Talakawa: Hausa, noun: Of or pertaining to the poor. The poor as a social category, as a community of the desperately needy deserving of the solicitude of the wealthy and powerful
Herald: English, noun. 1. A person, event or thing that precedes or comes before; forerunner, harbinger. 2. A person, event or thing that proclaims or announces: A good newspaper should be a herald for truth.
Dictionary.com (online)
This Sunday, February 24, 2013, I begin this weekly column in The Nation. Readers accustomed to reading my column, Talakawa Liberation Courier, in The Sunday Guardian, will immediately recognize that there is an echo of that column’s title in the title of this new column in another newspaper: Talakawa Liberation Herald. I could have retained the former title in this new discursive context, this new journalistic space. But since my “migration” from The Guardian, so to speak, represents for me a momentous event in my journalistic work of more than forty years in the Nigerian press, I decided that it was necessary for me to also change the title of the column.
Perhaps some months or maybe even a year or two from now, I shall write fully on why I left The Guardian for which I have written continuously since it was founded in 1983, perhaps the only one left among the old or aging writers, academics and commentators that were there at the beginning of the Guardian group. For now, all I will allow myself to say is that I left without rancour or bitterness but with a great deal of sadness and anger. In the meantime, my “migration” to The Nation, I feel, is an occasion that provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the column itself, hoping in the process to clarify both for myself and for my readers what it is I have tried to do – and continue hoping to do – with and through the column. In a nutshell, this exercise entails the question of the informing perspectives, ideas and values on which the column is based. And of course, with regard to these perspectives, ideas and values, the central concept is the term “Talakawa”. Concerning this concept, I wish to address two central propositions, two cardinal theses that the readers of this piece will be as startling and as confounding as I find them. What are these two theses or propositions?
In our country, Nigeria and in many regions and nations of the world, age-old cultural definitions and social meanings attached to the poor as a definite, recognizable demographic category are changing beyond recognition to include social groups and strata that would never have been remotely close to the actual and potential ranks of the desperately poor or needy. That is the first of our two propositions. Permit me to expatiate on it carefully.
Now, I do not speak Hausa and neither can I claim to have deep ethnographic knowledge of Hausa culture and society. What I do know about the meanings attached to the term “Talakawa” comes mostly from information I have gleaned over the decades from colleagues and comrades who both speak the language and have insiders’ ethnographic knowledge of its culture and traditions. From these colleagues and comrades, I have learnt that with the addition of the suffix “wa” to any ethnic or social group, a distinct collective identity is inscribed on the designated group. Examples are “Hausawa” or “Yarubawa” for the Hausa and the Yoruba ethnic groups respectively. I have learnt also from these “native informants” that in the wake of the oil-boom and the rise of a class of arriviste nouveau riches whose special symbol of new-found, lavishly spent wealth was the Mercedes Benz, the term “Benzawa” was coined on this same principle of adding that suffix, “wa” to identify and draw attention to a particular social group. [Incidentally, in Kiswahili, we have “Wa-Benzi” for the Hausa “Benzawa”, the same word serving reverse roles as suffix in Hausa and prefix in Kiswahili!]
At any rate, the most important thing that I wish to draw attention to in the term “Talakawa” is implied in the first of the two epigraphs to this piece. This is the idea of the poor as a community of the destitute and the needy deserving of the benevolence of the wealthy and the powerful. Behind this idea is the historic fact that in many traditional and strongly hierarchical societies of the world, most of the poor remain poor generation after generation. Through unexpected good fortune, a few individuals in a particular generation might escape the scourge of desperate poverty but for the most part, most don’t and do not even expect to. To repeat: that is what the term “Talakawa”, in its traditional or received historical and cultural meanings, basically implies: a social identity, a worldview in which life circumstances and chances are more or less permanently fixed. I may be wrong, but I strongly suspect that this is what many readers of this column will instinctively think about when they see the term “Talakawa” in the title of this column.
But capitalism in all parts of the world has changed that profile forever, giving new twists to what is involved in being within the ranks of the very poor, thereby opening up the range of experiences attached to being a member of the “Talakawa”. Abstractly, theoretically, there is no single modern capitalist country or economy in the world in which moving out of age-old, generation-to-generation poverty is completely or effectively blocked from anybody. People move from rural farming communities to the cities, they move from one job to another, and they move from one trade or profession to new ones perpetually, all in the hope, the promise that they stand a chance of having better lives than their parents and grandparents. But except in the richest countries in the world with high-income economies, most people in our country and our world in fact remain poor and only a sprinkling among their offspring will have better lives than they had.
“Talakawa” has historically become a broad, inclusive term that includes millions of factory workers and wage labourers who earn significantly less than the national, regional or local minimum wage; hundreds of thousands of vendors and hawkers whose daily and monthly trade turnovers are unbelievably paltry; uncountable numbers of grossly underpaid teachers and junior clerical staff; multitudes of pensioners and old people without solvent children to act as their social safety net in their last years. As I have repeatedly tirelessly in my column in The Guardian, 7 out of every 10 Nigerians live below the absolute poverty level; in some parts of the country, the figure is close to 8 out of ten in rural areas. In other words, and to use an analogy to drive home the point, like the group of animals that when molting completely shed their old skins, the term “Talakawa” has taken on new meanings, new expressions that were unthinkable in the traditional meanings attached to it. This is why unlike the “Talakawa” of old, the new “Talakawa” cannot expect – and at any rate will never get – the consistent, regular paternalistic benevolence of the wealthy and the powerful; they must fight it out by themselves, with the non-paternalistic help and solidarity of members of the elite who take up their cause. This leads logically to the second of our two propositions which, in my opinion, is far more confounding than the first proposition.
In the new millennium, the demographic constituencies of the “Talakawa” have been massively expanded by new patterns in which the young and the highly educated are significantly represented. Two years ago, the Central Bank Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, gave the figure of over 20 million as the statistic for unemployed high school and university graduates with no prospects of employment anywhere in sight. This alarming figure is further compounded by the fact that the median age for Nigeria is 19. For those unfamiliar with the concept of the national median age, what it basically means is that 50% of Nigerians are below the age of 19 while 50% is above that age. If you raise the computational age to 30, then you get more than 65% of the Nigerian population below 30. In other words, there is a vast demographic bulge at the younger age strata of our population and this bulge feeds right into present and future specters of being and/or becoming “Talakawa” among considerable numbers of our the young of our society.
We might choose to take some comfort in the fact that this phenomenon of great numbers of young and educated people falling into joblessness and poverty is indeed a global phenomenon, the effect – and resultant cause – of spirals of global crises in world capitalism. As the saying goes, misery loves company! In some European countries like Greece, Spain, Italy and Ireland, the figures for unemployed, educated and restless youths are close to 40%. And drawing from a personal experience, I have simply been stunned by the number of my undergraduate students at Harvard University who, in the last half a decade or so, have been expressing to me grave, terrified misgivings concerning what the future holds in stock for them.
Each region and nation of the world must of course seek its own answers, its own solutions to the specter of being and becoming “Talakawa” – without of course being indifferent to issues of great inequalities between the various regions of the world. In the case of Nigeria, I wish to give as much emphasis as I can muster in saying that poverty, or the “Talakawa” condition, is the one single factor that unites all our ethnic and regional communities. Show me any one single geo-political zone, any state or group of states in the country where the poverty rate is better than the 7 out of 10 absolute poverty level and I will eat my words. Show me any part of the country in which, no matter how well the elites are doing politically and economically compared to other regional, zonal and ethnic competitors in the political class, the masses of the people are faring better than ordinary folks in other parts of the country and I will mortify my spirit by attending an all-night vigil of one of our most fanatical evangelical sects!
Indubitably, the “Talakawa “ question is the bottom line of all the crises bedeviling our country since it is both directly and indirectly linked to all the other crises and challenges. This, by the way, is why this column can never possibly exhaust the range of issues it can and will take up. Beyond this and more impersonally, I would argue that the “Talakawa” condition ought to be the first item of discussion in a sovereign national conference that will sooner or later have to be convened if Nigeria is to survive as one unified, egalitarian and democratic society. In the weeks, months and years ahead, I hope to join my voice to the voices of other members of the “commentariat” [this playfully ludic term is, I believe, Victor Ifijeh’s] in The Nation and other organs of popular and progressive national conversation in our country
