An Autobiographical Sketch of Nnamdi Michael Okpala
My name is Nnamdi Michael Okpala. I am Nigerian, from Anambra State, and although I have spent part of my life in the United Kingdom, I have never stopped thinking of Nigeria as home.
There is a difference between living somewhere and belonging somewhere. The United Kingdom has been where I studied and where I built part of my life, but Nigeria is the place that lives inside me. I think about the land itself. I remember the soil, the heat, and the golden sand. I remember making sand angels—not snow angels, but sand angels, pressing myself into the earth beneath the Nigerian sun.
Those memories might sound small to somebody else. To me, they are not small at all.
I think about how fertile the land can be, how quickly something planted can become something living. That image has stayed with me: soil becoming food, land sustaining people, the earth giving something back. Sometimes I have described my relationship to Nigeria in intense ways, imagining that even after death I would want to become part of that soil. Beneath those words is something simple: I want to belong to the land that produced me.
Living in Britain has gradually made that feeling stronger.
At times I have felt stuck here. I came to study, but eventually I found myself asking what I was still doing in the United Kingdom. I have a house here and things I have built here, yet possessions do not automatically create belonging. I have experienced difficult periods in Britain, including experiences I describe as abuse and years of my life that I feel were taken from me. There came a point when I began thinking, I have had enough. I want to go home.
I do not think of myself as British simply because I have lived in Britain. When people describe me that way, something in me immediately pushes back.
I am Nigerian.
I am Igbo.
My roots are in Anambra.
And I want to reconnect with them.
That desire led me to something surprisingly ordinary: looking for people to talk to.
I began creating an account on InterPals because I wanted Nigerian pen pals. I wanted conversations with people at home and with Nigerians in the diaspora. I searched for people from Nigeria and Anambra and looked for Igbo speakers. It felt slightly ridiculous that a person could feel so deeply connected to a country and still find himself staring at filters on a website trying to select “Nigeria,” “Anambra,” “Igbo,” and “friendship.” Human civilisation has apparently advanced all the way to drop-down menus.
But it mattered to me.
I wanted real conversation.
One of the people I met was Charles, whose Igbo name is Ikechukwu. We began talking about where we came from. He told me he was born in Onitsha and had connections in Anambra State. I told him about myself. We exchanged pieces of Igbo.
Aha m bụ Nnamdi Michael Okpala.
My name is Nnamdi Michael Okpala.
Even something as simple as speaking Igbo with another person felt meaningful. It was a reminder that language is more than vocabulary. A language carries jokes, childhoods, families, villages, names, memories, and ways of seeing the world.
I began telling people that I wanted to return to Nigeria. Sometimes I simply said that I was stuck in the United Kingdom and had come here to study. I told Charles that I needed to get back because I had people who cared about me.
That sentence captured more than I realised.
I wanted community.
I wanted home.
I wanted to stop feeling as though my real life was somewhere else waiting for me to return to it.
At the same time, reconnecting with people online forced me to think carefully about trust.
Conversations about travel quickly become conversations about money. Coming to Britain can involve passports, visas, education, work, accommodation and fees. I spoke with people who wanted opportunities abroad, and I understood why. Life in Nigeria can be difficult.
But I also learned to set boundaries.
I do not want friendships based on sending money. In the past, I lent £250 to someone I considered a friend and was not repaid. That experience stayed with me. It made me more cautious about people asking me for financial help.
I can care about somebody without becoming their bank.
I can want somebody to succeed without paying for their life.
I can be somebody's friend without having to prove that friendship through money.
That distinction became important as I started meeting more people online. I wanted relationships based on conversation, culture, ideas and mutual respect rather than transactions.
My ambitions go beyond simply returning home.
I call one of my ideas “Return of the Riches.”
To me, returning should not mean simply arriving at an airport with luggage and saying that I am home. I want to return with knowledge, skills, ideas and resources that can be useful.
I think about food.
I think about water.
I think about shelter.
I think about technology.
I think about what I have learned through STEM, computing and building software. I have worked on computer programs and online projects. I have spoken about my OBINexus and Orion ideas and about creating systems that could eventually become something larger than myself.
I want whatever I build to mean something.
I do not want achievement merely so I can point at a screen and say, Look what I made.
I want creation to become contribution.
That is what “Return of the Riches” means to me: taking whatever knowledge, experience or resources I have gained and asking how they can travel back with me.
My thoughts about Biafra are also connected to this sense of identity and responsibility. At times my language about Biafra, conflict and sacrifice has been extremely intense. I have spoken about warfare, history, weapons, dying for the land and becoming part of its soil.
Those words reflect how strongly I can feel about history, belonging and injustice. But beneath the imagery of war is another question that matters more to the life I actually want to build:
What can I create for my people while I am alive?
Food is more useful when people can eat it.
Water matters when people can drink it.
Shelter matters when families can live beneath it.
Technology matters when it makes somebody's life better.
A country is not only its wars. It is also the conversations between strangers, the names parents give their children, the languages spoken in homes, the businesses people create, the farms people cultivate and the friendships people build.
My return, therefore, cannot merely be about what I oppose.
It has to be about what I build.
I am still working out exactly what returning to Nigeria will look like.
I have talked about packing my belongings and sending things through a port. I have imagined returning around the end of the year. I have thought about what I would leave behind in Britain and what I would carry with me.
Some questions remain unresolved.
Where exactly will I settle?
What will I build first?
How will my projects develop?
Which friendships will survive beyond an online chat window?
I do not yet have every answer.
But I know what keeps pulling me back.
The soil.
The language.
The names.
The people.
The feeling of being somewhere and knowing that the land beneath my feet is connected to the story I tell about myself.
I am Nnamdi Michael Okpala.
I have lived in the United Kingdom, studied, struggled, created things, met people, lost trust in some people and tried to rebuild it with others. I have spent nights online looking for Nigerians simply because I wanted somebody from home to speak to.
And somewhere beneath all the complicated plans, technical frameworks, arguments about visas, online conversations and enormous ideas is a much simpler image:
golden Nigerian soil,
a person lying down in it,
arms and legs moving across the sand,
making an angel in the earth,
and remembering where he belongs.
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