Recollections on Nigerian Masculine Discourses
I am uncomfortable with the uncritical transposition of Western social taxonomies on African societies. I’ve never fully bought into the notion that Nigerian maleness can be accurately characterized with or contained in terms such as “masculinity” and “toxic masculinity,” at least not in their derivative Western conceptual meanings.
For one thing, sociopolitical constructs of ideal manhood are as varied as Nigeria is culturally diverse. For another, Nigerian discourses on the performances of manhood map onto an infinitely fluid social terrain. Here, in this arena, where discourses and practices of masculinity meet in tension and symbiosis, metaphors of power and politics comingle with gender and status anxieties to produce a dynamic and rapidly shifting sense of what it means to be a man, a real man.
Therefore, I’m not convinced that terms housing supposedly stable and transcultural codes of masculinity can translate mechanically to Nigeria.
Nonetheless, as an African male who was raised in Nigeria and who has now had a chance to reflect on his experience and upbringing in what we conveniently call African patriarchal culture, I think there is such a thing as masculinity in the Nigerian society in which grew up.
I hasten to add that this masculinity has its distinct characteristics. Some of these markers of Nigerian masculinity may conform to Western frames; others may not. This masculinity is also not one thing. It is many things housed in one convenient analytical rubric. It is not stable. It shifts and takes on new connotations.
With these caveats in place, here are my experiential reflections and apocryphal evidence of what I identify as Nigerian masculinity and its many typologies and manifestations.
When I was coming of age in the 1980s, there were still noticeable residues of what I would call the Murtala masculine mythology.
This notion of masculinity is associated with late Nigerian Head of State, Murtala Mohammed. Murtala was reputed to be a Nigerian man’s man, a no-nonsense ruler and decisive authoritarian. When we were growing up as boys, we were taught informally (it was at least subtly suggested to us by popular idioms of the day) to emulate Murtala, to grow up to be like Murtala — to be decisive and strong-willed.
The popular, romantic, oversimplified, and sanitized perception of Murtala was that he was an authoritarian ruler but that his authoritarianism was for nationalist ends. Therefore, to be a real man in the mold of Murtala, one had to be an authoritarian leader in any sector or station of life one found oneself.
The only caveat was that the intent of this learned personal authoritarian bent should be altruistic or noble, not selfish. This was how to be a man in that Murtala masculine imagination that overlapped with my upbringing in the 1980s. This iteration of masculinity had a remarkable persistence, given that Murtala was killed in a 1976 attempted coup.
In some ways, Murtala’s sudden death at a relatively young age and the circulating photographic images of a serious looking army officer in full military regalia added to the popular purchase of a social construct of Murtala-branded masculinity.
Side-stepped and erased from the mythology of Murtala’s representational manhood is his role in the Asaba massacre, a tragically infamous episode in the Nigerian civil war. In this way, discursive modes and maneuvers around muscular manhood can simultaneously obscure and call attention to what is and is not included in the empirical examples of allegedly masculine deeds.
We heard stories of Murtala humiliating other men accused of various infractions — stories in which Murtala was the courageous patriotic hero and in which his targets were portrayed as weaklings shirking the dirty, challenging work of nation-building.
One aspect of the Murtala mythology of can-do manhood is the idea of a man who runs to rather than away from controversial actions. The construct of Murtala masculinity was expansive. Murtala, it was said, did not make or tolerate excuses for failure or inaction. Therefore, a real man, which Murtala was, should not be a giver or taker of excuses.
The masculine ideology that had the most direct and poignant impact on me in my youth was the one I call Idiagbon masculinity. Tunde Idiagbon was the deputy to General Buhari when the latter was military head of state from 1983 to 1985. In the Buhari-Idiagbon regime, the nexus of politics and masculine mythmaking emerged more clearly than it ever did before.
There were many popular tropes and anecdotes about Idiagbon, most of them invented to express how the public perceived Idiagbon’s political persona in a post-civilian martial political configuration. Idiagbon was a stern, tough-talking, and dour man whose public appearances and pronouncements created a mystique of him as a mean-spirited, cheerless, take-no-prisoner military officer.
As a boy at that time, I remember hearing stories, almost certainly made up, about what Idiagbon supposedly said. One popular one was that he had said that a real man only smiles twice a year. No one could point to where, when, or how Idiagbon said it, but this alleged statement of his traveled and circulated widely in Nigeria, and many men, young and old, repeated this statement admiringly, advancing and recommending it as a quotidian philosophy of how to be a real man, as a model of masculinity and masculine self-making.
We young boys wanted to grow up to be like Idiagbon, to be “tough” like him, and to be feared for our stern demeanor. We wanted to be emotionless like Idiagbon, to constantly keep people around us confused and fearful with a poker face like Idiagbon. Idiagbon was our masculine idol.
Throughout secondary school, Idiagbon was the avatar of Nigerian masculinity for us. Like Murtala, Idiagbon performed traits Nigerian men — and women — considered masculine. He was taciturn, saying little but taking quick, if impulsive, action. This quality meshed well with a Nigerian sociopolitical imaginary in which impulsivity was synonymous with decisiveness. Conversely, deliberative, thoughtful, drawn-out decision-making is considered less than masculine, a sign of a waffling and indecisive aptitude.
Idiagbon was, at least in public, averse to the atmospherics and ceremonial aspects of politics. He often cut to the chase. Very soon, this quality was given social valence as an aspect of Idiagbon’s manly character. A real man, it was said, should not allow himself to be bogged down by trivial, tangential matters. A real man takes a sharp knife, cuts through the outer distractions of life, and goes to work to deal decisively with an issue of core concern.
That was the model of manhood that was attributed to Murtala. Whether the attribution was true or false didn’t matter as the set of claims associated with that genre of manhood assuaged the masculine anxieties and fantasies of Nigerian men at that time.
Then Abacha happened to Nigeria. Abacha was a vile, brutal, murderous dictator who destroyed all norms of governance and civility that even his military predecessors grudgingly preserved. He was also mean. I don’t remember Abacha being explicitly put on the pedestal of masculinity, but there was, in addition to popular narratives of his evils, a subliminal, secondary discourse of Abacha as a tough, decisive man. This secondary, almost adulatory narrative of Abacha’s masculinity percolated and permeated the social environment of the 1990s when we were in the university.
Abacha was not recommended as a model of masculinity, but there were aspects of Abacha’s persona that were vernacularized as being compatible with, if not necessary for, being a real man. His defiance in the face of international sanctions and threats of them, his singlemindedness, his dark-goggled mystique, and his vindictive streak were recast in informal quotidian discourse as necessary aspects of tough Nigerian masculinity. It was subtly suggested that in a society in which a man confronts many challenges and enemies, a man gets ahead or stays ahead of his enemies and problems by adopting some of the aforementioned qualities of Abacha.
As undergraduates in the 1990s, most of us had watched the Godfather movies and that inaugurated for us a new performative regime of masculinity. Don Corleone and Michael Corleone instantly became our model of how to be a real man, our example of masculine vigor and honor. Most of us went through a Don Corleone phase in which we consciously tried to replicate the mannerisms of the Corleone patriarch and his successor-son, Michael.
It was both amusing and interesting to see some of my friends in the university and even during our one-year post-graduation national youth service being deliberately taciturn and sullen or frowning and looking serious all the time. It was strange to see formerly garrulous boys suddenly become more careful about what they said, how much they said, and how they said it. They wanted to be “men” of few words and to be decisive, stealthy, and inscrutable like Michael Corleone. They wanted to be a mystery, to keep their interlocutors guessing about their intentions and what they were up to.
That was our Michael Corleone masculinity phase. A real man, we came to believe, was someone who was cunning and softspoken but ruthless. Like Michael Corleone.
This Corleone masculinity and its tough guy trope resonated only because an entire generation of Nigerian boys had been introduced to the masculine Hollywood characters of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. The duo played hyper-masculine roles in various movies in the 1980s and 1990s as avenging altruistic heroes — strong men fighting for principle and for the protection of personal and community honor.
When Nollywood entered our homes through VHS and video CD rentals, the character of Ahanna in the movie, Rattlesnake, the tough guy characters played by Segun Arinze, Richard Mofe-Damijo, Saint Obi, and others consolidated the earlier Hollywood motifs of manhood. They also gave it a distinctly Nigerian cultural flavor. The aesthetics of masculinity in Nollywood devolves to the role of a man as do-good fighter for family and group honor, one whose masculine mettle is tested and forged in the crucible of crisis and tragedy.
Is there a Muhammadu Buhari masculinity?
In Buhari’s current political incarnation as president, he has transformed meanness into a template of statecraft. There is a popular political legend that he measures his effectiveness as a leader not by how much compassion and comfort his policies or lack of them bring to citizens but by how much pain and suffering his policies are inflicting on Nigerians. It is said that, for Buhari, the proof of a policy is in the social pain associated with it. It is an aspect of his political and personal character that was also on full display in his days as a military dictator.
Many Nigerian men were drawn to this Buhari persona. They admired his well-known righteous and jealous anger at well-off people, his unwillingness to display positive emotion, and his tough talking. This idea of a Buhari masculinity, marked by meanness, callous indifference, crusading anger, implacable bluster, and tough, even if impotent, talk, was one of the reasons Buhari won the presidential election in 2015.
The Buhari masculine brand advances austerity in place of showy ostentation and conspicuous masculine consumption. A real man, in this construct, is one who is able to discipline his base instincts, his raging, carnal, adventurous appetites. As a public script of masculinity, it was consistently practiced by Buhari. But there was also a private script of extravagant tastes and wild, untamed palates.
Because of this performative quality of Buhari’s claims to self-denial and self-mastery, Nigerians, men and women, have since caught on to the pretentious dimensions of this Buhari masculinity. Most Nigerians do not regard Buhari as a real man in the Idiagbon mythical mold because he has proved himself to be a weak, politically compromised, corrupt, and indecisive leader.
But there are still a few Nigerians who speak of Buhari’s alleged uncompromisingly masculine toughness and how that is precisely why “they” have caused him to fail. By “they” these holdout Buhari supporters mean the enemies of Buhari’s masculine posture.
For most Nigerians, Buhari’s second coming has demystified him as a false Murtala and a false Idiagbon, as a pretend man’s man. If he was previously seen as a model of masculinity, that image has since peeled away to reveal what many Nigerians see as qualities beneath a real man, qualities unworthy of true masculinity.
The zone of politics and leadership is not the one in which Nigerian discourses of masculinity incubates and crystallizes. When I was growing up in Nigeria, the colloquial expression “to be a man is not a day’s job” was such a quotidian mantra of Nigerian manhood and its expectational anxieties that it was emblazoned on many commercial buses and lorries.
In this expression, one finds the difference between being a man and becoming a man. Everyone born a man in Nigeria strives to live up to the moniker. The struggle to be a man consists of the patriarchal labors necessary to fulfil societal and familial expectations associated with masculine obligations in a patriarchal social order. Being a man is a routinized aggregate of a man’s daily strivings.
Becoming a man, unlike being a man, is an aspirational quest to replicate the models of masculinity consecrated and valorized by paradigmatic social discourse as an ideal mode of acting manly and embodying manly traits. This transcends simply being a man. Becoming a man is a more deliberate process of becoming someone to be reckoned with, someone who, while mimicking allegedly exemplary forms of manhood, becomes an example for other men.
Whatever the trajectory taken by Nigerian men to accomplish their masculine aspirations and fantasies, they must be able to convert their journeys and experience into narrative. Stories and storytelling are important instruments for codifying claims to masculine accomplishment and recognition.
In our youth, stories of personal heroism and masculine accomplishment filled our ears. Those who grew up or spent time in army barracks were inundated with stories of war exploits. Every soldier in the barracks was a war hero with an impressive wartime resume that has been transformed into a verbal artifact. These stories are told and retold until they are either refined into credible viability or implausible absurdity.
Among retired men of the military, war stories were their only remaining claim to fame and masculine credibility. In the midst of their non-military peers, their inventions of wartime heroism found credulous and impressionable listeners. Alas, even the listeners sometimes were in on the dramatic elements of such personal narrative adulation.
As long as the teller of the story did not offend, everyone pretended to believe his story and to be awed by it. But if the teller of war stories weaponizes his claimed exploits against peers or causes irritation by over-telling the story, expect scrutinizing retorts that had been withheld before then in the spirit of mutual masculine performance.
This is what happened in my village of Okpakor, in Agila district of Benue State. A retired soldier, a distant relative of mine, was fond of strutting his wartime bona fides and telling stories of his wartime exploits to impress his village friends. There was nothing unusual about this. Nigerian Ex-servicemen are famed for spinning tales of battlefield heroics starring themselves as protagonists.
The frequency with which he told the story had already worn down his audience. He then escalated the irritation by repeatedly going to his bag of war stories to one-up his friends as each of them talked up their own masculine resumes in the village assembly. Whenever he got into a fight, he was able to shut his opponent up by invoking his military service as a mark of his superior masculinity.
One day he picked a fight with a man who was known for his acidic mouth and acerbic retorts. As they traded insults, the retired soldier realized that his opponent had inched ahead of him on the scorecards. He could see it on the faces of the audience. Predictably, he announced that, unlike his opponent, he was a real man, that he was much more of a man than his opponent could ever be. He had served in the military. He had faced death. He had killed in war and had come close to being killed. His opponent was beneath him and could never understand what real manhood was because he was stuck in a boring village manhood marked by the routine of farming, eating, pooping, and sleeping.
Like a dam that just bust, his adversary unleashed the most humiliating insult a claimant to military masculine distinction could ever face. He told the retired soldier that they were tired of his war stories that always put him in heroic positions. They were tired of him bullying them with his self-lionizing wartime stories. He then went for the jugular: “we even heard that your stories are all made up and that when real men, real soldiers, were on the front fighting, killing, and being killed like real men, you were performing kitchen duties, cooking for the fighters.” Were you not an army cook? Did you see any combat?
With a clear advantage secured, the Ex-soldier’s interlocutor tightened the screws and went for the finish. “There’s nothing special about you, and there’s nothing special about a man being a cook in the army. If soldiering is about performing kitchen duty then all the men of this village can be better soldiers than you. We can all cook and serve food. You were not a real soldier. You should not be bragging to us about being a soldier during the war.”
It was a knockout punch, a fight ender. There was no comeback from that. Finally, the hackneyed story of masculine exceptionalism that did not perfectly match the teller’s biography was, in one angry retort, unraveled.
In the Idoma patriarchal universe, cooking is considered a feminine chore. While every man must learn how to cook because he will need that skill at some point in his life, cooking as a career was considered a feminine endeavor. When the ex-soldier’s foe said every man in the village could cook, he was saying that the ex-soldier was not a man of distinction or unique skills. Everyone could do what he did in his time in the army. Everyone in the village could have been his kind of soldier.
The insult was a double-barreled one. The insulter’s point was bitingly simple: the bragging former soldier was neither a real soldier nor a real man. Because he cooked while real soldiers fought, he was not the real soldier he claimed to have been. Because he chose a career in cooking, he had entered a feminine vocation and was no longer a real man.
In puncturing the ex-soldier’s carefully curated masculine repertoire, the retired soldier’s opponent had also broken a code of masculine mutual self-representation that soothed the collective egos of the elderly men in the village. After all, every man in the village routinely told patently embellished stories of their own hunting and libidinal exploits, and everyone knew to let everyone’s stories stand.
But if the retired soldier was going to weave an embellished tale glorifying himself as a special type of man in order to put down his fellow village male elders then dismantling that story justified amplifying the malicious rumor that he had been a non-combatant soldier whose job was to keep the fighting men fed.
Marking one’s masculine territory and branding oneself as a warrior to stand out from village peers was fine. But telling exaggerated tales of bravery and courage as a weapon of emasculating a fellow man exposed one to cheap shots designed to rip through one’s carefully curated masculine persona. The truthfulness of the rhetorical takedown didn’t matter, just as, in a balanced relational context, the truthfulness of stories of masculine deeds also didn’t matter.
Other village male elders who were fond of staking their claims to masculine honor through self-animated stories of questionable veracity learned from the experience of the former soldier and thenceforth disciplined the verbal performance of their masculinity.
Those who have no stories of masculine distinction of their own to tell latch on to other men’s stories, participating vicariously in other people’s constructed masculine discourses. They are the ones who cause fantastical, implausible stories surrounding certain male political figures to acquire virality and valence.
Storytellers are both prolific purveyors and prime audiences of fictive narratives of masculinity. They are the ones responsible for circulating the idioms of manhood and the masculine political biographies of important men that allegedly embody such idioms.
