But it shall be written and said that in the battle for the consciousness of this toddler, I gave her a fighting chance not to become the next victim of the imperialism of the dominant image of her people as hunger, disease, and death.
“Daddy, I’m going to die!”
“Kai, dapada, Tise. Young lady, I don’t find this funny at all. Don’t be saying horrible things. You will not die.”
“But I’m going to die, Daddy, because I am so hungry!”
My enemies in Nigeria have sent this child to finish me, I think. Here we are, Saturday morning in Walmart, and she starts this hunger and death drama on top of her voice? Doesn’t she know that her father’s compatriots in Nigeria are second only to Oyinbo people in gbeborun matters? Oyinbo people can gbeborun, ehn! Already, they are looking at us one kain, pretending to mind their business, wondering whether to take the little girl seriously and make funny phone calls to funny places about a little girl complaining openly of hunger at Walmart. Maybe her African parents are not feeding her?
“Haba, Tise. You had your cereals, joined me for my own akamu and akara before settling down to your mommy’s boiled yam and eggs – all under an hour ago before we left the house for shopping fa. And on our way here in the car, your mouth was doing up and down on your cookies. Which one is hunger and death for God’s sake? Ok, ask me nicely that you want me to buy you McDonald’s happy meal because of the toy that comes with it. You are just looking for that McDonald’s toy. Instead of asking directly, you are trying to use the Nigerian part of the brain in that your little head.”
“Ok, Daddy. I want happy meal. But it is true that children die without food. So you will not let me die like those children?”
“Ah, Tise, see, Play-Doh! Let’s get you some Play-Doh.”
Excitement over Play-Doh. She forgets the food, hunger, and death topic but I know that I have only postponed that argument by another day.
It happens every time she is asked to bring canned and packed food donation to school “for dying children in Africa”.
It happens every time she is asked to bring a loonie (one-dollar coin in Canada) or a toonie (two-dollar coin in Canada) for “hungry people in Africa.”
We have been putting the food and money donations in her backpack to take to school every time the request comes but it has taken me to a very dangerous ideological terrain. I am a Professor of Postcolonial Theory and Discourse. Those who go through twelve years of the sort of education that this child is receiving in this society ultimately end up as first year undergraduates in my classes where I have just four years to open up their world, enrich their perspectives, and undo the damage of twelve years of being taught and framed to see the non-White, non-Western other as nothing but hunger, disease, and death.
She is entering that pipeline. And I am determined to fight the pipeline. But this fight is like no other fight. There is a Nigerian dimension to it.
In that same consciousness where her Western society is lodging a single story of Africa as hunger and disease, I am using the image to plant other stories, other narratives.
When her Catholic school here asks for donations for the hungry and dying children in Africa, I know that the Africa here has a specific name: Nigeria. Her Catholic school falls in a Parish run by Nigerian Catholic priests. Without Catholic priests, Catholicism is dead as dodo in Canada. The Christian faith is dying a slow agonising death in the West. The “pagans” they went to Christianise in Africa and Latin America are now the ones sending Reverend Fathers and Pastors to them here.
There are so many Nigerian Catholic priests in an around Ottawa. These Nigerian Catholic priests adopt orphanages back home in Nigeria. Whenever they are traveling to Nigeria, they make an appeal to their Parish and the schools under their jurisdiction for donations to Reverend Father so and so’s orphanage in Nigeria. Father so and so supports the orphanage. Let us help the children.
Trouble is, these priests don’t always know how their well-intentioned appeal is passed on to the kids and on to the parents. The Nigerian priests never mean to create the impression that everybody in Africa looks like the children you see in Feed the Children television ads but that is the imagery that the pipeline processes and solidifies in the consciousness of these children.
That is is why my five-year-old comes back home with a sense of missionary emergency. The children of Africa are hungry. The children of Nigeria are dying. She is the five-year-old Western saviour who will swoop on Africa with a messianic miracle.
That is why she is associating food with hunger and death. When they tell her to bring food and money to school for the dying children in Nigeria, the narrative comes complete with the Western manual – that familiar imagery of malnourished children with visibly countable ribs, mucus dripping endlessly from nostrils infested by flies, and the obligatory distended bellies.
I fight back with image and imagery. The child does not understand why she spends so much time looking at photo albums of Nigerians and Africans on social media – with ample commentary from Daddy that these are “her people in Africa”. From Nigeria to Ghana to Kenya to Malawi to Tanzania to Senegal, she sees photos of beautiful and well-fed Africans in other spheres and other socialities. Just random photos of life in Africa beyond hunger and disease. And from social media, she watches Yoruba movies with Daddy, watches movies from other parts of Africa and sees the complexity and abundance of life yonder beyond the simplisms of one-track narratives.
In that same consciousness where her Western society is lodging a single story of Africa as hunger and disease, I am using the image to plant other stories, other narratives.
I do not underestimate the battle. It is the battle of every African diasporan parent.
But it shall be written and said that in the battle for the consciousness of this toddler, I gave her a fighting chance not to become the next victim of the imperialism of the dominant image of her people as hunger, disease, and death.
Pius Adesanmi, a professor of English, is Director of the Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Canada.
