Finding Stable Ground as a New Freelance Writer in Nigeria

"When I visit their websites/social media pages, I imagine an alternate reality where I’m on my way to becoming a lecturer, having office hours, dedicating my life to the slower churn of archival research projects, vast literature reviews and teaching year-long courses."

feature image by Daniel Cañibano

The ground here is not stable here at all. Sometimes the craze that fills your head comes from your stomach ulcer. Stress, the doctor says. Other times, it comes from the look a man on the road gives you when he shouts “go back home, you’re naked” as he points to your knee-length dress. When you get to the reception of that office, and they say “Mummy, you can take a seat there”, you want to immediately reply “oh no, I’m not a mummy” but you shut up because you know that securing that meeting depends on them seeing you as a much older, even married, woman. A very important thing you come to realise about being a writer here is that everything else that you are has a bearing on your capability to make a living off words.

Allegra Hobbs’s essay ‘Writer as Influencer’ explains how and why being a writer today often means also commodifying your self and identity. But as with most media I consume, which is unfortunately published on foreign-based platforms, I find a slight mismatch between my lived location-specific reality and the astute observations which speak for a location-agnostic ‘we’. The writer is not (yet) an influencer in Nigeria, unless you are based-between-the-US-and-Nigeria-globally-recognised-Chimamanda Adichie. When I say that as a new freelance journalist in Nigeria, your perceptible identity has a great bearing on your work, I mean something slightly different (though the culprit of both points is probably the same). It is that my writing cannot escape the strictures of the life I have, the life I am currently living. The doors slammed in my face because of my age, gender or nationality are doors through which I had hoped to find more resources to enable my work. In the same way, sometimes, concessions are acceded to me and my requests for access granted because of how I am perceived, how eloquent I sound, the university name on my CV or even who my parents know.

When I moved back to Nigeria in August last month to work full-time as a freelance writer and photographer, I promised myself to remember that ‘if the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s,’ as Joseph Campbell famously wrote. While I am currently less committed to that idea because life is hard enough and I must not always do the hard spirited thing, I found it necessary at the time. I had to be prepared for the questions “What do you mean by freelance writer and photographer in Nigeria? How does that pay?” which has come from family, friends, bolt drivers, the caterer at my grandfather’s funeral, everyone really.

In a country where 47% of the population live in multi-dimensional poverty, a country with a 42.5% youth unemployment rate and the second-highest rate of formal unemployment on Bloomberg’s global list, the question of how to earn a living is urgent. Salaries remain stagnant while costs of living continue to rise as Nigeria’s Naira becomes less and less valuable to the dollar. As result, as a freelancer in Nigeria, you hold this in your head as gospel: secure foreign-based clients because the dollar goes far in Nigeria. Of course, this means you’re apportioning the greater (and probably better) part of your talent to developing non-local projects and platforms. But on average, the same 1000 words on a dollar-based platform will earn you ten times the fee on a Naira-based platform.

Before full-time freelancing, I almost started a PhD and so I still have many acquaintances in academia. When I visit their websites/social media pages, I imagine an alternate reality where I’m on my way to becoming a lecturer, having office hours, dedicating my life to the slower churn of archival research projects, vast literature reviews and teaching year-long courses. Where the pace of work is more marathon than sprint, and income is salaried or from long-term funding, rather than fees and stipends. I won’t need to be active on social media, peddling my work out of anxiety. I won’t feel the need to be on to the world every day, nervously foraging for opportunities, lest my daily bread zooms past me like a rodent who is afraid of me as I am of it. I know it is a fantasy: not all PhD students have the funding they need. It’s easier to think switching jobs/career paths will fix my financial stress, before I think of the fact that capitalism is making earning a living more difficult in every industry.

But it is not all bad and complicated. When I slip into the claustrophobic state of financial anxiety, it helps to remember Aminatou Sow’s words, “We’re not trying to be millionaires or moguls. We just want to live a happy, small life and be able to afford the things that we like. Once you take that pressure away, it opens a different lane.” I happen to be one of the “we”s currently just desiring a small, happy life. One where I can do my work without feeling that doing the work is in competition with my keeping well- physically, mentally, and financially. So I started to ask myself “What would I do differently if it is already true that as a freelancer I do not have to be wrecked with financial anxiety or the tremors of work instability? What would have to change about my world?”

I am only five months into doing this full-time, but some things have surely helped. Remember what I said about everything else you are having a bearing on the work you do/are able to do. I found that leaning into that as a superpower, more than a limitation, has been useful. I can get paid from writing about the ways being perceived with prejudice as a young woman poses an obstacle to young women in my society. Some writers die on the hill of “Live a little before you write.” I say, “you’re already living, you are already a witness to stories many other people share.” But, even as I write about my everyday stories, there stands a small problem.

Remember how your first gospel is to secure foreign-based publications, these publications come from a centre that marginalises stories and storytellers from the Global South. That’s just how power and limited resources work. General audience stories from the Global South are already classified as niche interests to the Westernaudience. Just as I had found in other spaces of knowledge production (academia, the art industry), once the money is coming from a Western platform, the questions ‘How does it relate to the Western audience?’ and ‘How legible is the narrative to the Western audience?’ demand. to be answered. And so you bite your tongue where you can so the rest of your mouth can eat.

Turns out “you do what you hate so you can make money to do what you love” can also apply to people working their dream jobs. I say this also to encourage my younger self to still make the leap because no path is without contradictions and compromise, so why not choose you path you can stomach. It feels like a slight concession to make to the god of capitalism, and hopefully a temporary one.

Beyond making sense of my positionality as a media worker working in the Global South for Global North platforms, I have also found three practices useful. I set up Monday check-ins with another freelance writer to keep track of our big quarterly goals and the small daily goals to help us get there. I also commit to the cadence and boundaries of a 5(or 4)-day work week. And within those work days, I commit to task-driven productivity, as opposed to time-measured productivity. The last almost goes without saying: keep pitching, keep applying for opportunities. Hold rejection down between your legs and pull out its teeth.

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