By Prince Jerry Amaukwu
Not as strangers. Not as visitors. But as blood returning to blood.
For too long, this was the prayer of our fathers and the cry of our mothers. Today, it has ceased to be a prayer. It has become a movement. A living, breathing return of a people to their source.
From the skyscrapers of the United States, from the quiet cities of Canada, from the United Kingdom, Germany, and South Africa, and from every hamlet and metropolis across Nigeria, Ndigbo have heard it.
That ancient, unexplainable call that no visa can deny and no ocean can silence. It is the call of Alaigbo herself calling her children back to her bosom. They may have built empires abroad, but their umbilical cord was never cut from this soil.
Yet, the most sacred part of this return lies beyond our recent dispersal.
From Jamaica where the drums still sound like Nkwa Umunwanyi. From Brazil where the spirit of our ancestors never departed. From Costa Rica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Haiti, Cuba, Bahamas and the Dominican Republic they are rising.
These are not foreigners. These are our own flesh and blood, the great-grandchildren of our great-grandfathers who were hunted, chained, and thrown into the belly of slave ships at Bonny, Calabar and Port Harcourt.
For four hundred years, they were told they had no origin. Their names were changed. Their tongue was forbidden. But the Igbo spirit never dies inside a man. It endured. It survived in their courage, in their resistance, in their stubborn refusal to be broken. And now, through DNA, through dreams, through an unshakable spirit, they have traced their footprints back to Igbo Land.
This is not an event. This is destiny fulfilling itself.
It is the healing of a wound that has bled for centuries. It is the closing of a chapter of pain and the opening of a chapter of restoration. Alaigbo is that mother who sat by the roadside for years, refusing to go inside, because her children had not yet returned. Now, her waiting is over.
They left our shores weeping, in chains, as captives. They return today with their heads lifted high, as free men and women, as princes and princesses of a global Igbo nation that slavery failed to erase.
Therefore, let Ohanaeze Ndigbo Worldwide arise. Let the President-General, let all Ezes, let all Igbos at home and in the diaspora prepare. Let the Ikoro be sounded in every village. Let the gates of Igbo Land be thrown wide.
Because history is here. The prophecy is fulfilled.
The scattered children have been found and Alaigbo welcomes them home.