To Be a Man Is Not a One-Day Job: Masculinity, Money, and Intimacy in Nigeria

Abstract

There is little scholarship on Nigerian – let alone Igbo – masculinities. Daniel Jordan Smith’s To Be a Man Is Not a One-Day Job: Masculinity, Money, and Intimacy in Nigeria addresses this gap. Smith is an American social historian who lived and conducted fieldwork in Nigeria between the 1980s and the 2000s. His methodology encompasses interviews, surveys and participation in social life. In the introduction, Smith sets out to “explore the multiple, overlapping, and competing pressures, desires, moralities, and social imaginaries that animate masculinity in Nigeria” (12). The book revolves around three pivots – men, intimacy and money – and maps how money is central to Igbo men’s definitions and articulations of manhood. Smith employs “intimacy” as a theoretical concept to show how Igbo men relate to women and other men and how gender intersects with class and power among the Igbo. The first chapter traces Igbo men’s transition from youth to adulthood within an economy of fashionable consumption, in particular the connections between migration, youth and sex. Due to globalization, young men easily associate masculinity with modernity and urbanity with power. Smith comments that many young men believe the village constrains the performance of modern masculinity and so desire to migrate to the city (37). Chapter 2 emphasizes the centrality of money to courtship and marriage, demonstrating that marriage and fatherhood constitute masculine norms. The story of Ikenna, a teacher, confirms the burden Igbo men must negotiate as they perform weddings that “have become spectacles of conspicuous redistribution” (68). Igbo men must be willing to spend lavishly at both traditional and white weddings to impress families, friends, peers and strangers – to perform masculinity in a conspicuous way. Chapter 3 delineates how Igbo men earn a living in rural and urban spaces through motley occupations and professions. For example, Smith introduces a young man named Chudi who is a farmer in his home village as well as a tailor in the commercial city of Aba. This chapter also touches on the Big Man and “naira chiefs,” critiquing the instances of corruption surrounding wealth accumulation in Igbo society. Smith describes Ogbonna, a university lecturer who epitomizes the Big Man as he resigns from the university and joins politics, thereby amassing wealth, property and businesses within a short time. Smith notes that any man who achieves high status in Nigeria “is the target of rumours about the origin of his money” (119). To Be a Man Is Not a One-Day Job also references social clubs as archetypal masculine spaces of sociality. Chapter 4 presents the famous tennis clubs in Owerri and Umuahia as places of “all-male comradery and solidarity (132),” where men construct hegemonic ideals of manhood and reinforce patriarchal male culture. The clubs operate as a semi-formal association with an administrative structure. Men usually gather most evenings and on weekends to drink, eat and banter, after playing rounds of tennis. Some members use the opportunity to flaunt wealth and virility. Chapter 5 exposes the links between masculinity, violence and criminality. Here, Smith tackles underlying social problems as instigators of the crisis of masculinity, contending that “Men’s behaviour contributes to reproducing the challenging social conditions that they and others face. But whether men are good or bad, the social contexts that shape the performance of masculinity, its meanings, and its consequences look remarkably similar” (147). Chapter 6 explores seniority and the end of life, completing Smith’sethnographic cartography on generational configurations of masculinity in Igboland. The craze for wealth among the youth and rural–urban migration pose a challenge for the old men in the villages: