I Thought I Was Traveling. I Was Actually Reimagining Home.
Having traveled to 12 African countries and lived in four, Temi Popo began to notice one place consistently calling her back: Kenya.
From Lagos to New York. From Montreal to Mérida. From Cape Town to Nairobi.
In this audio-enhanced essay, Temi Popo reflects on what it means to search for home across continents — and what happens when Africa stops feeling like a destination and starts feeling like a life.
Born in Nigeria, raised between worlds, having lived across eight cities globally — including four in Africa — Temi traces the personal journey that eventually led her back to Kenya: a place she first visited in 2019 and has returned to almost every year since.
What begins as a story about travel slowly unfolds into something deeper: chronic illness, care, migration, softness, identity, ambition, and the quiet human desire to be held somewhere gently.
Through memories of hospitals in Nairobi, rebuilding life after burnout in Canada, traveling across Southern and Eastern Africa while scaling her tourism company, and learning how to exist joyfully between worlds, Temi explores the emotional realities of Diaspora return beyond the fantasy often sold online.
This is not a story about “finding paradise.”
It is a story about building relationship — with a continent, with yourself, and with the versions of home that reveal themselves over time.
Part memoir, part migration archive, part love letter to becoming, this anthology asks:
What happens when the place you keep returning to starts returning something back to you too?
I have often thought that my life can be measured by departures.
The first happened before I was old enough to remember it properly. I was three years old when my mother left Nigeria for America. And so my earliest understanding of home was already split between places — the country I belonged to and the country I was growing inside.
I grew up softly in Manhattan, on 14th Street and 1st Ave in Stuyvesant Town, in one of those brown brick buildings near the Hudson where childhood felt strangely protected from the chaos New York is known for. My memories of the city are not hard-edged in the way people often describe New York. Mine are slower. Tree-lined pathways. Roller-blading between buildings that touched the sky. The quiet confidence of being raised in a city that makes you feel like the center of the world before you are old enough to question it.
New York gave me ambition, yes, but it also gave me softness. A certain expectation that life should hold beauty, access, movement, and possibility. I think that early upbringing shaped me more than I realized. It is part of why I have always searched for places that allow me to feel both expansive and cared for at the same time.
Years later, I returned to Lagos, Nigeria for high school. It was my first experience of being both familiar and foreign at the same time. I understood the rhythms of the place instinctively, but I also carried America in my posture, in my expectations, in the way I spoke. People who grow up between countries learn quickly that identity is not fixed. It bends according to geography.
After university in Massachusetts, a year studying abroad in the South of France, and the beginning of my career in New York City, I moved to Canada for my Masters degree. There, I met my husband. At a Caribana Day Party of all places. We lived in Toronto first. Then Montreal. We built a beautiful life there, or at least the kind of life “immigrants” are told to aspire toward: stability, professional success, routine.
And then I became sick.
There is a loneliness to chronic illness that people do not speak about honestly enough. Especially for Black women. Especially inside systems where your pain must first survive disbelief before it can receive care.
I remember the exhaustion of trying to convince doctors and colleagues that something was wrong. The humiliation of feeling your body collapse while still needing to sound articulate enough to deserve attention. I remember understanding, slowly and unwillingly, how medical racism operates not always through open cruelty, but through cold indifference. Through delay. Through the quiet assumption that your suffering is exaggeration and perhaps you are the very cause of it.
By the height of the pandemic, my pain had become impossible to ignore, even by me.
So I left. I left it all behind. The house, the job, the friends, the life I’d built.
First to Mérida, Mexico, for six months. I needed warmth. Stillness. Distance from the life I had built while pretending I was not unraveling. After Mexico came Cape Town, South Africa. By then, what had begun as movement was becoming something else entirely — a search for a softer way to live.
In Southern Africa, I continued building my travel company, then called Girls Trip Tours, now evolved into Iranti: Africa’s first women-driven tourism economy. The work grew larger than I expected. What started as curated travel experiences became something deeper: an attempt to build infrastructure for how Black people, especially women in the Diaspora, could experience Africa differently.
Not as spectacle. Not as extraction. But as relationship.
That work eventually became a United Nations case study on women-led tourism and economic impact in Africa. There were features in Forbes, BBC News, National Geographic. All the things that sound impressive when written down.
But the real transformation was happening quietly, inside me.
Then came Kenya.
I first visited in 2019, and I kept returning without fully understanding why. Some places announce themselves loudly. Kenya did not. Kenya was patient. It waited for me to notice that I was exhaling differently there.
There is a particular tenderness I associate with Kenya now. Not because life there is perfect, but because I have experienced care there in ways that altered me.
I have been sick in Kenya.
Truly sick.
The kind of sick where I had a monthly subscription to an ambulance service. The kind of sick where your body feels less like a home and more like a constant negotiation.
And yet, even in those moments, I was treated with a gentleness that startled me. Nurses apologizing softly before procedures. Women fixing my hair while adjusting IV lines. Private rooms with quiet dignity. Monogrammed pajamas folded neatly on the bed.
Small things. But people underestimate how revolutionary small tendernesses become after years of neglect.
I remember lying in a hospital room in Nairobi unable to eat, smelling food being delivered to other patients, and feeling something close to grief for all the years I had spent surviving systems that treated care as inconvenience.
But it was not only the medical care that changed me. It was the people.
During one of my health crises with my husband out of town, a woman I had only recently become friends with left her child tucked in with a nanny so she could ride in an ambulance with me at one in the morning. She stayed beside me in the hospital until sunrise, not because she had to, but because in that moment my fear had quietly become hers too.
Another friend would arrive in the mornings with her laptop and work from my hospital room for hours so I would not be alone. We would sit together quietly — her answering emails, me drifting in and out of sleep — and somehow that ordinary companionship felt profound. Nobody announced themselves as generous. Nobody performed care. They simply stayed.
And I think that is when Kenya stopped feeling like a place I visited and started feeling like somewhere I belonged.
Because home is not only where you are celebrated when life is beautiful.
Home is where people remain soft with you when life is not.
Kenya did not heal my illness. But it changed my relationship to being unwell.
It showed me what it feels like to be treated as precious.
And perhaps that is why it began to feel like home.
Not because home is always where you are happiest. But because home is where your humanity remains intact, even on your worst days.
Now I split my life between Toronto and Nairobi. I have bought land in Kenya. Built businesses there. Imagined futures there. My husband and I speak often about what it would mean to spend more of our lives on the continent permanently.
Still, I resist romanticizing return. Africa is not uncomplicated simply because it is ours. Integration is difficult. Belonging is layered. The Diaspora often arrives carrying both longing and projection.
But I think what I have learned after living across countries, languages, and identities is this:
Home is not a single place waiting for you.
It is something you build slowly through repetition, care, memory, and the people who allow you to arrive fully as yourself.
And maybe that is what Iranti truly is.
Not simply a travel company, but an attempt to build pathways toward that feeling for other people too.
A way of saying:
You do not have to arrive perfectly to belong here.
