If you haven’t made friends with any Nigerians at Hive…WTF are you ...

We all know the Nigerian Prince who sent us emails in the early 2000's asking for our bank info and promising to send us lot's of money. He never did send me that money...

In parts of Asia there are some Nigerians who aggressively try to pull you into overpriced clubs. I wonder what happened to them during the pandemic. I hope they are ok.

Whatever your image of Nigeria, I challenge you to spend a few weeks getting to know the Nigerians at Hive and not feeling a strong desire to go visit. Not only has everyone at Hive broken all of my stereotypes, they have become good friend and some of my most loyal readers, leaving some of the best comments. They help fuel this community and they are a diverse bunch too.

I don't like to put too much focus on a persons nationality because we are all individuals, I just want to let the rest of Hive know what they are missing.

Last week I was in the Cross Culture discord with @esther-emmanuel and @blezyn and I surprised them with some Nigerian pidgin. They let me practice with them and make my nonsensical jokes. They were surprised that I knew some words and phrases, but look, if I have 10+ friends and acquaintances from a country, I want to learn how people talk. With Nigerian pidgin I don't think I'll be speaking it in person because it just won't sound right with an American accent, but I want to understand everyone.

I've spent hours on discord talking to @starstrings01, @rasamuel (who I'd love to see come back to Hive), and most recently @kemmyb and @kenechukwu97 sharing our worlds with each other. We have a lot to talk about anyway but they happen to come from a country that is very different from the countries I've lived in, and vice versa, so we have even more to share and learn from each other.

I didn't plan on name dropping anyone and I want to stop there because there is no way I can catch all the great people I've met here, there are just way too many. I do encourage you to see for yourself though, check out the comment section in any of my previous posts and you'll see what I am talking about.

Last year I watched carefully as the #endSARS protests heated up. I was impressed with and fully supported the solidarity and the peaceful but assertive nature of the protests. For those who don't know, SARS were a police unit that were very abusive towards young people. Local Nigerians with bitcoin or a bank app need to be careful of SARS otherwise they could be robbed or beaten up. Even though SARS was dissolved, the new police unit seems to have some of the same old habits.

Get the Nigerian Prince out of your head (over there they are called "Yahoo"'s), and get it out of your head that all the Nigerians at Hive just want to spam or power down and cash out. A lot of people from Nigeria powering up, and others make up for powering down by bringing great content and leaving awesome comments. Get it out of your head that you can't relate, or that you can make any blanket stereotypes, and get to know people for who they are rather than people from "one of those countries" that isn't part of the conversation.

In all honesty, I'm still intimidated by the idea of going to Africa but that has absolutely nothing to do with most of the people there. It just has to do with little things that I'm not used to.... eating food with my hands (dry food is fine), being a white dude in a continent which still hasn't recovered from being taken advantage of by white dudes, not knowing what to be careful of and how to stay safe (in general, and as a foreigner), and most of all, malaria.

I definitely want to go in this decade too, in the next few years if possible. I have my Hive friends from Nigeria to thank for that. You guys opened up a part of the world for me which I could only be cluelessly curious about before so thank you from the bottom of my heart.

And to the rest of you, go support Hive Naija, one of the most essential pillars of Hive. If you can’t find someone great to follow, you aren’t looking hard enough.

In the end we are all just people. I don't really care where you are from, more about what is inside. I am just showing some respect for people in a certain part of the world that I knew almost nothing about before. I know there are beautiful people in every country, so let's do what we can to bring everyone together and grow each local community as we connect between them at Cross Culture.

🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎🌎