 You guys are saying that I'm always interviewing African-Americans, Caribbean without talking to Black Europeans. You know what? Like whatever you say, I hear you. So today I'm with Black Europeans. Are you Black European by the way? No, they think I'm lying to them. Are you Black European? Yeah, I was born in England. Wow. Nice to meet you. My name is Maya. Nice to meet you, Maya. Thank you, Maya. Juliet. Juliet. And what's your name? Sir. Sir. Yeah. Please, can I use my Ghanaian accent or the UK accent? Ghanaian. Okay. Now you're in the Gambia. Yes. What brought you to Gambia? Oh well, we've been coming here since 2011. We love Gambia. We love everything about Gambia. What's there not to love about Gambia? From the people, to the food, just to the environment, the ambience, just everything about Gambia makes you feel at home. And when you're here, you are home. Your spirit is connected to the very earth here and the culture. What is there not to love about Gambian culture? I mean, come on. When you're here, you are African. We are Africans born in England. However, we are Africans. And so it's nice to be reconnected. Let me get this clear. You're Africans born in England. Do you know that people are denying the fact that they're Africans born in England? Yeah, sure. I mean, even my mom came here and she said, oh, I'm Jamaican. But you're an African born in Jamaica. And so we need to understand that and we need to get that concept. We need to be proud of Africa. Africa is the most beautiful place on the planet. I've been to 27 countries and I have been coming back every single year since 2011 till now. I said, I've got to live here. How can you not live in paradise? So you're trying to see Africa as a part? What without a doubt, without a doubt? You know, I've been saying this over and over again that I keep on seeing myself in paradise, you know, but people are saying, no, UK is paradise. You live in the UK. Crazy. Listen. You live in the UK and you decided to give away. You don't want it anymore to come and settle down with you. Why? What is the main reason behind it? The UK is not a nice place to live. I'll be honest with you. All these people that are trying to go the back way think again. It is not what you think it is. The UK, there are high levels of poverty at the moment, 14 million. Well, 14.3 million people live under the poverty threshold. In terms of homelessness, the density of homelessness is high. The only thing that saves England is if you like the benefit system. But other than that, England is an absolute dump. It's a dump. And London is a dump. You have small pockets of nice areas. As you do in every country. But for me, England is a dump. There are high levels of desanitation. There are issues around racism. Terrible, terrible, terrible racism. I mean, how can you live in a place where you're not wanted? How can you live in a place where you're not welcome? And how can you live in a place where people are hostile to you almost every single day? You can't live your life like that. You cannot live. And money, no matter how much money or little trinkets or little things they want to give you, it is never going to justify having to suffer and your children having to suffer. What to live in a little matchbox house when you can live in a beautiful, palatial palace like this with a swimming pool where you can pick coconuts and mangoes and oranges and live with people who like you. Oh, come on. The people in here like you? They love me. She's so fine. For real, I'm loving this interview. I really did not expect this, but for real, we need to continue. This is not a 10-minute video. This will be an hour video. Let me know. This is very important for you telling me that the people in here love you. They don't even like you. They love you. I want to stress on that because this is something I really want people out there to know because a lot of people are saying that whenever they come to Africa I forget I'm not going to like that. Oh, listen. This is our home. We are black. When you come here, the first thing they said to me is welcome back to your spiritual home. That's what they said to me. I didn't get that when I went to Jamaica. I didn't get that when I went to America. I didn't get that when I went to Europe, Spain, France, Turkey, Portugal, Italy. I didn't get that when I went to Mauritius. I didn't get that when I traveled to Cuba. I didn't get that in all of the places that I've been. I didn't even get that in Tunisia, Morocco. I didn't get that when I went to Egypt. But I got that when I came back to the proper motherland, which I call black Africa. And this is why, like I said, you have to make this your home. You're not living in England. You're surviving. You're not even thriving. You're just about existing. And this is what we're doing. We're working to ourselves to death in England, literally. And the government are now trying to work harder for longer until 67 until you can retire. No. So many of my friends have died before they even got to my age because of stress and other illness, not eating good food, not breathing good air, not drinking clean water. This is the truth. This is the truth. Trinkets and technology don't make a society. People make a society. In Africa, you have what I call true community, true love, true bonding, true unity. And that's why I'm here. Wow. You can make a business here. You can make a business here and survive really well on that business. It's not like England where you can't even afford to open a shop. You can't even stock it. Here, you can open a business and you can survive. You can build a house. You can buy a piece of land for like £2,000 and build your house. Yeah? Build your house. Put a few thousand aside and build your own home. You've got no mortgage. Get solar. You've got no electric bills. You've got your own borehole. You've got your own water. Just go and buy a canister of gas. You're living. Wow. Instead of working, you know, for 65 years to pay off a mortgage, 25 years to pay off a mortgage. Mama Africa... And you still don't own the land. You still don't own the land. The Queen owns the land. No. You know what? Like, I don't want you to live, you know? Because they only gave me 15 minutes to talk to you, but I really wanted to take this an hour interview. But before I let you go, this is very important for me. What is the message you're going to tell Africans who are looking for where to live the continent and go stay in somewhere like UK, you know, stay forever because there are people who are saying that I'm not going to stay in Africa forever. I'm just going to live my life, my best life in the UK. Do you have any message for this video? Because I definitely believe that you stay with people from Africa. Yeah. You know, together. Do you have anything you want to tell us? Oh, wow. In a nutshell, be very careful. Be very, very careful. I used to work in England ice to help homeless people. And unfortunately, a large percentage of those were actually from Africa, who got caught going the back way, so they can't claim, they can't do anything. So they sleep on the street. They sleep in shopping centres, sometimes grave yards. They have no food. Sometimes they're pulled into selling drugs and then they end up going into prison and then getting deported anyway or ending up in detention centres. Life is not good for them. I've even been to places where there have been like 10 people, 10 people from Gambia, including two people from Senegal, living in one small room in England and, you know, all sharing buying rice and, you know, trying to survive. It's not a nice life for them. And then you have the brain drain ones, what I call educated Africans, the ones that leave, get an education and they go to England thinking that they're going to get a much better life and then they get trapped in what I call the tax trap. The tax trap is because people don't realise we have to pay tax even to watch television. We have to pay a TV licence. We have to pay a council tax. As well as paying our car tax, we then have to pay congestion charge as well as congestion charge. Transport is the most expensive that you have in England as well as tax on your levy on your fuel as well as VAT added extra tax, the value added tax on what you buy, every purchase that you buy. You also have capital gains tax. You also have your national insurance contributions. You also have so many taxes that it will take up the whole of this interview. So basically what I'm trying to say is it's a tax trap and that's why so many Africans, you never see them come back. They don't want to come back. They can't. They can't afford to come back. They can't even afford to play fair back. Some Africans, in fact, some Europeans can't even afford to come to Africa because they don't own their own homes. They get caught in council homes or they get caught in the benefit trap and this is what happens and sometimes all the Africans might come with the best intentions. They also get caught in the trap. Brain drain. Africa really needs the brains. We are the most intelligent race on the face of the planet. We invented almost everything that made this society and every society on the face of the planet human. When I mean human, I mean as in toilets, sanitary, everything comes from Africa. The chair, the traffic light, the car, the computer, what is it we haven't created but our brains are going across. There are more, I think, doctors from Nigeria in LA than there are in Nigeria. Now, this is something that we have to address. The same with Ghana. We need to start keeping our resources and our human resources. Haven't we lost enough through slavery? They haven't paid reparations for slavery. We need to stop chasing their pounds and we need to start building the infrastructure of Africa. That is what is important here. So for me, Africans that are going to Europe are suffering terrible racism, terrible, terrible, terrible discrimination. I've seen it. I've seen African children suffer in schools. I've seen African parents suffer with their children in schools. I've seen them go through legal systems because they're discriminated at work so they lose their jobs. These are high-paid jobs that they might get. They're not in them for long because you're first in, first out. And this happens because the unconscious and conscious bias that happens within recruitment in England is alive and real. It is true. I have even as a person, as an African person the way I describe myself, had to sue my own employer in England and I was born there. So can you imagine, if I don't have an accent and I'm born there and I've had to go through that and I've had to go through terrible discrimination with both of my children. Terrible discrimination. That was even on the news in the press with my youngest son and my eldest son which became international news from Fox News all the way to ITN and ITV. At the end of the day what I'm saying to them is just be aware of what you're doing because your enemy is not your friend. They're only there to take out the best from you. Look at these young Garnian boys that invented a fuel from plastic bottles from waste. What do they do? They give them some kind of an invite to go to a university in America. Why? To take their ideas. They're not here to help build Africa they're here to exploit Africa and where they're going to help them exploit Africa further. So we have to really think twice before we go to build up their country we need to build up ours first. We need to build ours first and in order for us to build ours first we need both Africans in the continent and Africans in the diaspora you'll find our message for them. We need to come together. We need to unify. We need to come together. We need to unify. We have to we have to put our heads together. We have to put our resources together and we have to come together because you know I watched this film Black Panther and I watched Wakanda and I know that it's possible. And I also believe that it's possible. It's about time we come together and build Africa. Thank you so much Julien. This is the most powerful interview I've ever had and even if it's an hour I'm not going to finish watching it. Thank you so much. Thank you.