A letter to Mallam Nomau and Nome Karkara on International Women’s Day 2024

Voice is powerful. Science and native wisdom agree that we hear the world’s noise before we are born. After birth, the world continues to sing its hymn through voices imported into our homes via contraptions designed to educate, inform, guide and mould our behaviour. Voice serves as the distinct pieces of cloth sewn into an unforgettable quilt we come to trust and cherish.

In my childhood, that contraption was the radio. It was a member of the Salihu family with the right to drone on all day, sometimes all night, and every waking hour like a much- indulged grandparent. It spoke Hausa, Yoruba, Pidgin, Queen’s English and more. It chortled comedy and told the news and wisdom, too. Radio moulded us effortlessly. I didn’t quite know its power until I realised the bits and pieces of voice that lived on in my head, embedded in my memory.

Growing up we listened to each other’s favourite program and vicariously experienced thrill or trauma because the radio was always loud. For example, disco music blaring from a neighbour’s radio was very welcome since you would not dare tune to a station playing the same at home, and not when your parents wanted to listen to the news or some such important to an adult, but arduous to a child, program. The radio’s volume was only turned down during prayer times in my house. That is when my technician father would say, ‘Slow the radio’.

My 2024 tribute to a male champion is not to the radio. I am not sure it has a sex or gender. But radio enabled two male icons to shape my youth’s mind and draw me toward agriculture. Garba ABCD also known as Mallam Nomau (the master farmer), and Ado Charanchi, also known as Nome Karkara Magajin Garba (Garba’s heir, the quintessential farmer).

I am a farmer today due in part to my parents and these two agricultural extension gurus of the 20th century. In their heydays in the 1980s – 2000, they visited hundreds of the most illustrious farms and farmers and interviewed presidents. In a predominantly Muslim northern Nigeria, where women carried out all work within the home, they nudged and hailed women farmers and encouraged their active role in agriculture. Women of my mother’s generation and their children listened to Mallam Nomau as part of their repertoire of radio menus. Our mothers practised agriculture in gardens, invested in noman lambu (irrigated farming), and knew the value of fresh farm vegetables to the wellbeing of their families. They bought directly from farmers because of Mallam Nomau.

I felt my heart leap when our mentor, Dr Kole Shettima, a radio lover, asked in the context of a gender policy in agriculture convening, whether we recalled Mallam Nomau. I screeched, ‘Is he alive’? And his ‘yes’ teleported me to nostalgia. Nomau indeed lived on in Nome Karkara, his heir. Working side by side via Radio Nigeria Kaduna and Kano airwaves, Nome Karkara carried on after the death of Mallam Nomau (Garba ABCD), becoming the new Mallam Nomau and Garba’s heir or magaji. This is an amazing lesson in succession planning and transitioning.

The traditional African line of sight to education is oral. Radio is a technology which has aided that tradition. Agricultural extension and radio are great allies cooperating to reach millions of ears through locally adapted programming in agrarian societies. There remains a high listening culture in Nigeria, especially in the north. The Broadcasting Governor’s Board Gallup (2022) holds that 77% of Nigerians listen to the radio at least once a week. The radio’s malleability, portability and low maintenance persona lend it well to this connector role. Even with evolving technology, you can still find a radio on the phone and choose thousands of stations globally just by clicking a button. The radio is an idea whose time is enduring.

I celebrate these two sterling gentlemen I had never met but whose can-do spirit stoked and inspired me and hundreds of thousands of Hausa-speaking women to be food growers,

contributing to women’s economic empowerment and dignity. A farmer’s place has never been

more important than at this time in our national life when faced with a 33% food inflation due partly to climate change, conflict and convoluted public policy. At the same time, agricultural extension service is in remission and, at best, is approaching revival. Extension services used to be the livewire of farming and the source of new knowledge and advisory. The ingenuity and creativity of the farmer and our willingness to explore and elevate agriculture along its entire value chain, leveraging adaptive technology, is what may save us.

The ‘Nomau’ voice made generations. They came on radio Kaduna every week, reporting farming innovations in a folkloric manner, telling tales of travels and encounters with banter. Farming communities depended on the programme. The duo loved to talk with their studio guests about seedlings and fertiliser application techniques, which farmers were wise because they embraced modern farming methods and the commensurate size of their harvest. They made farming romantic and endearing. I can still hear their voice’s warm, rolling cadence more than 40 years later.

The Oyster–Hadis award given to Alhaji Ado Chiranchi, Nome Karkara, Magajin Garba in 2024, read ‘in gratitude, for inspiring generations of farmers’. We have heroes and sheroes in our communities. We just have to find them, name them, and hail them.

Mallam Nomau, and Nome Karkara, may your legacy continue to endure. Happy International Women’s Day 2024.

‘Invest in women: Accelerate progress.’

#InspireInclusion