when someone tells a British-born Yoruba, like myself, to “go back to Nigeria,” they are really telling him to return to a construct invented by British bureaucrats, not to his ancestral civilisation.

The Oyo Empire, Ife Kingdom, or Benin Empire were real and distinct entities, each with its own structure, language, and sphere of influence. Nigeria was a spreadsheet solution, not a spiritual homeland.

In truth, most “homelands” are the same.

Even if we look outside of Africa, for example, Pakistan was born in 1947. Belgium in 1830. Italy in 1861. Even France’s current borders were only settled in the 20th century. China, often imagined as timeless, was a mosaic of shifting dynasties and borders for a millennia.

The notion of a static homeland is a modern illusion. The kind of myth people create when they need emotional simplicity in a complex world.

Europe’s Convenient Amnesia

What makes the remigration debate especially absurd is the selective memory of those who champion it.

Europe itself is a patchwork of migrations.

The English themselves are a blend of Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and Normans. The French were once Franks and Gauls before they were “French.” Spain is part Moorish, part Visigothic, part Roman. Even Scandinavia, so often idealised as “pure”, the purest version of white, was once a web of traders and raiders linking Russia, the Middle East, and Britain.

So when modern nationalists cry about “outsiders,” they’re essentially demanding a purity that has never existed.

Their entire civilisation, their language, their cuisine, their religion, is built on centuries of movement, invasion, and exchange.

Globalisation didn’t begin with the internet or the Industrial Revolution. It began when human beings first walked out of Africa and never stopped walking.

Go forth and multiply, we were told.

The Fiction of Ancestral Land

Perhaps the deeper problem lies in the romantic idea of ancestral land.

It sounds noble — the place of origin, the soil of one’s people. But look closely and you find it’s not a matter of geology; it’s a matter of mythology.

The Israelites, often cited as history’s archetypal people of “promised land,” were never static. Their story is one of migration and movement, from Egypt to Canaan, from exile in Babylon to diaspora in Europe, from persecution to return. Their “ancestral land” has changed names, rulers, and borders countless times.

The Bantu peoples of Africa expanded across the continent for centuries, reshaping linguistic and cultural landscapes. The Mongols swept across Eurasia. The Turks migrated from Central Asia into Anatolia. Even the Native Americans who faced European colonisation had once migrated from Asia themselves using the Bering Land Bridge.

There is no fixed homeland because human beings have never been fixed.

We are, by nature, migratory. The land remembers us for a time, then forgets.

“Ancestral land” is not the soil beneath our feet, but the story we tell about it. It’s a narrative of belonging, sometimes true, often imagined, but always political.

Nations use it to justify identity, borders, and possibly even war. Individuals use it to locate themselves in a chaotic world. But the earth itself owes us nothing.

Land Does Not Belong to Us. We Belong to It.

The tragedy of the remigration fantasy is that it misunderstands belonging.

Land does not belong to people; people belong to land for a season.

Empires rise, fall, and are forgotten. The same hills that once bore Roman legions now host tourists. The same African coasts that witnessed slave ships now send their descendants to Europe’s ports. Time humbles every claim of permanence.

The British Empire thought it ruled the world forever. It lasted barely a century. The Ottoman Empire ruled for six centuries. Gone. The Oyo Empire, the Mali Empire, the Ming Dynasty. All dust. What endures is not the border, but the human story that flows through it.

To be truly civilised is to understand this humility: that belonging is not inherited through blood or enforced by border patrol, but earned through participation, by building, contributing, and coexisting.

Globalisation Was Never the Problem. Our Memory Is

Globalisation is not a recent curse; it’s humanity’s oldest pattern.

Trade, curiosity, and migration built civilisation. Silk, salt, gold, spices. they all moved long before passports existed. People followed. Ideas followed. Culture followed.

What we’re witnessing today is not the failure of globalisation, but the failure of memory.

We have forgotten that global connection was always messy, always human, always reciprocal.

We celebrate the global market but resent the global human being. We love the diversity of our supermarket shelves, but not our neighbourhoods.

The real question is not whether we should reverse globalisation, realistically we can’t, but whether we can grow up enough to manage it responsibly. To accept that the same forces that brought us prosperity also require empathy, adaptation, and patience.

The Future of Belonging

If there is a lesson in all this, it’s that belonging must evolve.

We can no longer define identity by geography alone. The child of a Nigerian father and a British mother born in London is not a guest in either world, he is the product of both. The Indian engineer in Toronto, the Jamaican nurse in Birmingham, the Polish builder in Dublin, these are not intruders; they are the latest chapters in the story that began when humanity took its first step beyond a cave.

Our real homeland is not a nation, it’s civilisation itself.

It is the shared inheritance of everything our ancestors built, destroyed, and rebuilt again.

To cling to purity is to deny that inheritance.

To accept mixture is to honour it.

Closing Reflection

Ancestral land is a comforting fiction in a world that craves certainty.

But the truth is deeper, humbler, and perhaps more beautiful:

We are all migrants wearing the clothes of permanence.

I am not saying we should not expect migrants to confirm to the rule of the land, we should not be patriotic, nor should we have countries or preserve cultures, nor flood countries and damage infrastructure with those seeking opportunity. I just believe we should just respect the soil beneath us has hosted countless peoples before us and will host countless more after we are gone.

So when someone says, “Go back home,” remember:

Home is not where your ancestors started.

Home is where you continue their story.