South Africa invented a name for the children of Nigerian and South African parents. The name tells you everything.

"Sougerians." That's what some South Africans call children born to Nigerian-South African families. Foreign Minister Bianca Odumegwu-Ojukwu used the word this week in her account of what's happening to Nigerian children in South African schools right now. They're being bullied. Told to return to their country. A country that, for many of them, is also South Africa.

South Africa's Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola acknowledged the problem and said education authorities are working to address it.

The word "Sougerians" is doing a lot of work. It puts you outside both places at once. It says you are not quite Nigerian and not quite South African. It says the two things you come from cannot be held together without giving you a new name that belongs fully to neither.

This is what second-generation immigrant identity looks like when the politics turn hostile. Take the child who grew up in Durban speaking Zulu and English, whose grandmother is in Lagos. That child is suddenly being told in a classroom that they don't belong in the country where they were born.

Nigeria has committed to tracking this with South African education authorities. Whether that tracking produces anything is the question Ojukwu didn't answer, and that Lamola couldn't answer on behalf of a school system he doesn't run.

What nobody in this week's diplomatic exchanges said is what those children are carrying home from school and putting down quietly in their bedrooms at night. That part doesn't make it into the bilateral statements.