I’d always wanted to visit Florence, and not for what you’d expect. Long ago, I’d read an article in a magazine about a famous sandwich shop, All’Antico Vinao, and I got obsessed with the idea of visiting the city just to taste the sandwich. I got my opportunity in August 2022, after I was selected for the Young African Leaders Programme. It was with the School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute (EUI) and it felt like a dream come true, in several different ways. 

Years ago, while studying for a Masters at the London School of Economics, I found myself right in the middle of the implementation of Brexit. I think there was something of a countdown to mark the point when Britain was finally exiting the European Union. I think I remember lying in bed, watching it on a screen. The same way I lay in bed and watched the results of the Brexit vote on a screen. Only that time I was in far away Abuja, and this time I was in London. I became even more fascinated by the concept of regional integration and its complicated facets. Why would anyone want to leave the EU? What were the path dependencies and critical junctures that led to this very moment. Was there anything that we Africans (with our very different but similar sounding African Union) could learn from this? I decided that I was going to explore this question for my Masters dissertation but was later dissuaded that it’d be a better fit for a PhD. I took on a smaller integration question, the enigma of the Eco, the proposed West African single currency that incidentally rhymed with the Euro.

So being selected to live in beautiful Florence, eat famous sandwiches, be surrounded by art (my first love) and to learn about governance beyond the nation-state felt like an incredible gift. I was going to get the opportunity to take a peek inside the behemoth that was the European Union, while curiously, also learning more about my African Union. Sign me up!

The first bridge to cross was visas. Those of us from Nigeria fared a bit better. Our country was big enough to merit an Italian Embassy (we had two), and some quick thinking on our part helped to escape the long waiting times. I faced Italian immigration with some anxiety but  arrived in Florence through Rome without any incident. Then my journey as a Fellow with the EUI went into full swing. The first treat was putting faces to the names of the other Fellows from the WhatsApp group we created. There were 25 of us from across the continent, and we immediately felt like old friends. 

Our classes also started in earnest and we explored topics from African Union governance to African trade policy to the digital economy. We were taught about the challenges facing regional integration and democratic governance in a changing world. The study tour to Brussels was the highlight of the programme for many Fellows, and we were able to go inside the European Union both in the literal and figurative sense. It was during the visit that I learned about the support the EU was providing to the implementation of the AfCFTA. It was also during the visits that an EU official, while talking about irregular migration from Africa, told us “When you get back home, tell your friends not to get on boats and come here”.

A fascinating part of the trip was our visit to Bruges to engage with our European peers at the College of Europe. Our visit was only a few days after the “garden” controversy, but that didn’t stop us from extending our hands for a more equitable partnership.

A cocktail reception let us engage better with different partners, smiling and exchanging contact information. We were encouraged to “set aside the colonial past” and focus on the future. We caught each other’s eyes across the room but managed to prevent them from rolling. It was here that I learned the EU was going to be funding a project focused on intra-African mobility, an African Erasmus, if you like. It felt a bit weird to me. That the EU would be brought in to help Africans move around their continent. It was a request by African leaders, I was told. 

During a visit to Rome that happened at a later date, an expensive Freudian slip made me chuckle. In a meeting with a high-level Italian official, he said “We know France is having issues in Africa and we are ready to take over…oh no…I didn’t mean to say it that way.” We all chuckled. We knew what he meant to say. And he knew that we knew what he meant to say. As I described situations like this to my colleagues, we know they know we know they know. But we all smile and shake hands. The art of diplomacy.

Back in Florence, a few of us began to feel the reality of the outcome of the September elections in Italy. I didn’t know too much about Mario Draghi, but had seen a documentary on the Euro and was impressed by his personality. I was intrigued by his replacement, the same way I was intrigued by the Brexit vote and the American elections that brought Trump into office. 

Florence started to get colder, in more ways than one. Heaters were turned on by landlords, and a colleague experienced racial abuse on a bus. “We have a new leader and she’s going to take care of our problem with African migrants”, the woman had apparently yelled, in Italian. She apparently also used the word “monkey”. As my colleague, a fellow young African leader, recounted this, I found myself feeling the same shock that she did. From when we arrived, we had noticed that we mostly only saw other Africans in less than ideal circumstances. Migrants that were trying their best to hustle a living in Italy. We didn’t miss the irony of being verbally assaulted even though we were in Florence at the invitation of the European Union. To me, it was all the same. Being an EU-funded “young African leader” did not differentiate me from the average African migrant that found themselves in the middle of the EU’s migration dilemma. At the centre of both of our relationships with the EU was the migration question – I was in Italy as part of a long game that meant they could stop coming to Italy. I remembered Emmanuel Macron’s speech when he visited Fela’s shrine in Lagos “You have to build your future in Africa and not outside Africa.” 

Being at the EUI felt in some ways like being in a movie. Walking up the hill to the beautiful Fiesole campus was a daily treat. Staring at the frescos on the ceilings of the classrooms in the School of Transnational Governance. Walking home after a night out with colleagues and seeing the Duomo ahead of me. My eyes could never sufficiently drink in the beauty I was surrounded by. Taking pictures with my phone was a fool’s errand because I could never get enough. I tried to instead take pictures with my mind and fully immerse myself in the gorgeous city.

Soon enough, my fellowship came to an end and it was time to say goodbye to the people I’d spend the last three months with. It was a bittersweet moment. It was also sad to say goodbye to our tireless and excellent administrators, EUI staff that had been in charge of our welfare and studies. As a group we had mostly gotten along, even become friends. We had taken trips together, confided in each other. Now we were returning to our countries, jobs, studies and families.

I wasn’t quite ready to say goodbye yet, so on the night of our final ceremony, I got on a bus to France. I’d planned a two-week European tour going from Nice to Bucharest with buses, trains and flights and only a backpack. In Barcelona I learned a bit about Europe’s complicated past with the struggle between fascism and communism. I watched a Flamenco dance that made me think about the diversity between and within member states. I got to experience directly, Europe’s complicated relationship with blackness. In Spain, no one saw me as a “young African leader”. With my locs and dark skin, I was a tedious black body, like any other. 

In Paris I dove into European art at the Louvre. My blackness felt much less conspicuous, and I wondered about the relationship between closeness to the coast and relations with migrants. In Vienna I visited several sites dedicated to their musical geniuses. On the train from Vienna to Budapest I met a Nigerian man that had lived in Austria for 16 years. He told me that life was good, and he wouldn’t trade it for anything else. I trudged through the snow in Prague, appreciating how functional a society had to be to continue to operate under those weather conditions. In a way it was a tour of Christmas markets, as I went from one to the other in all the cities I visited. The state of train stations in each new city served as some sort of signal of the income disparities in the EU.

I also observed the ongoing struggle for European unity. In Berlin, at a seminar I was invited to, Germans asked themselves “Should we approach our Africa relations as Germans or do we wait for the European Union?” On another tour on communism in Bucharest, a debate erupted between an Italian tourist and our Romanian guide. We had stopped for coffee in the middle of the tour and the subject of migration and the Italian government came up. In a bid to not make it about black bodies, the Italian went on a rant about how it was unfair for Romanian migrants in Italy to get more aggregate welfare than the taxes they contributed to the economy. The Romanian didn’t say much. Just that he was content with his choice to stay in the country. That things were much better in Bucharest than they used to be. That he hoped his daughters would also choose to stay.

In a strange way, heading back to Italy felt like going home. The first Ciao! I heard at the Pisa airport felt like a warm hug. Italy was not my home. But it still felt good. Back in Florence, I took in the Duomo one last time (for the time being), ate lots of Neapolitan pizza then caught a flight out of the EU. My education felt complete, and I had a better appreciation of the impressive but complex European project. On Africa-Europe relations, my main takeaway was that Europeans were too busy figuring out their internal challenges to properly shape their African relations. We had to decide for ourselves what we wanted, and then show Europe why this made sense for both sides.