Not Homesick for a Place, but for a Time!

 EDITOR’S NOTE: Dr. Shaaban Fundi is a Contributing Writer to ZNK and, in this deeply reflective essay, he explores a dimension of immigration that is rarely discussed openly - the realization that what many immigrants truly mourn is not merely a place, but a vanished period of life itself.

This is a thoughtful and emotionally mature piece from Dr. Fundi. It carries a quiet philosophical tone that many diaspora readers - especially those who have lived away from home for decades - will deeply relate to.

Perhaps the most powerful line in the entire essay is:

“And time is the one country no one can return to.”

That line alone may bring tears to many diaspora readers.

Through memory, nostalgia, and quiet philosophical reflection, the essay speaks to millions who left home physically while continuing to carry an emotional homeland within them for decades.

/ZNK

By: Dr. Shaaban Fundi

What many immigrants mourn is not geography, but vanished time. The village, the street, the language, the smells after rain, the voices of grandparents, the rhythm of evenings without urgency — those things belonged to a particular historical moment. When you leave, life continues moving there without you, and you continue moving elsewhere without them. Eventually, both you and the homeland become strangers to each other.

The painful realization is that home was never only Tanzania. Home was Tanzania in a certain era: a certain political mood, a certain childhood innocence, certain people still alive, certain roads still unpaved, certain fears and hopes still intact. Even the poverty, the simplicity, the communal life — they existed within a time capsule that history has already dissolved.

Immigrants often spend decades believing they are homesick for a place, only to discover they are grieving a time. And time is the one country no one can return to.

When you return after 26 years, the shock is not merely that Tanzania changed. The deeper shock is realizing that you changed too. The country continued evolving while you preserved fragments of an older Tanzania inside memory. Meanwhile, Tanzania developed its own memory of people who stayed, survived, adapted, and became something else. So the reunion becomes emotionally disorienting: you arrive physically at home while psychologically understanding that the home you carried within you no longer exists.

This is why immigrant nostalgia can feel almost existential. You are not simply displaced geographically; you are displaced temporally. You belong partially to a world that has disappeared.

Yet there is also something profound hidden inside that grief. It means those years mattered deeply. It means the child from Kibogoji, Turiani, Mabama, or wherever one began still lives within the adult navigating Atlanta or elsewhere. Memory becomes a form of internal citizenship. Even if the physical country transforms, the emotional country survives within language, stories, music, food, humor, and longing.

Perhaps maturity is finally accepting that life is only ever “here and now,” while still honoring the worlds that formed us. Not trying to recreate them exactly, because they are gone, but carrying them forward with dignity through storytelling, teaching, relationships, and memory. That may be the closest thing humans have to defeating time.

By: Dr. Shaaban Fundi