ABIGAIL KABANDULA
BLACK tax has embedded itself into the private arithmetic of diaspora life – less a line item than a habit of mind, a quiet deduction I make before any other calculation begins. It is not taught in classrooms, nor captured in the tidy abstractions of economics. There, one encounters the term remittances, a phrase favored by the World Bank, which has noted – almost with surprise – that money sent home by Africans abroad outpaces official development assistance. The word is accurate, but misses the texture of obligation, the moral undertow. What I know, and what anyone inside it knows, is that these are not simply transfers of funds. They are transfers of duty, guilt, expectation, and love.
Black tax was never explained to me before I left. No one sits you down at the airport and tells you that alongside your passport, suitcase, and ambition, you may also be carrying the financial expectations of an entire family or village. I learned it instead in fragments. A message about groceries. A call about school fees. A relative in hospital. A cousin or friend with an “urgent situation.” Sometimes the requests are urgent in any real sense; sometimes they are not. Money for a night out. Money to impress a date. Money for baby clothes. The categories blur quickly, but the pressure does not.
Beneath it all is a quiet assumption I keep encountering: that migration equals wealth. To leave is to succeed. To succeed is to owe. Once you migrate to the United States, Britain, or elsewhere, you are imagined as having entered a permanent state of financial ease. The truth, as I learned early and keep relearning, is far less cinematic. Many of us are surviving, not thriving. We work long hours. We pay exorbitant rent or mortgages. We manage electricity, gas, transport, council tax, insurance, childcare, and debt. Some have postponed holidays for years. And yet, before most of it is accounted for, money goes home first.
That gesture is often misunderstood. It is not always abundance that sends money; often it is conscience. I give because I know what hardship looks like. I give because I remember. There is a particular cruelty in how quickly generosity becomes obligation. Because you helped last month, you are expected to help this month. Because you paid school fees last term, you are expected to pay this term as well. Before long, the arrangement is permanent.
In emergencies, the role hardens further. Illness. Hospitalization. Death. The diaspora becomes the first point of call. The first question is often not How are you? But can you send something? At funerals, it becomes When are you arriving? Which is often another way of asking, Will you be paying? Even grief, at times, arrives with an invoice.
Visits home often reveal the full theatre of expectation. Before the plane lands, shopping lists begin circulating. Fragrances, Brazilian hair, cosmetics, and electronics—luxury items that are requested with an ease that would seem unremarkable if I didn’t know how seldom they are purchased for oneself. I remember once being told, “You always come with the same handbag, don’t you? Don’t you like to change?” My honest answer—the one I kept to myself—was, Of course I do. I simply cannot afford to, because all my disposable income comes here. But the answer I offered was gentler, tidier, easier for the room to accept: “It’s my favorite bag.” I quickly realized that gratitude has quietly given way to entitlement.
Then comes the bill-paying ceremony of the visit itself. Meals, drinks, fuel, transport, cash handouts. The returning migrant is received as a close friend, even by those they were never particularly close to before leaving. Within the family, they are treated partly as kin and partly as a wallet that has just arrived from abroad. And if, after years of giving, someone hesitates. They are told they have changed. They think they are better than everyone else now. They have forgotten where they came from. Their labor abroad may even be mocked, despite the fact that much of the world is held together by exactly such labor: caring for the elderly, cleaning hospitals, driving buses, stocking warehouses, building homes.
For those in inter-racial marriages, black tax can be difficult to explain. A spouse raised in a more individualistic society may see the practice as irrational or exploitative. Why are able-bodied adults being financed indefinitely? Why must one household carry many others? These are not trivial questions. Left unresolved, they can strain even loving marriages.
None of this is to dismiss support. Helping elderly parents where pensions are fragile or absent can be necessary. Responding to a genuine crisis can be an act of care, I don’t question it. Community has always been one of our strengths in Africa. The difficulty begins when care hardens into expectation and entitlement, while generosity becomes default setting. No migrant, however hardworking, is a development plan. No daughter abroad is a pension fund. No son in London is an ATM.
Black tax persists because it is rooted in both material scarcity and a deeply embedded sense of kinship. It survives because people care—because family, in many African contexts, does not end at the nuclear unit, and responsibility rarely stops at the edge of one’s own household. But I have learned this slowly, and sometimes painfully: care, if it is to remain care rather than collapse into exhaustion, must have limits.
The author holds joint fellowship appointments at the Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs, University of Denver and University of Edinburgh Law School….https://enews.daily-mail.co.zm/welcome/home
