I came across a film recently that I couldn’t stop thinking about. Not in the way a good thriller stays with you, where you’re replaying the twist in your head. More like a bruise you keep pressing because you need to understand why it hurts. The film is called Atlantics, directed by Mati Diop, and it’s set in Dakar, Senegal. It came out in 2019. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes. And somehow, in all the noise of everything else, I’d never watched it until now.
I wish I had sooner. Not because it would have changed anything. But because it puts into images something I’ve been carrying in words for a long time, something a lot of us have.
Everybody wants a better life. The woman selling groundnuts and corn by the roadside in the afternoon heat, she wants a better life. The man mixing cement on a construction site from morning till his hands crack, he wants one too. The nurse pulling double shifts at a hospital with no running water. The graduate who has sent out 200 applications and heard nothing back. The mother who sits down every evening to do the math, rent, school fees, food, transport, and the numbers never add up. They all want a better life. Not a perfect one. Not even a comfortable one. Just better than this.
You work so hard. All day, sometimes deep into the night. You smile when you’re tired. You show up when your body says stop. And you do all of this for the basics. Food. Rent. Transport. Maybe a little left over to send home. And sometimes, after giving everything you have, they still owe you. You ask for your money and they say next week. Next week becomes next month. Next month becomes silence. You fight for it. Nothing. But you keep going, because what else is there?
You pray. Against enemies, against bad luck, against whatever invisible thing seems to hold you in place while the world moves on without you. You stay hopeful. For your family, for the person you love, for yourself most of all. Because if you stop hoping, what’s left?
But somewhere quietly, a thought starts to grow. Maybe it comes at 2 a.m. when the ceiling fan isn’t working, and the heat won’t let you sleep. Maybe it comes when you see your mate post pictures from London or Toronto or Dubai, smiling, clean clothes, a life that looks like it actually works. Maybe it comes the day someone you love gets sick, and you realise you can’t afford the hospital.
At first, the thought is small. Just a whisper. Then it gets louder. Then it’s all you can hear.
I have to find a way out of here.
This is exactly where Atlantics begins. A group of young men in Dakar are building a tower. Tall, modern, shiny, the kind of building that shows up on investment brochures. They built it with their hands. And they haven’t been paid. Not for months. Their boss, a wealthy man who clearly sleeps fine at night, simply doesn’t pay them. He doesn’t have to.
So one night, without warning, without goodbyes, they get on a boat and set out across the Atlantic toward Spain. Toward Europe. Toward the idea that something better must exist on the other side of all that water.
They don’t make it.
I wasn’t ready for that. Not because I didn’t know it was coming, but because of how quietly the film holds it. No dramatic score, no slow motion. Just absence. And the women they left behind, the girlfriends, the lovers, the ones who never got a proper goodbye, were left standing in the silence of a world that just got emptier.
I had to pause here. Because this is not a movie story. This is Tuesday in Lagos. Saturday in Bamako. Any day of the week in Conakry, Asmara, or Dakar itself. It’s been happening for years. For decades. It’s happening right now, somewhere along a coastline, in the back of a truck, in a conversation whispered between two friends who’ve decided they’re done waiting.
The tower in the film is a symbol, but the reality behind it doesn’t need symbolism. Millions of people across this continent build things they’ll never benefit from. You serve the economy, but the economy doesn’t serve you back. You are essential, you are the reason the whole thing stands, but you are treated like you’re replaceable. And when you ask for what you’re owed, you’re told to be patient. To be grateful. To wait.
In Nigeria, they have a word for what comes next. Japa. It means to flee. To run. To escape. And over the past decade, it has become the defining word for an entire generation of Africans who feel they have no choice but to leave. Doctors, nurses, engineers, teachers, developers, people who spent years training in their own country, now packing their bags because the system at home will not give them what they need to survive, let alone thrive.