Jápa or jáhá? The Nigerian modern migration pattern

Nigerians have a penchant for creative neologisms – they have the special ability and innate tendency to create new words, new phrases, even new proverbs. The brilliant intellectual giant at the University of Ibadan, Remi Raji, even came up with the notion of the postproverbials, where, for better or for worse, the genius of the people has forced them to create and re-create proverbs. Rather than say, for example, “Ilé ọba t’ó jó, ẹwà l’ó bù sí i” (A burnt down palace brings about untold beauty), they would say, “Ilé ọba t’ó jó, ọbá sá lọ” (The burning down of the palace puts the monarch to flight). Quips of this nature are endless in the arsenal of the people. Simply put, you just can’t beat my people when it comes to creative rhetorics and humorous interlocutions.

I first heard the concept “Jápa” from one of the write-ups of my friend, Dr. Toyin Falola. Falola is the most celebrated professor of the Humanities, writing from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a voracious writer and foremost scholar – the rarest of his type in the black world, and among the topmost in the world. Whenever he writes something, I’m drawn to it. When he wrote about this concept of Jápa, it caught my attention, and I started looking at, and thinking about it. Later on, the famous economist and financial analyst, Ngozi Iweala, also spoke about it. Definitely, Jápa is not a joking matter, and, believe me, contemporary social scientists in the fields of linguistics, human geography, human history, sociology of survival, cultural anthropology, analysts of the patterns of human behavior, locations, dislocations, mass exodus, forced and unforced labor, brain drain, and more, have their works cut out for them on this one.

Jápa is a neologism, an ultramodern slanglish creeping out of Nigeria into the world around. The etymology is a bit complex: Já is a Yoruba word meaning to break. “Pa” is to kill. As an idiomatic expression, it means to break away for good, without looking back, without a second thought. It is a deliberate, noncompromising severing away and breaking free of an unproductive umbilical cord. I was not one bit surprised when I found that among the lexicological contributions of Nigerians to the modern English/global lexicon, this word has featured prominently. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary of January 2025 has Jápa among its new entries. The genesis of it is clear. Many Nigerians have fled the country to seek greener pastures far away from home, especially in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. I recently read about the fate of the newly minted medical doctors from the University of Ibadan, via University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan where, I believe, 147 graduated. Sadly, and very sadly, only one of them planned to stay in Nigeria. That is a staggering 0.7%! In a nation fraught with multitudinous health challenges, how can we survive when less than 1% of our elite healthcare providers are seeking refuge for their souls away from where they are most needed? Sadly, one with conscience cannot blame those young minds. In my extended family, there are four physicians. Not a single one of them is in Nigeria! As much as I love Nigeria, I would not be the uncle to counsel them to do otherwise. How could a leadership see this and not fret, perspire, and fall on its knees to beg? “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind,” to borrow those sacred words of Bob Dylan. But that in itself, is a topic for another time.

Of late, I have started to cast a critical look at the concept of Jápa, juxtaposing it with a conversely proportional one, and that is the word “jáhá.” Both jápa and jáhá are action verbs in the Yoruba language. Linguists would even consider the two words as split verbs of sort; after all, between the two meaningful segments of the two words (called morphemes), you could throw in a word or phrase to connect them and make an intelligible phrase out of them. But, let me spare my readers of that linguistic complexity that could so easily distract us from making our point.

Jápa is a voluntary migration away from home with a good chance of a permanent or temporary migration back home when the need arrives. Jáhá, however, may or may not be a voluntary migration away from home, but it presupposes that a return home is almost, if not altogether, impossible. The fact of the matter is that there is a critical mass of Nigerians who have jáhá, and, alas, have no home to return to! Some are homeless, some face extreme mental health conditions and, indeed, some dead bodies found on the American streets and in parks in extreme winter conditions are known to belong to some of such unfortunate Nigerians.

Again, let’s look at the etymology of jáhá. “Já” is to break, tear, rip up, lose balance and fall, etc. In this case, it is more of “to lose balance and fall.” “Ha” is to get stuck, entangled, knotted in, suspended (in the air), caught in the thicket, hanging in the branch of a tree or at a space higher than for the victim to alight with ease. Jáhá is an unfortunate phenomenon, not so much because of the consequences of its occurrence, but because of the fact that people don’t pay attention to that phenomenon. Many don’t even know that it exists. I am going to exemplify my argument with some stories.

Permit me to cite an extreme situation. It happened in the American Midwest a short while ago. A family drove in their vehicle and ran into a bad accident which instantly took the lives of Dad and Mom, leaving the three young children alive. The police came and asked where they originally came from, and they told them “Somewhere in Africa.” Where in Africa, they were not sure. Those children automatically became wards of the State. That would be a “jáhá” case in its rustic and tragic manifestation. Odd as it may sound, those kids represent a critical mass that have “jáhá” in the population of Africans in the diaspora.

There is a critical mass of Nigerians known to roam the streets of American urban centers. They speak fluent American English but clueless to where they came from. The late Gbenga Adeboye Funwontan lampooned that group in one of his video clips that showcased Adeboye’s American sojourn, where he met a gentleman by the name Lekan Orimabogunje, who thought his name was actually Lincoln Something.

Go to inner-city homeless shelters across the United States, and there would be Nigerians who are stuck in the foreign land. The saying that “Biwaju o bá ṣeé lọ, ẹ̀yìn á ṣeé padà sí” (If moving forward becomes a chore, returning to the base should be an option) no longer applies to that group because they have no place to which they could return in the home base. “Ilée baba ọmọ kìí b’ọmọ l’ẹ́rù” (The home of one’s father does not become a place to dread) is an exception to these folks. That group belongs in the category of those who, sadly, have “jáhá.”

The list goes on and on. But by far one of the worst of the “jáhá” group are those who traveled legally to the foreign land, most especially to the Americas and Europe, who obtained citizenships of those foreign lands and even acquired legitimate sources of income to fit snugly into the American and European dreams. The problem is that their income is spent on the exponentially high lifestyle, the mortgage company, car loans, and the rest is hardly sufficient to put food on the table. Sadly, in all the decades of their overseas sojourn, they never thought of acquiring a small property of their own to which they could return. As successful as they may seem, they belong in the “jáhá” category.

In this terrible hall of shame is the group that has blown the bridge behind themselves before leaving their natal home. At work, they would fit the cliché of “Boyinbo ba n lo se nii su s’aga” (When the white man vacates a seat, he leaves the chair smeared with his own excrement). Sadly, when the vicissitude of life raises its ugly head in the foreign land, there is no home to return. This is a bad case of “jáhá” proper.

What of those who have gone for such a long time that they have totally lost touch with how to survive in the natal home. Regrettably, the newly acquired culture in the foreign land does not sit well with them. They are members of two worlds, citizens of neither. They are literally “stranded!” Sadly, in that group are those who reluctantly returned home or are made to return home by family members through coercion, deceit or supernatural beckoning. One came home with his family. The children managed to survive but the father died in less than two years of the “forced” return. This is among the worst category of the “jáhá” scenario.

They belong in the group that the poetry of Ifa, the prehistoric literature of the Yoruba, has long warned about the danger of “jaha” when it talks of “Òrìrò tí ń ṣawo re’lú Òìbó.” Over six decades ago, Kofi Awoonor’s Songs of Sorrow underscores the graphic scenario of members of that group when he lamented over the unfair apportioning of ill fortunes to some people by Dzogbese Lisa, the Ewe people’s personal god of destiny and dispenser of life’s fortunes and misfortunes, which the Yoruba call Orí. Those verses say:

Dzogbese Lisa has treated me thus

It has led me among the sharps of the forest

Returning is not possible

And going forward is a great difficulty

The affairs of this world are like the chameleon faeces

Into which I have stepped

When I clean, it cannot go.

I am on the world’s extreme corner,

I am not sitting in the row with the eminent

But those who are lucky

Sit in the middle and forget

I am on the world’s extreme corner

I can only go beyond and forget.

My people, I have been somewhere

If I turn here, the rain beats me

If I turn there the sun burns me

The firewood of this world

Is for only those who can take heart

That is why not all can gather it.

The world is not good for anybody

But you are so happy with your fate;

Alas! The travelers are back

All covered with debt.

Jápa is bad, but Jáhá is saddening, and exponentially disastrous!

Afolayan is a retired professor of Education and Linguistics at the Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, United States.

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