I JUST WANT TO GO HOME, REALLY.

🎧For the maximum cinematic reading experience (optional but encouraged), listen to Asa - “Eye Adaba” at a volume low enough to feel, not hear. If you start singing along, it’s too loud.

I was doom scrolling through ‘Lagos TikTok’ today when I felt an aggressive, creeping irritation settle in, enough that I eventually closed the app. I needed to interrogate that feeling, because this wasn’t its first visit. It had been knocking on the door of my thoughts for a while; in fact, it had already made itself at home. Lately, I have found myself desperately hoping that the gentrification of Lagos in December soon becomes a thing of the past. I almost hesitate to even say “Detty December” at all. I genuinely HATE the term, along with its sister phrases: “Batch A, B, and C,” “Your Ultimate Guide to Lagos in December,” “/Lay-gurs/”, and the general commercialisation of something that was never meant to be a packaged experience. What bothers me isn’t fun, or celebration, or people enjoying themselves. It’s the way Christmas in Lagos has been reduced to a brand. 

For people who grew up in Nigeria, December isn’t an experience. It isn’t content, at least not in the way it’s now presented. It is simply going home for Christmas. It is seeing your parents, reconnecting with friends, attending events you didn’t plan for, sitting in traffic for hours, being bored and overstimulated at the same time. It is familiar, chaotic, and deeply unremarkable in the way only ‘home’ can be. I think this is why the term “Detty December” unsettles me so much: it feels like a misnaming, like turning something lived into something to be consumed. What’s happening isn’t just the gentrification of a place, but the gentrification of its meaning.

On social media, TikTok in particular, which prompted this piece, Lagos has become a backdrop for curated chaos and an aesthetic optimised for virality. And in branding the space this way, something is lost. It's more than nuance; it’s ownership. As a result, the desire to return home begins to look and feel indistinguishable from participating in a trend, and that misrecognition is deeply uncomfortable. 

I have hated the rhetoric that is “Detty December” for years, so I’m not even sure why I felt such an urgent need to interrogate my feelings around it today. But in doing so, I realised that what bothers me more than the term or the trend itself, is how it has begun to shape my own feelings about going back. I have started to cringe at the desire to travel home in December, not because I don’t want to see my parents or friends, but because the internet has reframed my return home as a consumer joining a trend. As though doing what I have always done has suddenly become participation in a social media spectacle I never opted into. The sheer loudness of “Detty December” has contaminated something personal, leaving me with the sense that I have lost narrative control. 

So I ask myself: am I being a gatekeeper? A hater? Am I unfairly annoyed? I don’t know, maybe, to some degree, I am. But the truth is that I genuinely believe people, especially Nigerians in the diaspora who have never been, should experience Nigeria. I think knowing where you’re from matters and going to your home country isn’t only grounding but extremely necessary. My frustration isn’t about people coming. It is about how they come, and how it is spoken about once they do.

There’s a difference between going to Nigeria to better understand yourself and consuming it for social capital. My protectiveness, then, doesn’t come from exclusivity; it comes from the grief of watching something formative in my life be redefined in ways that strip it of its ordinariness and intimacy. Social media amplifies meaning through repetition. Even if only a handful of people engage with Lagos superficially, the constant repetition of that framing makes it feel as if this is now the only narrative being told. For those of us who know it as home, that narrowing of narrative leaves behind a particular kind of grief: the grief of losing what home once was to us. 

For me, loving Nigeria doesn’t mean wanting it all to myself; it means wanting it to be seen honestly, and sharing it without spectacle. I have come to understand that my discomfort isn’t necessarily about Lagos changing, cities change all the time. It’s about framing, and who gets to define what Lagos is and isn’t. Ultimately, what I am trying to say is this: going home shouldn’t feel like participating in a trend. It should just feel like going home.