In December 2020, I stood in Istanbul’s airport on a layover, somewhere between the life I’d left in Nigeria and a master’s programme in Morocco I wasn’t sure I’d survive. My wife’s message glowed on my phone: “We believe in you.” I was carrying one suitcase and a decision that looked, from certain angles, like the worst I’d ever made. I had left a stable job at Olam in the middle of a global pandemic to study something called Collective Intelligence at a university I’d never visited, in a country where I didn’t speak the language.
Was I a migrant or a traveller?
I’ve been turning that question over for years as something I’ve lived, well beyond any abstract thought experiment. Sometimes in the same week, sometimes in the same hour.
The easy version of this distinction
There’s a clean way to frame it. Migrants move reactively, pushed by circumstances, pulled by necessity. Travellers move intentionally, drawn by curiosity, guided by purpose. One is survival; the other is exploration. One is happening to you; the other is happening through you.
I’ve seen this framework in futures literacy circles and systems thinking workshops. It’s appealing because it maps neatly onto how we like to narrate our lives: agency over drift, choice over compulsion, growth over mere endurance.
But the clean version has a problem. It’s dishonest.
What the clean version misses
Three years before Morocco, I was a packaging supervisor at Olam in Ilorin. Twelve-hour shifts. Mechanical noise that settled into your bones. Shouted instructions. My degree in crop and environmental protection (five years of study at LAUTECH) felt like something that had happened to someone else. I wasn’t thinking about futures literacy. I was thinking about whether I could keep doing this for another decade.
When the acceptance letter from Mohammed VI Polytechnic University arrived, the decision to go looked like a traveller’s move. A bold leap toward intellectual reinvention. And in some ways it was. I had applied on purpose. I wanted something different.
But I was also running. Running from a job that was crushing me. Running from the feeling that my education had been wasted. Running toward the only door that had opened, without knowing what was behind it.
Migrant or traveller? Both. At the same time.
That’s the part the clean framework struggles with. In real life, reactive and intentional aren’t opposites. They’re braided together. The same decision can be an escape and an expedition. The same person can feel pushed and pulled in the same moment.
When the mindset shifts mid-journey
In Morocco, I spent two years in a state I can only describe as productive disorientation. The master’s programme was intellectually thrilling. I was studying how groups think, how collective decisions emerge from individual contributions, how the architecture of interaction shapes what intelligence becomes possible. My agricultural background, which had seemed like a liability, turned out to be an asset. Ecological systems and social systems share deep structural parallels that my classmates from other backgrounds couldn’t see.
But I was also navigating a new culture, a language barrier that never fully dissolved, and the quiet pain of watching my children grow up on a phone screen. When I took an internship back in Nigeria’s troubled north and the security situation deteriorated, I had to relocate to the southwest. That wasn’t a traveller’s choice. That was survival.
When I returned to Morocco after the internship, the job search tested me in ways the programme never did. Rejection emails accumulated. Savings dwindled. I lay awake calculating how many weeks I could keep going before I’d have to surrender the dream and go home.
In those weeks, I was entirely a migrant. Reactive, desperate, pushed by circumstances I couldn’t control. The traveller’s mindset felt like a luxury I couldn’t afford.
Then an interview came through. The Africa Initiative at UM6P needed an Outreach Officer. My unusual combination of agricultural science, collective intelligence, and cross-cultural experience (the exact resume that had felt like a confused patchwork) turned out to be precisely what they wanted. The migrant became a traveller again. Or maybe the traveller had been there all along, disguised as a migrant.
The honest question
I’ve come to think the migrant-traveller distinction describes two modes that every person oscillates between, sometimes by choice and sometimes not, rather than two types of people.
What determines which mode you’re in? Partly circumstances. It’s hard to be a traveller when your savings are running out and your visa is expiring. Partly perspective. The same situation can feel like exile or adventure depending on whether you can see a thread connecting where you are to where you’re going. And partly privilege. The traveller mindset requires a certain baseline of safety, resources, and optionality that isn’t available to everyone equally.
That last point matters to me because I come from a context where millions of people move, across borders, across continents, because staying isn’t viable, with curiosity playing no part. Framing the reactive mindset as a deficiency, something to overcome through better thinking, ignores the material conditions that make intentionality possible.
The more honest question moves past “are you a migrant or a traveller?” toward something harder: what conditions allow someone to shift from one mode to the other? And, more urgently, how do we create those conditions for more people?
What I carry forward
I’m writing this from Morocco, where I’m working at UM6P’s Africa Initiative after completing my master’s. I’m applying for doctoral programmes, hoping to take this work further. By the clean framework, that should feel like a traveller’s move. And in many ways it is. I’m choosing this. I want it.
But I also know that the next time circumstances tighten (visa uncertainty, family separation, the disorientation of starting over again), the migrant mode will return as a natural human response to precarity rather than a failure of mindset.
What I’ve learned from the oscillation is this: the traveller mindset is never a permanent achievement. You reconstruct it, again and again, from whatever materials the migrant’s journey leaves you. The agricultural background that felt like a dead end became the foundation for my research. The packaging factory that crushed my spirit gave me three years of understanding how systems grind people down, knowledge that now informs how I think about collective intelligence and power dynamics.
Nothing was wasted. But I could only see that in retrospect. In the moment, it felt like drifting.
Maybe that’s the real insight: the difference between migrating and travelling is sometimes only visible after the fact. In the middle of it, they feel exactly the same.
This piece draws on my experience moving between Nigeria and Morocco. If you’ve navigated similar transitions, between countries, careers, or identities, I’d like to hear about them. Reach out via email or on LinkedIn.