About - MEANWHILE IN THE DIASPORA

By Baba Zhi

We out here.

Scattered like seed on foreign soil. Growing sideways through concrete. Sending money home through apps our parents don't trust. Explaining our names to people who won't learn to say them. Making $150K in cities where we still get asked "where are you really from?"

Meanwhile. In the Diaspora.

This is not a newsletter. This is a dispatch from the in-between. The place where your Uber driver recognizes your tribe from your cheekbones. Where the bodega knows your order but not your story. Where you scroll WhatsApp at 2am for news your mainstream paper won't cover.

I am Baba Zhi. I started this in March 2026 because I was tired of reading about us written by people who never sat in our kitchens. Tired of "African diaspora" meaning one thing when we are Shona, Yoruba and Amhara and Kikuyu and Wolof and still finding each other in these foreign cities.

What you get:

• The news that finds us — policy, money, movement, explained for people who send remittances before they pay rent
• The culture we make — not the museum version, the living version, the version your cousin started in a Brooklyn basement
• The profiles — of people who left, stayed, returned, and the ones still deciding
• The money — because financial literacy is survival literacy when you're one generation removed from passport privilege

No algorithms. No news feed gambling. Just the work, straight to your inbox, twice a week.

Your subscription keeps this alive. Not metaphorically. Literally. This is independent. No grants. No newsroom. Just us. Your $5 or $10 or $15 a month is the salary I don't take from a day job, the freelancer I can pay, the story I can chase.

Subscribe. Read. Reply. Tell me what I'm missing. Tell me what I'm getting right.

Meanwhile. We out here.

— Baba Zhi