oyinbo szn

The state of behaving, speaking, or presenting yourself in a noticeably Westernized way — putting on the accent, turning down the spice, apologizing for things that do not require apology, or just generally acting like someone who has forgotten how they were raised. Oyinbo mode is usually invoked with affectionate mockery: you have switched registers and your Nigerian friends have clocked it. It can describe a momentary slip or a more sustained identity performance. Either way, someone will call it out, probably loudly, and everyone will laugh.

The act of deliberately maximizing your Western assimilation — not just drifting oyinbo but actively optimizing for it. Someone who is oyinbo maxxing is making conscious choices to out-Western the Western world: perfecting the accent, adopting every lifestyle trend, curating a social media presence that shows zero trace of Nigerian origin, and generally engineering themselves into the most Westernized version possible. It is usually said with a laugh, because the effort involved in this level of assimilation is both impressive and slightly absurd to anyone watching.

The distinctive social aura that foreigners — especially Westerners — carry when navigating Nigerian or broader African spaces: a cocktail of over-politeness, mild confusion, and earnest enthusiasm that locals clock immediately. Oyinbo energy is not always negative; sometimes it reads as refreshingly sincere. But it signals someone operating outside their cultural fluency zone, following invisible scripts nobody else is reading. Used in Nigerian and diaspora communities to describe that unmistakable foreigner frequency, whether expressed by actual oyinbo or by Nigerians who've been abroad too long.