I 

“What makes Nigerians tick?” I was asked recently by one of those folks, you know, who by hook or crook would be found asking Africans here where they really are from. 

On a blessed day, I would’ve ignored the question, pretended I didn’t hear the blasphemy, or, even better, offered a not-so-polite dressing down. It’s frustrating to be constantly harassed with antiquated, racist questions: where are you from?, what makes your people unique?, how do you greet in your language? Questions that many of us know to be loaded with intents and mal intents to put us where we are perceived to belong. Elsewhere, anywhere but here. Questions about one’s foreignness. Often shot at one in the name of beginning a conversation or expressing interest in Africa. 

Anyway, it wasn’t a blessed day and I was in agreeable spirit. Moreover, to be fair to the asker, the question was not entirely without warrant. The asker had posed it in response to the activities they observed at a fund-raising event organized by a Nigerian community organization in Winnipeg. For some reason, the organizers encouraged attendees to come fully dressed in their cultural attires and to be ready to dig deep into their pockets. And trust Naija folks in the diaspora who sought every opportunity to perform nostalgia and belonging often by wearing their Nigerian cultural identities in the abroadian public, they came—my pretty self included—in colourfully attired layers upon layers of different versions of aso oke, buba, agbada, babanriga, isi agu, name them. It was, to put things mildly, a medley of noisy colours. The occasion was loud, full of pomp and pageantry, and boisterous talking and dancing. 

The first person to donate walked all the way from the back of the hall to the front to use the microphone to announce his contribution. He began: “On behalf of me and my amazing, darling, Godfearing olori, who is seated over there, the butter on my Canadian bread, the mother of our brilliant, gorgeous children, a woman of stupendous splendour, the one who stokes a conflagration in my soul, the inimitable manager of our home…” At this point, the cheers and claps were a frenzy and everyone was laughing. A Naija woman with a face that was the quintessence of smile who was seated beside the asker and I said that when Nigerian men do this—by which she meant sing their wives’ praises in public—it must be because they’re subtly apologizing for infidelity for which they’ve been caught and not-yet-completely forgiven. The man used more than 5 minutes to deliver encomiums and words of embroidery to his family before announcing his donation: fifty fucking dollars! 

The rest of the event unfolded in a similar fashion: embellished stories, highfalutin praises, even occasional dancing to introduce a donation. So that when the asker asked what would’ve ideally been an offensive question, I was in a conciliatory, boisterous mood. And my answer was: bombasticism! OK, beside the offensive ethnographic baggage of the question, I myself have for sometime been thinking about this supposed Naija tickness and have reached provisional, not-entirely-unproblematic theory even though informed by an entirely different understanding of the tick in question.

II 

If there’s ever such a thing as a national character, Nigeria’s must certainly and unarguably be the bombast. To describe it in Naijaspeak: the bombast is that figure of ostentatiousness, affected magniloquence, a la-di-da of pomposity, full of jaw-breaking verbism and mouth-tearing prolixism. This figure by its manner and act is the victorious hero in a drama of the excess. Be it in its language use, its gestures, its carriage, its aura, its gastronomic exertions, its gait, and so forth, it’s all about immoderation—that surplus of sound and act. Bombasticism is the protagonist of just about any facet of the Nigerian society—politics, economics, religion, popular culture, education—a reason I believe it’s become the quintessential Nigerian character: at least in the contemporary time. 

A few years ago, a Nigerian legislator shot to national limelight for no other reason than his unapologetic embrace and embodiment—deliberate or by habit—of the bombast. Many Nigerians who weren’t even aware of—let alone ever tuned in to watch—the drab and often puerile “debates” of the country’s National Assembly on TV suddenly became ardent viewers. Why? Because of a Patrick Obahiagbon. Back in the days when Obahiagbon was a legislator, legislative sessions were a different kind of comedy show—the kind that made people really laugh, not the usual sardonic laughter that Nigerian politics generally elicits, but really heartfelt laughter. 

There are scores of compiled quotables from the politician that are available on the Internet. Here’s a popular one for those unfamiliar with them—Mr. Obahiagbon’s retort about Democracy Day Celebration in Nigeria—

“A celebration of democracy or a deprecable apotheosis of a hemorrhaging plutocracy, cascading into a mobocracy with all the ossifying proclivities of a kakistocracy? With our democracy enveloped in a paraplegic crinkum-crankum, we must all rise up to bring to focal hiceps and biceps Nigeria’s pluto-mobo-kakistocracy… certainly not democracy!”

A typical Obiahagbon delivery—as may be discerned from this interview he granted to Nigeria’s Channels TV that went viral, is more than the bombastic words. There’s the straight, unlaughing face, the squeezing of the nose and twisting of the mouth, the conducting hands accompanying his words, the pauses and sudden quick tempo. The heaved shoulders, neck slanted in the erudite mien of someone who as we say in Nigeria has chewed books to pieces, which is to say, a learned fellow. There is also the cheering, laughing audience as was usual during his days at the National Assembly, or the pretend silent audience of TV presenters whose efforts to suppress laughter added some spectacle to the comedy. 

To understand the dominant cultural attitude in Nigeria is in fact to understand the psychology and cultural work of Naija bombasticism. It’s perhaps what explains the loud fashion that’s come to characterize what we call traditional dressing in Nigeria. Across all distinct cultural groups in Nigeria, the traditional dress—its colour, fabric, outfit—is the costume assemblage of Hon. Obiahagbon’s bombastic performance. They hit you with their excessive show of glamour. They fill up visual, physical, and psychological space. And talking about filling up visual space, the unfortunate folks who sat directly behind the popular Nigeria singer Tems at the 2023 Oscars might attest to this sense of dressing that fills up the visual space with their extravagance. This extravagance cuts across just about every facet of cultural life. It’s in how language is spoken, in the gait, in the manner of behaviour, in how success is measured, in short, in how value is determined. If you’re in doubt, just check out the bulk of Nigerian music and Nollywood films that became successful in recent years. Besides the regular use of bombastic words and coinages, the act, the sound (including dialogues), the beats and rhythms, the dance, the colour, and the very spirit of their cultural contents rely on elements of bombasticism. 

It might be worth carrying out an exhaustive study of the cultural history of this contemporary culture of bombasticism even if only to understand its unique philosophical contents and dispositions. There’s an Igbo phrase that captures something about it for me: ida uda, which is to say, to resound loudly. It’s a phrase that challenges the popular proverb about empty vessels making the most noise. Ida uda will instead determine value by the loudness of the sound. If it booms, it’s worth. The value is in the loudness. For what it’s worth, the idea seems to offer a different, if you like, substantialist understanding of value in the Nigerian cultural market: one that is based on decibels. But we have to understand where the bombast came from and how it has emerged to become the contemporary hero of the Nigerian cultural mien and character. 

III 

Nigerian literature since the twentieth century—especially the ones that emerged in response to British colonization—arose largely in response to an ambivalent attitude to this character I am calling the bombast. The colonial and postcolonial Nigerian bombast was an ambivalent figure of the colonial situation. He (the historical bombast was predominantly male) started out as the interpreter—the one who translated the colonizer’s words to his community and vice versa, the one who served as the colonial court clerk, the colonial missionary’s altar boy, the village English teacher and later headmaster, the colonial police agent (that is, the kotuma or several other names they were called), and later the elite anticolonial so-called nationalist activist who ousted Indigenous authority in the name of seeking liberation from the colonizer. One of the distinctive attributes of this figure—whom his people perceived ambivalently as at once caricatural and important—is his dalliance with the exuberant magic of language/speech act: the colonizer’s language on the one hand and his community’s language on the other. His community folks often gathered to listen to him not so much because of a deep interest in the content of his speech as his dramatic vocalization of English words. His choice vocabulary was often highfalutin—to bamboozle his audience. Different iterations of the colonial/postcolonial bombast figure would make their way into literature and popular culture often appearing as a quack and a half-educated idiot and would speedily rise to become an important embodiment of postcolonial Nigerian confusion. 

Most popular stock characters of Nigerian drama, fiction, and even so-called market literatures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries were versions of this bombast cast. Think of such characters as Professor, Lawyer, Doctor, Headmaster, Loverboy in different cultural forms and expressions. What connects them is their romance with bombasticism. Consider a few examples from conventional literary works. In Chinua Achebe’s influential 1960 novel, No Longer at Ease, a central tension of the story is the hero Obi Okonkwo’s rejection of what he considers his community’s fetish with bombasticism. He has been sponsored by his community to study law in Britain—a feat that would not only give more symbolic and other expected clout to his community (including the clout of bombastic performance especially as Nigerian lawyers past and present are ipso facto given to bombastic vocabulary) but also help them to navigate the colonial legal system—but instead he studies English to the disappointment of his people. And as though his failure wasn’t already sufficient, Obi Okonkwo refuses to use bombastic words to demonstrate to his people that truly he conquered the white man’s tongue while seeking higher learning abroad. From that point on in the story, his fall becomes swift. In the end he realizes the value of what he has rejected as empty bombasticism. Achebe’s other novels are replete with this ambivalent drama of the colonial and postcolonial bombast. 

Yet no other Nigerian writer, past and present, is as captivated with bombasticism as Wole Soyinka. All his early plays and fiction since the 1960s grapple with bombasticism. From the bombastic Brother Jero (in The Jero Plays) whose sermons rely on gobbledegook, and Lakunle (in The Lion and the Jewel) who discovers too late that his blustering English is not enough to seduce the village belle, to the professor figures and bombastic tyrants in some of his other works (e.g., The Road; A Play of Giants), it won’t be out of place to suggest that not only is bombasticism a crucial thematic of Soyinka’s works but even, in fact, that Soyinka himself rose in the Nigerian cultural scene to become the quintessential cultural bombast of twentieth century Nigeria. His bombasticism is writ large all over him: his grey/white afro and beard, his characteristic “African” dress, his bombastic vocabulary (both in oral speech and his writings), etc., became over time in Nigeria a measure of erudition. To look erudite in Nigeria is generally to look Soyinka. Making Soyinka effectively the modern deity of Naija bombasticism. 

The Nigerian linguist Professor Diri Teilanyo has written extensively about bombasticism in Nigeria. In a 2003 academic article he titled, “The Use of Bombast in Nigeria,” he identifies and analyses what he describes as verbal and non-verbal uses of bombast in popular TV shows and other popular cultural contexts. The linguist persuasively showed the different elements and paraphernalia of the bombast in just about every facet of popular cultural form in Nigeria. Yet his interest in so-called second-language linguistic competence leads him to a conclusion that I think misses the point: besides [bombasticism] being an indicator of inadequate linguistic mastery, such bogus language is often a product of linguistic ostentation and affectation, of false erudition, of a pretentious and overbloated sagacity, or of schizophrenic megalomania, to mimic the quintessential bombaster. […] Bombast among users of a nonstandard variety of a second language is a consequence of the additional social role the language performs as a status symbol, and the user's ignorance about or bypassing of the essentially communicative function of all language. [101]

While I think that the professor is quite right to imply the use of bombastic language is a colonial legacy, describing bombasticism as an indication of ignorance and a bypassing of the communicative function of language misses the point. Clearly, in all the examples of bombasticisms that I know, there’s communication taking place. And these communications do not suggest a lack of linguistic mastery. 

The important point here, though, is that our bombast emerged from the colonial crucible and for some strange reason rambled his way to the cultural centre. He is the material measure of that something called the cultural legacy of colonization. He is both original and fake at the same time and has managed to captivate the Nigerian imagination. By captivation, I mean that he has since emergence held the Nigerian popular and cultural imagination captive—spellbound—with his resounding magic. 

 

IV 

The thing about bombasticism in Nigeria is not only the content of what is being communicated. (Even though the content matters significantly, a reason the bombast often enlists both verbal and non-verbal elements of speech act. The point is that the what of bombastic communication extends beyond the denotative use of language.) It’s even more the historical drama and feeling of communication being evoked. It’s to possess communication (or just about any cultural expression) with a historical character that both masks and reveals the condition of our colonization, a character we recognize, laugh at, embrace, ridicule, all at once. We love his act even when we can see through it, even when it violates us. The bombast reflects something about us—about our cultural condition as captives of a colonial imagination. 

During my undergrad years at Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria, I came to intimately understand and appreciate the use of bombast. As an extremely shy and timid person who was cripplingly intimidated by my new environment (that was my first time of being away from home in southeastern Nigeria to be on my own in the southwestern part of the country), with everyone around me speaking Yoruba and often making fun of what they called my “conk” (meaning heavy or thick) Igbo accent, bombasticism became my recourse. I would often during conversations/arguments with my roommates unleash a cacophony of highfalutin words to everyone’s cheer and entertainment. My venture into student activism (of sorts) was made possible by bombasticism. The first time I wrote a public attack of a student union leader, I garnished the writeup with grandiloquent, sometimes meaningless, phrases. Words such as concatenatious, rigmarolling, bombastic, elocution swam about in the piece. On a whim, I used a pseudonym (which turned out to be a wise decision that saved me from violent reprisal) and I was able to be at the different locations where the piece was posted to observe students’ responses. As you can imagine, the reception was exhilarating. It wasn’t the criticisms I offered that drew

responses but the bombastic phrases. At some point, folks were chanting those phrases in mockery of the targeted union leader, who searched unsuccessfully for the author of the piece. Some years later when the guy found out I was the author—by then my pseudonym had become my regular campus writing name—we had a good laugh. And I bought him some bottles of beer as peace offering. 

A lot of my public and creative writings that succeeded during my years as an undergrad were oriented to bombasticism: my journalistic works (especially a series I called Gossip Column), some of the academic papers I submitted to bombast professors in my department, and most especially my plays. One play in particular was hugely successful: Justice Justus. I originally wrote the play for a debate competition we were invited to participate at the University of Ibadan. We had previously lost a debate to one of the opposing teams from Olabisi Onabanjo University. They had these two eloquent speakers whom we cheered even when they vanquished our own team in our own backyard. The debate at Ibadan was supposed to be our chance to revenge. 

The debate topic was addressed in response to the debate about the value of beauty pageantry in Nigeria that regularly came up, especially following the so-called Miss World Riots of 2002 when some Muslims protested against hosting the Miss World pageant in Nigeria. The debate organizers gave us the arduous task of arguing that Miss World beauty pageant was culturally great for Nigeria, as though setting us up for obvious failure. 

Well, we had a strategy to win. We requested they allow us to entertain the audience with a play just before the debates. They happily agreed because of the entertainment a play would add to the event, oblivious that our play was part of our debate strategy. Our play was a burlesque I adapted from the famous Nigerian playwright Ola Rotimi’s Man Talk, Woman Talk with a mix of that Brechtian justice circle. In our play, a randy, sexist, bombastic judge comes to town to deliver justice. Cases debated before him between a male counsel and his female counterpart were stewed in all manners of bombasticisms and bifurcated along gendered lines. The loud Justice Justus insistently sided with the male counsel for no other reason than male solidarity and a liking for the male counsel’s bombastic phrases. The last case the judge oversees happens to be about beauty pageantry. The male counsel offers the kinds of standard, traditional arguments against beauty pageantry including claims about its colonial origins and how it’s alien to indigenous Nigerian cultures. The female counsel disagrees and makes a strong feminist argument including pointing out the indigenous foundations of beauty pageantry in Nigeria. When she senses the unjust judge is going to do the usual—side with the man—she requests a demonstration: a parade. By the time the parade is over with both the judge and the male counsel exhibiting their randiness and hypocrisy, passing judgement afterwards seems ridiculous. Justice Justus had no other choice than to dismiss the court. 

Beside the raucous laughter that greeted the play throughout, you can imagine that our eloquent opponents had a monumental task arguing against the fantastical landmines we planted with the play. We rightly guessed their strong points so that when they tried to hammer them home members of the audience—and even the debaters themselves—began laughing at their own recollection of the play’s mockery of the same points. Justice Justus was in their heads and we won the debate with our bombastic drama—not with substantive arguments. 

 

V 

Those who understand the vagaries of postcolonial Nigerian cultures and sensibilities would probably know the function of bombasticism in the country and among Nigerian communities in the diaspora. Bombasticism is the key and the door; it is the nomos of our contemporary cultural life and expression. The very way we emerged and are navigating a colonial world.  

Wonder why so many notable Nigerian preachers, especially the Pentecostal stock, are such unapologetic bombasts? The ones that made bombasticism so appealing on the Christian altars in Nigeria were often cast in 3-piece cut-to-fit designer suits, had their hairs permed, their lips coated with gloss, and generally adorned with sparkling details: shiny shoes, golden wristwatches, etc. And if they chose to dress traditional, it would be tailored to glamour and colour. Then, they chirruped their sermons using variations of affected Western accents supported with bombastic vocabulary—including Latin, Greek, Hebrew words. When they speak in tongues—that is, babble what no one understands when under the influence of the Holy Spirit—the sound theatrically and loudly booms: ribobobobo-ka-dididi-bobobo-pakakaka… The prayer sessions are often a bombastic babel that mean so much to the supplicants. Prayer and devotion in Nigeria have become a bombastic spectacle. Spectacularly loud for a god that has proven to be hard of hearing. 

 

VI  

The memories of my time in the boarding school are replete with bombastic spectacles that have remained more enduring than any subjects I was taught. I attended Dennis Memorial Grammar School (aka Dengram) in Onitsha, which was named after a colonial missionary credited with the translation of the Bible into Igbo language. During my time at Dengram, all the male teachers of worth were expert floggers. Teacher Okoro who danced to Bright Chimezie’s “sound boy” music when he flogged students. Maazi who called his cane mma agha (sword of war) and sang the sound of its lashes out loud. Pinchor (a nickname because the man was as petite as petite could be) who regularly dressed up in students’ uniform to catch defaulters. The towering Teacher Mmadu who chuckled loudly while lashing students. Batman (a mysterious nickname most likely given to the man for his nocturnal exploits) who made flogging into an art form. What unites all these teachers wasn’t so much the flogging as it was the bombastic spectacle that accompanied the flogging. Consider Batman. 

Not many students knew Batman’s real name. Legend had it that he fought in the Biafra-Nigeria War as a child soldier, travelled to England after the war to study, and returned to his alma mater to teach History and Physics. Batman lived in one of the few teachers’ residences within the school compound. Most nights, Batman dressed himself up in the students’ boarding uniform: a light blue shirt and brown shorts. Armed with a taped cane or a koboko bundle, he raided corners and hideouts where mgbemilas—students who refused to observe prep times—passed their time. Batman would creep in on them and unleash torrents. Such nights which were almost every night students in the prep rooms heard bangs and feet fleeing the dark classrooms or tree sides. Many of the fleeing students would run into the prep rooms and pretended to be reading. Batman would follow them to the prep rooms and as if in possession of clairvoyant powers sniff out the errant students. Sometimes if he wasn’t able to identify the erring students, he would lash the house prefect severely before asking him to identify those who just entered the classrooms. 

One thing was never in doubt: when Batman flogged you, you remained thoroughly flogged. With scars and blood. He flogged with all the muscles in his body, with incredible fury. The part of his flogging that students loved most of all—even those on the receiving end of it liked telling this part of the experience—was the torrent of bombastic expletives accompanying the lashes. Batman would normally begin with English and end with a combo of English and Igbo until one couldn’t distinguish which was which. You bloody Jew, you Ichabod, you nigger, you scrappy imp, you nincompoop, you bombastic moron, you ragamuffin, you nonentic in tata… With each expletive came lashes of the cane or the koboko as the unfortunate student danced about in pain. I dika apu ala in short, ala adika apu i in short… 

On several occasions, encounters with Batman baptised students with new names. I remember one particular incident one evening when Batman sneaked in on a sleeping student during an evening house prayer. That night Batman was in his camouflage military uniform, which meant he was armed with koboko instead of cane. School lore had it that his koboko was made not from the usual cow hide but from hippo hide from Uganda; another lore had it his koboko came from alligator hide. What was never in doubt was that one stroke of the koboko was felt in different parts of the body at once. It took only two strokes that evening to cause the unfortunate student to begin speaking in tongues, that is, uttering gibberish. He danced to the lashing, collapsed on the floor, and began to scream tulemon! With each lash, he shouted gibberish that ended with tulemon! Everyone began to call him Tulemon afterwards and the name stayed with him even after he graduated. 

The amazing point of the story, though, is that Batman is well loved by students, most especially those who felt the brunt of his punishing lashes. A few years ago, when Batman retired, Dengram Old Boys Association social media pages became flooded with love letters and praises and tributes for Batman. It wasn’t strange to hear some of the “boys” who got permanent body marks from Batman’s koboko express love for the man. Even back in the days when Batman unleashed his bombastic lashes and expletives on the boys, many of them laughed afterwards and would chuckle at the new words hurled at them. I have not forgotten the words “scallywag” and “ragamuffin.” Those were the vocabs that accompanied my own day of reckoning with Batman’s canes. 

It is perhaps the reason we “love” our Batman-like politicians whose greatest gifts to the global community is their invention of all manners of torture against their citizens. Torture, to them, must be made into a bombastic theatre: it must resound loudly—ida uda—until torturer and tortured alike and their audiences love it. It’s the quintessential colonial drama! 

 

VII 

What was it that makes our bombast hero so enchanting to us, so culturally Nigerian; why are we so amenable to the tortuous “pleasures” of the cane when delivered with grandiloquence and extravagant expletive? 

Simple: It’s because the bombast is the political and cultural hero of colonial and neocolonial Nigeria. It’s what tickles the popular and not-so-popular Nigerian imagination. As I suggested earlier, the bombast has held the Nigerian imagination captive by its resounding colonial magic. This magic—as I have tried to explain—is the work of colonial artifice. Let me by way of conclusion elaborate with another real-life anecdote of the enduring cultural legacy of this character.

Sometime in 2007 I was in a public transport travelling home from the university when a group of soldiers stopped us at one of the innumerable checkpoints on Nigeria’s roads. For some context, back then, my head was still hot with principles. I had all these ideas against corruption and whatnot. So that when the soldiers stopped our car and our driver was fondling with his pocket to find the right, shall we say, “passcode,” I was seething quietly. And then to my amazement, the soldier who flagged us down refused to take the notes our driver offered. He said it was an insult and ordered the poor driver to go speak with another soldier standing behind a tree. I wasn’t going to keep quiet anymore. I jumped out of the car and followed the driver even when he told me to stay back. As the driver pleaded with the soldier behind the tree to take the amount he offered, I volunteered my voice, “Excuse me, officer, may I know what this is about and why you stopped us?” 

The soldier turned to look at me. He gave me a stare down and asked, “Na who you be?” 

“I’m a passenger in that car…” 

“No be wetin I dey ask you. Na who you be?” 

I thought he was asking what I did, something about my status or occupation, and so I said, “I’m a university student and…” 

“You be Mongo Park, abi? Na im you come here dey tear phoné. Bastard beast of no nation! I go clear your doubt today…” and he went on and on about how he could waste me and nothing would happen. By which he meant shoot me without ever getting punished for it. 

(Take note of the soldier’s reference to Mongo Park. And beast of no nation which is a story for another time.)

Long story short. It took the intervention of other passengers and the driver parting with double the sum he had initially offered before the soldiers decided to not only let the car be on its way but also to let me go with the rest. By then, I had received several flying kicks in the butt, a few resounding slaps, and even a punch or two I miraculously dodged. When I reflected on the incident later, I realized how blindingly foolish I was to confront soldiers drenched in hemp and alcohol, angry with the world, brandishing AK-47 on a lonely highway. 

Some years later, I made friends with a soldier during my national service year in Nigeria who nicknamed me Mungo Park (the Scottish colonial explorer whom the British claimed “discovered” River Niger—the river that assumedly gave Nigeria its name). Mungo Park by the way was known for his maniacal slaughters of Africans for fun, who from the safe distance of his boat in the river, regularly fired shots into African communities during his murderous expeditions until fate caught up with him in what is today known as Northern Nigeria. The solider began calling me Mungo Park after he saw me perform in a play. I played the role of a bombastic professor debating with other stakeholders on matters of national significance. I don’t know how a bloodthirsty colonial explorer—Mungo Park—came to be associated with bombasticism in Nigeria. But who knows. Perhaps the booming sound of Park’s gun’s that gutted African communities provided the impetus. The bombasticism of the colonial gun that storytellers turned into a character we now love so much and do our best to emulate.