This is Our America
PhD student Leesi George-Komi is the son of Nigerian refugees who have persevered through political and environmental terror in their home country and racism in their adopted one. One of his responsibilities, as is Nigerian tradition, is to tell his parents’ story. But he’d like to go further than that — and use the lessons learned from his family’s lives to change the next generation’s stories.
Section I: Introduction
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Click on bolded, underlined text throughout the story to hear Leesi and his family pronouncing their names and other key Ogoni vocabulary. |
University of Michigan PhD candidate Leesi George-Komi (pronounced LEH-see jorj CO-mee) sits on the floor of his parents’ home in Stone Mountain, Georgia, looking into the past.
A photo book lies open on Leesi’s lap. Three suitcases — blue, with a leather band around them — surround him, all full of more photos and historical ephemera. The luggage is clearly high quality; there are no obvious snags or stains. But it has no wheels, so it’s old enough that its original owners must have carried it by hand.
“The three suitcases around, that’s what my parents were given when they came here,” Leesi says.
Leesi’s parents, George Komi and Monica George-Komi, fled Nigeria as refugees in 1996. They are Ogoni (pronounced OH-goh-KNEE), one of the oldest ethnic groups in the resource-rich Niger Delta region. Some of the assets that came from their land were oil and natural gas. But the Ogoni did not benefit from this wealth. Instead, the community had to advocate for basic rights, through a nonviolent civil justice movement.
The crusade culminated in government-ordered murders of Ogoni leaders. If George hadn’t escaped, he could have been next.
“There are a bunch of photos behind me,” Leesi says, “of things that wouldn’t have been possible if we didn’t travel here to America.”
He rattles off some examples, gesturing as he speaks: Behind the dining room table is a photo of George and a woman the whole family knows as Mama Nancy, a parishioner at the church that sponsored the George-Komi family to come to America. She helped teach George how to navigate this new culture. A picture on a shelf below commemorates Monica’s graduation from her bachelor’s program in 2013 — 17 years after she arrived in the United States with 1-year-old Leesi.
“I know these suitcases are old as hell,” Leesi says, looking around at the luggage. “To me, it feels like this is a way for my parents to hold on to their past in a very physical way. They look at these and it’s like, I’m traveling back to a different time period.”
The photos now stored in the suitcases provide a time machine for Leesi, too, sending him back to the days when he and his parents were learning how to succeed in a foreign land.
As he works toward his PhD in movement science at the U-M School of Kinesiology — where he’s conducting research on whether physical activity can help marginalized youth manage their own stressors and improve their mental health here in America — Leesi has had to reckon with his own memories and experiences of isolation, anxiety, and health issues that twice pushed him close to death. But his recollections, too, have helped him realize how his family has persevered through trauma — lessons that could help the next generation of Black and immigrant children.
“I constantly think about what scenarios allowed my parents to be able to cope with these stressors in such unique, persevering ways,” Leesi says. “I think the Lord has shown me in each of these moments where I could have gone off this earth very early that I’m supposed to be here doing something. And this work that I’m doing — talking about the influence of discrimination and stressors on youth mental health and that there’s ways to be able to reduce the impacts using physical activities and sports and community — I feel like that’s why I’m here.”
Section II: Background
Nigeria was supposed be where Leesi’s parents built a life and had children. Instead, they must each flee to a refugee camp, threatened by political persecution.
How oil changed Ogoniland
George and Monica became George and Monica in college at the University of Port Harcourt, located in Port Harcourt, the capital of Nigeria’s Rivers State. He approached her first, attracted to her looks, poise, and intelligence. She appreciated his gentility, passed down by his schoolteacher father.
“I was born to know that education is your passport,” George says. “If you’re not educated, you can go nowhere. Once you’re educated, you can go anywhere and everywhere. And I met somebody who had the same ideas about how to move in life.”
The couple had never planned to leave Nigeria. Ogonis have been living in the Niger Delta for at least 500 years; as farmers and fishermen, historically, they consider themselves stewards of the land and everything that contributes to it — rivers, lakes, animals, trees.
Neither of Monica’s parents could read or write, yet they understood the land. Once they planted seeds, they didn’t replant in the same plot for seven years, to let the soil recover and rejuvenate. For a long time, the earth responded beautifully. When Monica was 6 or 7 years old, she cut down a towering, eight-foot-tall cassava plant (whose roots, which resemble yams, are eaten as a starch) from her family’s farm.
“There is a sense of pride for anyone who has land to be able to farm and eat,” Monica says. “It shows your own dignity in the society, that you’re able to work out and feed yourself and your family.”
Ogoni land held other riches that would bode trouble for the community, though. In the late 1950s, Royal Dutch Shell (now Shell) discovered oil in enough quantity and quality to merit the production costs of drilling and piping. Chevron started its own operations in Ogoniland in 1970.
Soon, pipelines cropped up across the landscape. With them came oil spills. Some were sourced to fires or explosions. High temperatures in the region could lead to cracking and bursting pipes that flooded nearby farmland, gunking the soil with dark, tar-like clumps or floating with a deceptive rainbow sheen on top of waterways.
It was common for the oil companies to burn off excess natural gas from the oil production process. When the rains came, these gas flares produced soot that fell into the Ogoni’s streams.
“In those days, if you put a white basin out to collect rainwater, you would see black soot all over it,” George says.
With time, Monica’s family noticed that the cassava wasn’t doing well anymore. In fact, all their crops were withering.
The mangrove trees that had grown on the edges of creekbeds — their sprawling roots serving as sanctuaries for crabs and periwinkles — were gradually disappearing. Palms grew in their place, but they were foreign to the water-dwelling animals that the Ogoni sourced for food, now gone elsewhere to search for sanctuary.
“We used to be a food basket, and they took that away,” Monica says. “It’s like you have your own house, and somebody else comes and moves your lamp. Moves your computer. Takes away your chairs, so you don’t even have anything to sit on!”
It wasn’t just the ecosystem that was vanishing. Once, one of Monica’s mother’s friends was passing by a pipeline on her way back from her farm. The pipe burst. Her legs were severed. She eventually died.
By the ‘90s, Ogoni leaders had had enough. They formed the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP, pronounced moh-SOP) and presented the Nigerian government with the Ogoni Bill of Rights, which included requests to preside over their own political affairs within Nigeria, parlay more economic resources into Ogoni development, restore the health of their people, and protect the environment from further damage.
They also demanded that oil companies bury their pipelines, compensate and pay royalties to the people whose land contained oil, and generally practice corporate social responsibility principles by considering the effects of their business on the Ogoni and their environment.
“The once beautiful Ogoni countryside is no more a source of fresh air and green vegetation,” the first president of MOSOP wrote in a statement attached to the Bill of Rights. “All one sees and feels around is death. Death is everywhere in Ogoni. Ogoni languages are dying; Ogoni culture is dying; Ogoni people, Ogoni animals, Ogoni fishes are dying because of 33 years of hazardous environmental pollution and resulting food scarcity…Mining rents and royalties for Ogoni oil are seized by the Federal Government of Nigeria which offers the Ogoni people NOTHING in return. Ogoni is being killed so that Nigeria can live.”
The movement
and the response
George was the president of a MOSOP unit, the Council of Ogoni Professionals. In footage from Delta Force, a documentary about the Ogoni struggle, he’s visible in the back row onstage during a speech on the first Ogoni Day, which rallied 300,000 people to peacefully protest in support of the Ogoni cause.
Later, you can briefly see him again wearing the signature MOSOP visor — light blue with a red brim, six stars representing each of the Ogoni kingdoms, and lettering that reads “MOSOP” and then below, “Ogoni Must Survive.”
“I hadn’t seen this cap in years until my mom brought it out at Christmas,” Leesi says. “Any time I see it, I think of Delta Force. Watching the video again, I knew my dad instantly. I always try to remember that he was there.”
Even in the grainy footage that dates to January 4, 1993, it’s evident that that first Ogoni Day was joyous.
Throngs of people bounced down dirt pathways, holding palm fronds aloft and carrying signs with statements like, “Save Ogoni environment” and “Assassins go home.” Local cultural groups danced in the grass, stamping their feet and shaking their hips. People hoisted elaborate decorations, like a canoe containing a hula dancer, and large drums on their heads as they milled about. A crowd at least 50 deep held their hands up in the air and chanted, “No to Shell!”
“Everybody, including me, walked for miles, and we didn’t even feel it,” Monica says. “I’m generally very private and shy, and this was one of the times when who I am really came out.”
“It was electric,” George says. “It was magical. You can’t put your finger on why, but you can feel the peace and the happiness in that crowd. It was a real reawakening for the people.”
At first, it seemed like Ogoni Day and subsequent protests were making an impact: Shell paused its oil production shortly afterward.
Yet the excitement was short-lived. The rest of Delta Force provides a sobering look at the outbreak of violence after MOSOP’s calls for justice: regular attacks on Ogoni villages that burned down buildings and killed or maimed residents. A particularly gruesome scene shows women and children wailing with confusion; corpses lie on the dirt around them, organs spilling out onto the ground.
The military government accused other ethnic groups in the region of committing the strikes, but MOSOP leaders rejected these claims; they’d never had conflicts with those tribes in the past. Instead, they said, the story came back to oil, which made up 90 percent of Nigeria’s exports.
“When we began to question the corporations that the state relies on,” George says, “the army unleashed their security on Ogoni.”
The first murders
Ken Saro-Wiwa, a prominent writer and activist who had brought international attention to MOSOP and the predicament of the Ogoni, had been traveling but was scheduled to return to Ogoni that day.
The soldiers refused to let him enter. Instead, they escorted Saro-Wiwa in the opposite direction for at least five miles.
While Saro-Wiwa was being led away from Ogoni, there was a riot. Four Ogoni elders were killed.
By that night, Saro-Wiwa and eight other MOSOP leaders had been accused of the murders, with the government pointing to a rift that had developed in MOSOP (given different opinions on political strategy) as the impetus.
Those who were charged with the murders were sent to prison, awaiting a military tribunal that would decide their fate. Remaining MOSOP leaders, including George, were placed on wanted lists, despite recent sanctions on Nigeria by the United States and other countries.
Monica had recently given birth to a child, a girl, who was stillborn, and the couple were still grieving the loss. But, if George wanted to stay alive, the only thing he could do was hide.
“I couldn’t stay in one place,” he says. “They were always looking for me.”
George took refuge at different friends’ houses, staying a week at one, a few days at another, only moving at night. Once, he returned to Monica, bringing news that another friend of his had been arrested. The man had no children, a grievous affront in a place like Nigeria where children are expected to pass down the stories and knowledge of their parents.
“George did not want to leave this world without anyone knowing he was here,” Monica says.
A friend paid for Monica to go to a gynecologist, and the doctor told her when she’d be ovulating next. Somehow, Monica and George were able to rendezvous during that time period, at a friend’s house.
“How do we get pregnant?” George asked her.
Monica grinned. “We seize the opportunity,” she responded.
New life amid loss
Thanks to George’s status as a local leader, the family’s house was like a town square, open to all who wanted to share a gripe or a piece of news. The number of people constantly coming in and out was hard on Monica, and the probing questions she received — like how she became pregnant with George gone — weren’t helping.
“It was the most frightening time of my life,” Monica says. “I cried more than I talked then.”
George was friends with all of those imprisoned — he’d regularly had one-on-one meetings with Saro-Wiwa to plan MOSOP’s next moves — but one man, John, he knew particularly well. They’d been friends since third grade and had worked together before MOSOP; John supported George when George’s father died.
In George’s stead, Monica visited John at the prison.
Please stay strong, she told him.
On Sept. 24, Leesi was born at the hospital in Port Harcourt, with George still in hiding. Labor was quick, and the baby came out crying. Monica immediately burst into tears.
“I was overjoyed because our first child was a stillbirth,” she says. “So when he came out crying, I started crying for joy.”
The military tribunal had been ongoing, with statements given by several witnesses who were later revealed to have been pressured into false testimony. Everyone was tuned in, gathered around the radios in their homes to listen to the hearings, praying that the accused would not be killed.
Six weeks after Leesi’s birth, Monica left the village to get the baby checked out at the hospital. This child doesn’t sleep, she told the doctor. Monica’s sister had given birth to a child three weeks after Monica, and her baby was dozing away. But Leesi was active from the beginning, uninterested in rest.
Monica heard the news while she was in Port Harcourt: On Nov. 10, the accused men were indicted and hanged. They became known around the world as the Ogoni Nine. But George says the murdered Ogoni leaders should have had the moniker of the Ogoni 13 instead.
“In my opinion, the four Ogoni elders who were killed first were also victims of Shell and government violence on Ogoni,” George says. “If you add them to the nine that were hung, they are 13. Because you cannot separate them. What killed them is the MOSOP struggle they started.”
Leaving home
After the hanging, a MOSOP leader who was still alive looked frantically for George. When they finally connected, he asked George, “Why are you hiding in a way where no one can find you?”
“Do I have a choice?” George asked.
“Yes,” he said. “You need to leave this country now.”
George decided not to take Monica and the four-month-old Leesi on the voyage; he was confident that once he was out of the country and had secured a safe place to stay, he’d be able to arrange for his family to follow.
By mid-January in 1996, George made it to a refugee camp in a neighboring country, the Republic of Benin. An envoy from the American Immigration and Naturalization Service arrived at the camp in early February. The rest of the world was aware of the tragedy — many countries had removed their ambassadors from Nigeria after the Ogoni Nine murders — and Saro-Wiwa, before he was killed, had written a letter to the American embassy asking for the United States’ help in resettling about 10 MOSOP leaders.
“His aim was that we could continue exposing what was happening, since he was incarcerated,” George says.
After an interview with U.S. immigration officers, George received word that he’d be going to the state of Georgia.
Through the World Council of Churches, a global network of Christian representatives, a Presbyterian church in Georgia had applied to sponsor a refugee during the recent Bosnian War. Peace accords for that conflict had been signed in December, before the church could carry out its mission. But, as a result, its members were ready and able to support George.
On Feb. 14, 1996, George arrived in the United States. It was snowing — the first time he’d ever seen flurries.
He called a Nigerian friend with a landline and set up a time to talk to Monica. A month before, she hadn’t known where he was. Now? He was safe.
But Monica still had to make the journey, which had become more dangerous since the Nigerian government had discovered that George and a few other MOSOP leaders had escaped. In response, the government had closed the border with Benin. If anyone was found crossing, the warning came, that person would be shot on sight.
A friend arranged for Monica to stay in a safe place in Lagos, the closest Nigerian city to Benin, as he worked to figure out a way for her to cross over with Leesi. Four days and three nights later, he’d found a solution.
The next several hours were an exercise in trust, as Monica rode a bus, hid in bushes on foot, and darted between trees, following a person she didn’t know away from her home country toward her new life.
At six months old, Leesi wasn’t aware that the passage from Nigeria to Benin was dangerous. His mother had wrapped a blanket around her when she left for Lagos and often swathed him in it on her back during the crossing. As she ran through the forests, the bubbly baby chortled. Hee hee, hee hee, hee hee.
“To him,” Monica says, “it was fun.”
The refugee camp
When the pair arrived at the refugee camp, they found it full of fellow Ogonis. Many were also women whose husbands were not with them, some with three or more children.
Food was scarce. Monica tried not to go multiple days without eating to ensure she had enough milk to breastfeed Leesi. At one point, she was holding Leesi during a meal, and he peed in her soup. But there was no other food, so she ate the soup anyway.
Yet grief and despair were just as hard to find as sustenance in the refugee camp. Leesi started walking at the camp and would frequently return from a jaunt covered in mud, to the delight of other residents.
The refugees sat in huge groups and sang songs that chronicled the struggles they’d encountered and their hope for the future; in one, they sang, “Bill Clinton, we love you” to thank the American president at the time for his support of the Ogoni.
When Ogoni families left the camp, the strains of the signature Ogoni anthem inevitably rose into the air:
“Aabo, aabo, pa Ogoni aabo; nee iye ge ziga na ko Baraboo a giima i
“Eegai, eegai, pa Ogoni eegai; nee iye ge ziga na ko Baraboo a giima i
As the departing refugees got on the bus to head to the airport, their community would usher them to their new lives with a final call and response:
“Great Ogoni people; great! Great Ogoni people; great!”
In a photo from the camp of Monica, two friends, and Leesi, they don’t look like they’re suffering. Monica wears a smart pink-and-white polka dot tunic. Leesi resembles a typical American baby of the ‘90s, dressed in jean short overalls, a striped polo shirt, and tennis shoes with velcro straps. Everyone is smiling except for Leesi, who’s distracted by something out of frame.
“It’s an important part of Nigerian and Black culture: You’ve got to dress nicely, regardless of what you’re going through,” Leesi says now. “There’s a Black saying — Deon Kipping had a song — that’s called ‘I Don’t Look Like (What I’ve Been Through).’ So when we came to America, my mom barely had one bag of clothes. But the clothes that she had, she’s gonna make sure they look nice.”
“It’s striking because in this photo, I look clean, I have shoes on, my uncle has a watch,” he continues, scrutinizing the Polaroid. “But then you look in the background, and you’re like, ‘These are tents. There’s the ground. That’s grass.’ But you guys were important people in Ogoni so when you took your items to this new place, you didn’t want your items to look like the worst of your situation, the worst part of your lives. I see this photo and I’m like, ‘Ah! If you take the background away, you guys could be the same. No one would assume you’re refugees.’”
Section III: Methods
The George-Komis try to adjust to a new country, navigating different dynamics in religion, education, and work while holding on to the parts of their culture that empower them to find hope amid immense change.
The people who helped George
In America, everything was different than in Nigeria — the weather, the food, even the compliments. George was used to telling people that they were fat, like they looked like they’d had enough to eat lately. Luckily, the first time he did this in the United States, at church, “Uncle” Sam was there to shepherd George in a more culturally appropriate direction.
Sam was a member of the church that provided funds and support for George to get settled in the United States. A warm man with a talk show host’s gleaming teeth and shellacked hair, he’d served in the Air Force and worked for the American Red Cross.
Together with the selfless “Mama” Nancy — a taller version of Betty White, with a continually joyful smile — Uncle Sam taught George how to operate in this new country.
They ordered for him at restaurants when the only thing he recognized on menus was chicken and rice. Uncle Sam helped George negotiate the price of a car, and both he and Mama Nancy then went to court when George disputed a parking ticket to make sure George understood the judge. They accompanied George to job interviews and soothed his spirits when he was put on the night shift — considered the worst schedule — stocking shelves at Kroger.
“I had a master’s degree before I came here,” George says. “People were reporting to me. I was already somebody. And all of a sudden, in America, I came crashing down. But Uncle Sam and Mama Nancy, they talked to me. They made me understand that this is a different society. All you can now do is see how you can reboot.”
By September, George was able to save enough money to rent an apartment for his family: a comfortable three-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment unit half an hour outside of Atlanta. The building was owned by a group of churches that provided affordable housing for disadvantaged folks.
One of their neighbors was Ogoni, too; another was from Kenya. The complex was a few miles southwest of Clarkston, which would go on to become known as the “most diverse square mile in America” for its large number of immigrants and refugees.
Restarting in America
Leesi doesn’t have a lot of memories of that apartment building in Decatur, Georgia — the George-Komis moved into their own house when he was 5 years old — but seeing the complex’s driveways in a photo sends him back to playing on the asphalt as a young child.
“That was our physical activity in that space,” he says.
He remembers other Ogoni families who came to America after his, with everyone in tow. Their initial living situations were bleak compared to what George had secured. George understood that your living situation can have a direct impact on your outcome, your success.
“Recently, my mom and I were talking about her having to be by herself in the refugee camp with me,” Leesi says. “As frustrating as that was, my dad’s reasoning was that he couldn’t afford a place for his family yet. If he took us here, we’d have nowhere to stay. The apartment is significant because it was him and us. But it also allowed my parents to hit the marks they wanted to be able to hit, to progress into buying their own home and living the American life that they envisioned after being forced to come here.”
MOSOP USA
Once the family was settled, George jumped back into MOSOP efforts. He owed it to Saro-Wiwa and the other MOSOP leaders who had been killed by the Nigerian government — as well as the friends and family members who remained back in Ogoni, continuing to suffer under military occupation — to continue this work.
George and other Ogoni refugees in America quickly became integrated into MOSOP USA, an offshoot of the original organization that continued to push for Ogoni rights from outside of Nigeria. Every six months or so, they held meetings in cities with significant concentrations of Ogoni people — Washington, D.C.; Chicago; Atlanta; Houston — to swap news and discuss strategy.
In between meetings, they organized demonstrations at Shell gas stations and spoke on the Ogoni’s behalf at Atlanta City Council. George arranged meetings with authority figures passing through Atlanta: Nigeria’s former head of state, Yakubu Gowon; Wole Soyinka, the only Nigerian to win the Nobel Prize; Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, the first African-American woman to represent Georgia in the House of Representatives.
For a few years, MOSOP USA was able to gain traction. When Nigeria transitioned from military rule to a democracy in 1999, though, Americans became less receptive to the organization’s bids for more attention on the Ogoni plight.
The Ogonis in Nigeria still didn’t have the basic rights they’d asked for, so MOSOP remained needed. But different opinions emerged within MOSOP USA about the best methods to take going forward.
After all, every person in MOSOP USA had experienced trauma. Their friends and leaders had died. They’d had to escape to another country to avoid the same fate. They were as invested as they could be an ocean away from the heart of the Ogoni conflict.
“That pain stayed in us,” George says.
Leesi remembers MOSOP members regularly stopping by their house to talk shop with his father when he was a kid. They’d smile at Leesi and try to talk to him in Khana or Gokana (two of the primary Ogoni dialects) but always gave off a serious aura. After all, they had important things to discuss.
Gradually, Leesi noticed that the Ogoni uncles didn’t come around as much anymore. At the time, he didn’t understand why.
Faith and fracture
During the pristine Georgia summers, the George-Komis’ church provided lemonade and cookies on the lawn after services.
While the kids snacked and frolicked around, the adults mingled, chatting with each other and pastor Steve Montgomery, a jovial man who was a regular advocate for social justice as part of the Christian mission.
“...the Bible I read and study daily,” he once wrote in an editorial, “is filled with passion for welcoming the alien, the sojourner, the fearful, and most especially the children.”
Reverend Montgomery and some church members in the Six Star Refugee Partnership — a collaborative between several local parishes that had sprung up to sponsor more refugees like the George-Komis — would talk to Monica and George, but few others did. If other parishioners were sitting at the one picnic table in the courtyard, those people would get plenty of visitors. If Monica and George had taken a seat there, though, they were often left alone.
“Church was the first place I saw them experience discrimination,” Leesi says. “We were the first Black family that church ever had, the first refugee family they had. And it was founded in 1960.”
Certain churchgoers refused to greet the George-Komis when they came to services. Once, Monica and another church member were going door-to-door to speak with members who hadn’t turned in their yearly donation pledges yet. One person wouldn’t come outside because Monica was there and refused to commit to any donations, stating that the church has “welcomed other people.”
The church member with Monica apologized on the man’s behalf.
“I’m so sorry that you had to hear that,” she said over and over.
“This is not new,” Monica told her. “We are used to this.”
“Why are you still coming to church then?” she asked.
“We are still coming to this church not because of the people but because of God,” Monica told her, “because that is who we are serving. If we were serving people, then we would leave because of how some of them have treated us. But no, we are staying.”
“We stayed as long as we could,” she says now.
Are we Ogoni? American? Black?
Leesi was 5 or 6 years old when he first watched from the church lawn as his parents were ignored.
It was a confusing experience for him. At home, Nigerian culture was regularly celebrated, his mom playing cassettes of Ogoni music while she cleaned or made breakfast, his dad popping in videos of Nigeria to show off the homeland to Leesi and his younger brother, Tombari (pronounced tom-BARR-ee) George-Komi.
In the outside world, though, their family wasn’t recognized as Nigerian or Ogoni. Instead, they were seen as Black.
Leesi’s father wasn’t shocked by this. He had a master’s degree in history and had studied how discrimination manifests in Nigeria and around the world. As a member of a minority ethnic group and a MOSOP leader, he’d personally felt the blows of prejudice. He was prepared for what he’d experience in America.
But were his sons?
“My parents always let us know: ‘While you’re in this house, speak Khana,’” Leesi says. “‘But when you're out there in the world, be conscious that you are still a Black man in America and the world sees you as such.’ It's something that's always in the back of my head.”
“They move very, very cautiously,” Tombari says of his parents. “And so the expectations were that we also move very cautiously. They did not want to arouse any sort of trouble.”
At elementary school in Clarkston, Leesi was surrounded by students that looked like him. But at LOGOS, a once-a-week after-school program run by the family’s church, he was the only Black kid in his age group.
The other children were nice to him, for the most part. But he was constantly aware of his own behavior and actions and regularly tried to play down traits that could be perceived as stereotypically Black, including physical traits and tropes, to stay in the kids’ good graces.
I know you're my friend, his inner voice worried, but I don't want you not to be my friend in the future. And if I continue to beat you in these sports and games that we're playing — relay races, tug-of-war — and make you feel bad…
The ruminating became a pattern. Whenever Leesi jumped in the car to head to LOGOS, he was eager to run around with his peers. But once he started thinking about what sports they’d play that day and how he’d have to talk to everyone during the dinner at the end of the session, the excitement would drain from his face.
He always wanted to open up more. After all, the kids there were cool. But he wasn’t able to make the distinction that LOGOS was a safe space, that he could let his guard down and not feel like he had to be looking over his shoulder to protect himself as a Black person.
“I was in an all-white church, and I’d seen what happened to my parents, so it was a constant question in my mind of whether these white people were going to look at me differently,” he says. “And it was confusing because some of the kids were nice to me, but some of the adults weren’t nice to me. As a kid, I was not able to differentiate that just because society is this way at large doesn't mean that these kids around me feel this exact way. I didn’t know what to do.”
Leesi didn't have the vocabulary to know it at the time, but this inner voice was the first sign of a growing anxiety.
“When I think about it, I can’t separate the joy and the pain of the experience,” he continues. “The anxiety was so pervasive, but no matter what, I was in a place where I got to commune with God and we got free food. So no matter how sad I was, I was leaving with a full stomach.”
Fighting to belong
Outside of church, the George-Komis were subject to more blatant racism. Open your mouth, people said. Speak English. You don’t belong here. Go back to your country.
Once, Monica went to the Georgia Department of Human Services to pick up food stamps. There, an intake worker could not comprehend that Monica had two last names.
“I don’t understand you,” she said loudly and haltingly, as if Monica were the one who didn’t understand her.
Usually one to stay quiet about her frustrations, Monica snapped. “I understand my name!” she said.
“I felt like: ‘You may think that I don’t know anything, that I’m less intelligent,’” Monica says. “But I know my name.”
For George, the workplace was the worst. After his stint at Kroger, he worked as a file clerk at a wholesale insurance company, where people openly mocked his appearance and the rice dishes Monica sent for his lunch.
“The first time I saw my husband cry was when we lost our first child, before Leesi, 30 years ago,” Monica says. “The second time I saw him cry was a day when he came home and told me about what happened at work — how he was talked down to, how he was not treated like a human being. And we both cried.”
“We said, ‘We did not choose to come here,’” she continues. “‘We did not choose to change where we lived. We were forced to come here just because we asked that what is in our land should be distributed to us. But we will have to see what we can do to manage our lives, live our lives, and still be happy.’”
George enrolled in night classes at a local trade school, working toward a certification to become a Microsoft-certified systems engineer that would set him up for a network engineering role a little higher up the office hierarchy. Monica started a garden; soon, tomatoes, peppers, and rosemary were bursting out of the small beds, more than enough to feed her growing family. (“We ate a lot of tomatoes,” Leesi says, laughing.)
When they had free time, the parents took their kids on bike rides around the neighborhood or kicked a soccer ball around in the backyard of their Stone Mountain home, taking turns as goalie. They bought an annual pass for the park housing the giant granite monolith that gave their city its name. Over time, they taught Leesi and Tombari to climb the mountain.
When sports helped with the stress
In Nigeria, everyone plays football (or, as the United States calls it, soccer). Leesi grew up hearing stories of his father playing the game with friends, still in their school uniforms, kicking up clods of dirt with their bare feet. When Leesi was in first grade, he continued the tradition, joining a recreational soccer team for which his dad served as coach.
Two to three games were always going on at once on the soccer fields behind the Clarkston library, with kids sprinting around in those neon yellow pinnies that smelled of body odor no matter how many times the parents washed them.
It was one place where Leesi didn’t need to be concerned that his physical skills would overshadow the other kids’.
“I just wasn’t good,” Leesi says. “I was 7 or 8 so obviously I didn’t have great motor skills. No kid does. But I was not the best.”
One practice, when Leesi was particularly frustrated, his father comforted him. Leesi doesn’t remember exactly what his dad said, but he went home that day feeling calmer, like things would get better.
And they did: Leesi’s team ended up making it to the championship game. Leesi and a kid on the opposing team had recently gotten into a fight at school, so Leesi desperately wanted to win.
But once he started playing, he forgot about the feud. Soon, he was just enjoying moving and competing.
Sometime in the second half of the game, Leesi scored. His team won, and his dad received an award as rec coach of the year, a gold plaque that remains in the George-Komi home.
“That’s a core memory for me,” Leesi says, “of my dad helping me succeed in a sport that made me feel good and that he really cares about.”
Amid the end-of-game celebrations, Leesi shook hands with the kid he’d argued with — and realized he wasn’t angry anymore.
“As emotional as sports are, they’re also cathartic,” Leesi says. “After it’s over, you guys can just be friends and wash away the issues you had. That’s when I first realized that physical activity made me feel good, not just in physical ways but psychologically as well.”
Proud to be an American
A few months after George had arrived in Georgia, the 1996 Summer Olympics kicked off in Atlanta. The region was teeming with pride as the world’s best athletes faced off in their own backyard.
“You see American patriotism, and now you’re part of it,” George says. “That’s how it felt: Now you’re part of that pride.”
Monica felt similarly during Independence Day parades. In Decatur, the George-Komis lived about a mile from The Square, a downtown district that hosted Fourth of July festivities, and walking past all the flags and the smiles made Monica beam, too.
“One thing I found out when I came here is that Americans are proud of their country,” Monica says, “and it’s contagious.”
When George and Monica each became U.S. citizens, in 2002 and 2003, respectively, their nationalism inflated even more. In exchange for living in the country for five years and passing a U.S. civics test and an interview with an immigration officer, they received certificates and mini copies of the U.S. Constitution — and a welcome sense of relief.
“Symbolically, having that shield of protection for people like us, whose home government was after us, and now you acquire citizenship of the United States… it’s like you’re no longer under their tutelage,” Monica says. “You feel liberated.”
When Monica told the caregivers at the daycare where she brought her youngest son, Bariture (pronounced barr-ee-TOUR-eh) George-Komi, that she’d become a citizen, they gave her a plaque decorated with thumbprints from all the babies.
George received a large piece of paper printed with an American flag. On the back, church members had written words of congratulations.
On the top, it said: “Well done, George Komi. All across the country, the flag still waves. Its stars are stronger than ever and, beneath its proud colors, America stands together.”
A new chapter in learning
While their parents were applying for citizenship, Leesi and Tombari were applying for the Kittredge Magnet School for High Achievers.
Students with the best reading scores in the county were entered into a lottery for spots at the magnet school. Both boys had high enough scores to be considered but neither wanted to leave their community in Clarkston.
“I remember crying a lot,” Tombari says. “I didn’t understand why I couldn’t see my friends anymore. Our elementary school was not even a mile away from our house so we could walk there. All the kids in the neighborhood were there. So it was very familiar.”
“The idea of having to leave the few friends that I had when I felt I wasn’t good at making new ones — I hated that,” Leesi says. “I was so worried. I was so fearful.”
Parents or guardians needed to sign an approval form for their children to enter the Kittredge lottery. Two years in a row, Leesi conveniently “lost” the form. By his fifth-grade year, though, his mother had figured out what was going on and dropped off the form herself. Both boys were then accepted.
“That was the best thing: that I wasn’t gonna have to go to a brand-new school alone, and he wasn’t gonna have to go to a brand-new school alone,” Tombari says. “We were gonna have each other. So that meant a lot.”
Tombari was more social than Leesi, though. The first two weeks at Kittredge, the older brother was the new, quiet kid. The teachers pronounced his name as “LEE-see,” and he never corrected them, too nervous and uncomfortable to speak up. He didn’t have the accent his parents did, but he was still afraid of being misunderstood.
“My mental thought process is kind of all over the place,” Leesi says. “And sometimes when I talk and I'm excited about things, I jump all over the place and I paint a picture that makes sense to me. But I quickly realize it might not make sense to others. The easiest way to not have people misunderstand you is to just not speak.”
Then another new kid arrived at Kittredge. Larenz and Leesi hit it off. They were both studious yet athletic, into Marvel as well as basketball. But Larenz was more extroverted and could act as a gateway for Leesi to make other friends.
“Every stage of my life, I’ve made one really great friend and they’ve been the social person, and then I start being able to talk to people. And people realize they might like me, that I’m cool,” Leesi says. “But it really takes that person for me to feel like I can be in a safe space.”
In the long run, Tombari became an icebreaker for Leesi, too.
“He's incredibly funny, hilarious, but also as a child, he would be annoying sometimes,” Leesi says, chuckling. “But he helped facilitate some social interactions with people, especially later in high school, that I learned to really appreciate. Even if he was doing dumb shit, people were still then talking about it with me, like we were still conversing and that would lead to discussing other things. And people liked him. He’s more outgoing initially than I am. So he could break in first, and then I, as the older brother, would get in there and people would be like, 'Oh, he's cool, too.'"
“It was wonderful,” he says, “having Tombari around.”
(Re)education for Mom, too
The same year the boys started at Kittredge, Monica found a job as an administrative assistant at Emory University.
When the boys were little, she’d cried herself to sleep on a regular basis, remembering that her Nigerian education — the degree she’d spent six years earning — was worthless in this new country.
But now that her kids were a little older, she was determined to get back to where she belonged in the workforce. A job was the first step.
College was the second. With the internet had come the concept of online degree programs; the University of Phoenix took that idea and supercharged it by creating the first fully online higher ed institution, making it easier for parents like Monica to both take classes and take care of their children.
But when Monica called to ask about enrolling, she began to cry again.
The representative on the phone had asked if she had any previous education. It made her feel like she’d never been to school, like she was being devalued for the millionth time.
Why are you crying? the woman asked from the phone.
When Monica told her, the woman said, I want you not to look back — but instead, to look forward. I will help you.
For the next two years, Monica sat at the dining room table and did her homework alongside her sons.
When she received her diploma, she said, “This degree is for all the women, like my mother, who could never read or write.”
Monica was then promoted to the position of associate director of admissions for the Division of Physical Therapy at Emory’s School of Medicine — just eight years after she’d started there as an administrative assistant.
After she sped through a two-year master’s program in 16 months, she said, “This degree is for me.”
Sports as a social mechanism
Every day when Leesi had finished his homework, he and Tombari would knock on neighbors’ doors, gathering their friends for the best part of the day. To the left lived Antonio, a feisty friend of Tombari’s. In a cul-de-sac to the right were the late Kristopher, “the coolest cat with a jump shot like butter,” and his twin sister, Kristina, who were two years older than Leesi.
Rounding out the squad were brothers Q and Tay (“calm” and “a real dude," respectively); the late Rashad, Q and Tay’s older brother, the comedian of the group; Q and Tay’s uncle DJ (albeit younger than Q), a competitive, hilarious hooper with the craziest bounce and most effortless shot; Alex, of Eritrean descent; and Muhammad, the son of Ethiopian immigrants. Alex and Muhammad weren’t brothers but had similar personalities: They both had a sense of moxie, with no qualms about being real with their love for their heritage.
Together, they’d all walk to a basketball court or a football field, gabbing about their favorite sports stars: LeBron, Kobe, Atlanta Falcons wide receiver Roddy White.
“We were walking everywhere to play a sport, farther than our parents would have ever allowed us to go,” Leesi says. “It was all just because we liked our friends, we liked the people in our neighborhood. I wasn’t particularly good at basketball at the time. But I was going to stick around to play because this was my social mechanism. This is how we coped with our life. That was such a large component of my childhood and how I built relationships with people that I cared about.”
Moving in groups also gave the boys protection when they trekked further away from home.
“If I wanted to play basketball in Brandon Hills, which was the not-so-good neighborhood next to ours, let’s say hood-adjacent, I had to bring my brother because I had to have somebody else with me; I couldn’t go by myself,” Leesi says. “And I’m more likely to make that walk through the woods to get there. But if I don’t have him, then I’m not doing it.”
Bariture was five years younger than Tombari and seven years younger than Leesi. Seeing his brothers play basketball created a similar pull to the sport for him. Even if he wasn’t playing, he would sit and watch from the sidelines.
“That’s honestly a lot of where I was learning how to be a man,” Bariture says. “A man learning how to operate with difficulties, like arguments and things of that nature.”
When Bariture did play with Leesi and Tombari, he considers those games some of his favorite memories of sports.
“I felt like nobody could touch me during those times,” Bariture says. “We’d trash talk, but I knew for sure my brothers would never let anyone try to disrespect me. And when I had a good game, they always made me feel like I was on top of the world, like nothing else mattered, like we didn’t just argue about playing the PlayStation two hours ago or whatever the case might have been. They always uplifted me.”
Kinship without borders
When Leesi was a kid, he remembers his mom calling people in Nigeria every day. How do you know all these people? he wondered. What are you doing with all these people? Why are you talking to all these people?
What Leesi didn’t understand at the time was that Monica hadn’t broken ties with her community in Nigeria just because she’d left the country. In Ogoni, everyone is an “aunt” or an “uncle” or a “cousin,” and the code of family applies; you win when they win, and you lose when they lose.
“The older I got, the more I realized she and my father were continuing to maintain that community, continuing to maintain that protective unit that helps you get through these stressors that you have,” Leesi says now.
George had MOSOP USA as an extension of that Nigerian network. With time, Monica gained her own versions.
In 2000, the Nigerian Women Association of Georgia (NWAG) was founded to create a support pipeline from the Nigerian women in America to the girls in the homeland.
One of NWAG’s primary initiatives involved providing scholarships to Nigerian girls to ensure they could go to college. To apply for the scholarship, the girls had to write essays on different topics every year; recent examples involved considering why educated Nigerians are leaving the country and what applicants think the government can do to stop the brain drain as well as analyzing how technology can be leveraged to address gender-based violence in Nigeria.
“I don’t think I’d be able to do things like this in Nigeria,” says Monica, who joined NWAG in 2010. “But with the process here in America, you’re able to see how you can help.”
By 2010, the Ogoni Women Association of Georgia (OWAGA) had formed to create a similar group for the Ogoni community, although it initially focused more on social support.
“We’ve got to express love to one another,” Monica says now. “And we’ve been doing that for the past 15 years: helping one another, reaching out to one another, checking on one another, reaching out to our families, being there for our families, being there for two of our members when they lost their husbands.”
When Monica became president, OWAGA began to give back in more tangible ways. One was an initiative called the Widows Project, through which OWAGA donated cash to 119 Ogoni widows back in Nigeria to use toward a project or debt of their choice.
Fifteen years before, one woman had pledged her land to pay for her husband’s funeral and hadn’t been able to reclaim it since. When she received the funds from OWAGA, she went straight to the man who’d acquired her land and gave him all of the money, redeeming half the cost of her property in one transaction.
“That makes me so, so happy,” Monica says. “One thing I’ve learned in America is that you don’t just have to help people from your family. It’s OK to help humanity — those you may never meet, those who may never thank you, who may never know you or who you are.”
The pressures of being Ogoni
It was Leesi’s sophomore year of high school when he first googled “anxiety symptoms.”
Even though he had made friends in his neighborhood and at school, his mental and physical tension around social interaction was getting worse.
“I would start worrying about how I was saying something and how the other person is going to interpret it and then that consistent worry about the next steps of the conversation would stop me from even engaging in conversations,” Leesi says. “And then after that, you get the physical signs of sweating and shortness of breath, and you’re thinking, ‘Oh, shit. Now they know I’m nervous.’”
Understanding that there was a name for what he’d been dealing with was helpful, but he didn’t know what to do with the information.
What do I…Who do I… he remembers thinking. I guess I can go to my parents and tell them, but I know how we view our society. I know how things go.
Expectations for Ogoni-Nigerians are immense, for reasons that date back hundreds of years. The Ogoni take pride that they were never sold into slavery compared to so many other Africans. (Some scholars believe that the Ogoni remained free because their kingdom was the primary food source for the Eastern Niger Delta, which provided food for Trans-Atlantic trade.)
When the British military did arrive in Ogoniland, in 1901, its soldiers admired the Ogoni lifestyle so much that they called the tribe “pure,” a word later transformed into a slur by other ethnic groups in Nigeria.
In America, Nigerian immigrants in general were considered a “model minority,” given their high level of education and income relative to the median population when Leesi was growing up.
“In Nigeria, you’re made to believe when you get to America or when you get to the UK, you’re going to do great — you’re going to make money — while Black Americans, African-Americans, don’t,” Leesi says. “And they’re not able to do what you can do with the opportunities when you get there. So you must be a better Black person.”
“There’s a psychological component of Nigerians in Nigeria seeing their older brothers, their older siblings, go to these countries that they have been taught are racist and succeed in ways that people who have been in these countries for hundreds of years have not been able to succeed, even though they look like them,” Leesi continues. “So the conclusion is: ‘There must be something wrong with those other people,’ even though the foundational institutional issues that have occurred in America, that are specific to Black Americans, will never impact Nigerian immigrants in the same way.”
Being the firstborn male in the Ogoni tradition comes with even more duress. For explanation, Leesi points to the biblical story of brothers Esau and Jacob, which tells that the firstborn son inherits the birthright — more money and land but also the responsibility of taking care of the family and the burden of blame if something goes wrong. Esau gave his birthright to Jacob in exchange for food, a trade that was considered unforgivable in the Bible — and, by extension, in families like Leesi’s.
By the time he was in high school, Leesi felt like he served as an additional parent, trying to set a good example for his younger brothers while keeping Tombari out of trouble and mediating between Tombari and Bariture.
“I put a lot of pressure on myself to be the model first child,” Leesi says. “That’s Nigerian culture. And so, if people don’t get me, then I’m doing a disservice to my family.”
In those days, Leesi was so stressed that he would often walk halfway to a friend’s house, consider all the ways that a potential conversation could go wrong there, turn around, and go home. He’d read instead so he wouldn’t have to interact with the outside world.
“I didn’t give many people the chance to understand me,” he says.
Education as recovery
Leesi was leaving football practice in 10th grade when the call came that his father was in the hospital. George had been in a car accident — the vehicle he was in had flipped over several times — and he was now dealing with a traumatic brain injury.
The first six months afterward were full of doctor’s visits as the family tried to parse how the injury would affect George’s thoughts and emotions.
Memory lapses and brain fog became part of George’s life. He started experiencing more dips in his mood — more sadness, more loneliness.
“He was trying to figure out, ‘OK, how do I navigate a new space while still holding on to the dreams that I’ve had?’” Leesi says. “Instead of feeling like I can no longer live those dreams.”
George tried to keep working after the accident. His children were getting older, and the bills were mounting, so he felt like he had to stay at his job. But his employer eventually asked him to leave.
“There was a manager and a few staff who were very…I hate to use the word racist,” George says. “They saw an advantage and they took it.”
For a long time, George couldn’t figure out what else to do.
“I was beginning to lose the essence of who I am, what I knew myself to be,” George says. “Because I’d been beaten down for so long.”
To find his footing again, he decided to return to school, the place that could give him a purpose in a familiar environment. In his home of Nigeria, getting a PhD was a lot less expensive than in America, and he’d be surrounded by friends who knew what he was capable of.
“It took some time and struggle,” George says, “but there was huge support from my friends who were professors already, who knew my capabilities.”
Nigerian society had changed since George had become an American. He had to relearn how things worked while carefully choosing the people he spent time with, given his former status as a MOSOP leader.
In 2021, George received a PhD in diplomacy and international studies from Ignatius Ajuru University of Education.
“Being in a familiar environment with my friends helped me realize, ‘Oh, there’s still fuel in this tank.’ It boosted my confidence in myself that had been completely decimated,” he says. “For me, it was more like therapy.”
George and a friend during his PhD program
George and a friend during his PhD program
Keep reading:
This is Our America, Part II
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