Reifying subaltern voices: a visual communication and figurative discourse of headloading practices in Nigeria

The paper examines headloading—the practice of carrying loads on the head—prevalent across Africa and especially Nigeria, as a signifier of subalternity. Motivated by the 2018 “Lazy Nigerian Youth” (LNY) social media conversation sparked by former President Buhari’s remarks, and by the author’s lived experience with headloading, the study asks: how does headloading, as a social practice and as represented visually, signal a social structure of the subaltern? What ways of seeing and representing can position headloading as such? The work situates headloading within visual discourse, arguing its importance as a persistent symbol of class and power differentials in Nigeria, Africa, and the broader Global South.

Prior work frames headloading as human porterage and an intermediate mobility practice prevalent among youths and women (Ogunremi 1975; Porter et al. 2007), with research on health impacts identifying energy costs, biomechanical strain, injury risk, maternal-fetal concerns, and psychosocial effects (Porter et al. 2013). Studies link headloading to histories of containerisation and mobility (Osborn 2018) and to picturesque, exoticized representations that shape Western perceptions of Africans (Ubogu 2016; Hall 1997). Scholars call for understanding socio-economic, cultural, and institutional contexts of headloading (Porter et al. 2013). The literature, however, lacks explicit connections between practice, representation, and socio-political spaces. This study addresses that gap by exploring headloading’s humanistic, ideological, and discursive dimensions through visual analysis.

A qualitative, interpretivist, discursive approach is used, with auto-ethnographic reflexivity. Visual texts (photographs and artworks) were purposively sampled from online sources (notably Facebook posts from the 2018 LNY discourse) and exhibition catalogues, including the author’s own works. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is adapted for visual semiosis drawing on Fairclough and subsequent elaborations for images (Wang 2014). Analysis proceeds at three levels: (1) micro-level description of visual form, composition, and visual tropes (e.g., visual metaphors; Kress & van Leeuwen); (2) meso-level discursive practice analyzing production, distribution, and consumption of images; and (3) macro-level social explanation situating images within socio-political contexts (coloniality, class, Global North/South relations). The analytical structure follows description–interpretation–explanation to recontextualize headloading as intertextual and interdiscursive. Key visual cases include: a viral Facebook image titled “Lazy Nigerian youth waiting for oil money” (cement headloading); Obiora Udechukwu’s People of the Night and Nightsoilman; and the author’s artwork Global North on South.

• Headloading operates as a potent visual metaphor for subalternity. In the LNY discourse, images of strenuous headloading were deployed ironically to refute claims of youth laziness, reifying lived suffering, survival struggles, and class stratification between political/economic elites and the working poor.
• Historical and artistic representations of nightsoilmen associate headloading with vassalage, stigma, secrecy, and low social status, indexing menial labor and socio-economic servitude shaped by urbanization and colonial legacies.
• The artwork Global North on South visualizes geopolitical power asymmetries: a burdened, bleeding Global South carrying the Global North, signaling deformity (mental/psychological/bodily) under systemic weight, and connecting local Nigerian class relations with global colonial and neo-colonial structures.
• Headloading imagery links everyday survival with broader deficits in infrastructure, social welfare, and governance. The paper contextualizes this with poverty indicators: about 87 million Nigerians in extreme poverty (Adebayo 2018), over 40% classified as poor in 2019 (NBS 2020), and around 50% in extreme poverty per World Poverty Clock (World Data Lab 2020), illustrating why burdensome practices persist.
• Visual discourse analysis demonstrates how images circulate (production/distribution/consumption) on social media to mobilize counter-narratives, while also revealing difficulties in tracing provenance and the role of platform affordances in shaping meaning. Overall, headloading functions as a sign-system that encodes inequality, exploitation, colonial continuities, and the lived experience of the subaltern across Nigeria and the Global South.

The findings address the research questions by showing that visual representations of headloading—across social media protests and fine art—operate as discursive signals of subalternity. The LNY images translate lived labor into metaphorical counter-speech, contesting elite narratives and foregrounding structural burdens. Nightsoilmen artworks historicize headloading as stigmatized servitude, while Global North on South articulates a macro-metaphor connecting Nigerian class divides with global hierarchies and colonial/neo-colonial dependencies. The visual-discursive approach reveals how metaphor and intertextuality enable images to carry ideological content about power, class, and geopolitics. Significantly, reconceptualizing headloading beyond transport practice illuminates broader socio-political dynamics of marginalization and the endurance of colonial effects in contemporary economic and social relations.

The study establishes headloading as a sign-rich practice that metaphorizes subalternity within Nigeria and the wider Global South. Through CDA of social media imagery (e.g., LNY), historical/artistic depictions (nightsoilmen), and a conceptual artwork (Global North on South), the research shows how headloading reifies class structures, power asymmetries, and colonial legacies. It differentiates the lived realities of the poor from those of the political and economic elite and connects local Nigerian dynamics to global North–South relations. While not calling for abolishing headloading, the work argues for rethinking its meanings and implications, recognizing the burdens it symbolizes within unequal socio-political orders and the continuing imprint of colonization on development trajectories.

• Qualitative interpretivist design with purposive sampling of a limited set of images limits generalizability.
• Heavy reliance on visual CDA and auto-ethnographic reflexivity introduces subjectivity in interpretation.
• Provenance issues for social media images (difficulty ascertaining original sources or edits) may affect contextual accuracy.
• The analysis is context-specific to Nigeria/Africa, which may limit transferability to other settings without adaptation.