The Ham in the 21st Century

      It is worth stating from the outset that it is misrepresentation to refer to the Ham of Nok area of north central Nigeria and their language as Jaba. This is so because as findings have revealed this label is an offensive term, what linguists call exonym - a name of a group applied to them by outsiders. In this direction, the Ham have many exonyms. For instance, the Bajju, the Atyab, the Gworok, the Gwong and the Bhazar (Koro) Ham cognate neighbors all have names they refer to them. However these have not been appropriated to refer to the Ham nor have the Ham impressed what they call their neighbors as their identity.

     Thus, from this perspective, I contest the use of 'Jaba' as a substitute or equivalent representation to Hyam or the Ham. Jaba is not only 'unsuitable' to history of the society, but that it is appropriated with little or no consideration of its etymology and implication is cause for concern. What is indisputable is in all the Hausa Dictionaries I have come across, Jaba means the HOUSE MOUSE (Nintsong in Hyam) which is poisonous. More so, other Hausa dictionaries suggest it could also mean "to spoil or destroy something", thus my deduction is that the designation is DEROGATORY and should be discarded by all Ham people and well meaning neighbors (See, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaba,_Nigeria).

       Let me at this point critique the myth that it was the casualty the Hausa (call Kpaar in Hyam) suffered during a battle at a place known as Duur Ham (located between Kyoli and Ngat Ture), recorded to have taken place in 1846, that is the origin of the term. No! As early as the 1800s, it is said, or even earlier, the Hausa referred to the people as Jaba, - several years before 1846.

       I will give an incidence which relates to this. In the year 1853, four Ham youth, rescued slaves from the ships to the Americas, were reported to have lived in Sierra Leone. In an interview carried out by one Rev S. W. Koelle (Koelle, 1854:19), the youth identified themselves as HAM, DSAHAM (I suppose Dzam Ham - youth of Ham) and FU HAM a toponym, autonym or endonym. They said "it was the Kpaar who called them Dsaba" whilst the "Fato called them "Kafir." This reference affirms that by the time they were captured from home, possibly in the year 1846, they did not know the Kpaar where called Hausa neither did they know the Fato were called Fulani. Thus with little doubt, the association of 'Kafir' with 'Dsaba', now written Jaba, reveals its etymology does not seem to be a friendly one at all.

        Further, in case you are working on an assumption that my preference for Ham and Hyam as the genuine identity of the people and language stems from lack of "love" for Hausa people, permit me to say this is in the contrary. Jaba, which I reject,  yes, is 'foreign' to Hyam, yet my choice for Ham/Hyam are purely on linguistic and historical grounds. If we are agreed that detaching the society from its ancestral identity and understanding of themselves in their own words erases formal identity, then the use of Jaba displaces collective biographic memory of the people.

       As a native speaker, I reckon, the Ham are not able to refer to themselves as Jaba when they speak in Hyam, their mother tongue. This is another suggestion that the name or signifier is as foreign as the language of Hausa and its people were 'alien' at the point of contact in the 1800s. Additionally, morphology which studies how words are formed by the morphemes - the single meaningful aspect of a word - shows 'Ham' and 'Hyam' are derivatives - i.e. come from each other.

      Secondly, I have chains of literature to back the usage of ''Ham and Hyam'' but I will give only a few for our current purpose. Koelle (1854:19) spells it as 'Ham' most probably realizing it was articulated the same way Ham, one of the sons of Noah, in the Book of Genesis 9:18 - 22 is written. Next is Meek (1931:120 & 127) who acknowledges though the people are called Jaba, they call themselves as the Ham. Gunn, H. (1956:116) writes 'Jaba and puts ''Ham'' in bracket. Fagg (1977:14) says 'Ham', while Kato (1974) spells it 'Hahm'. In a similar fashion, Ethnologue: Languages of the World (1998:268 & 278), one of the most respected authorities on the languages of the world edited by Grimes has it as 'Hyam' and 'Ham'. Another scholar, Gerhardt (1983) who has researched Hyam language from 1965 records it as ''Ham" and "Hyam."

       Equally, James (1986, 1997, & 1998), a native of Ham himself, records the 'Ham/Hyam' so also does Haruna Musa of Kwain in his book (1993:3) enters it as 'Ham'. Blench (2006, 2010, 2012) acknowledges it is the 'Ham/Hyam'. In this same vein, from 2004 till date, the Hyam Literacy & Translation Project in all its publications have 'Ham/Hyam' and the study of the current researcher so far all is the 'Ham and Hyam' - with a section of the research dedicated to this.

      But the question is how shall the Ham promote the study of their culture and identity? My simple but challenging response would be to create an orthography in the language alongside the move to reclaim genuine, historical and proper identity of the society. The feeling of inferiority of the language is linked to the impression created by Christian missionaries of an assumed superiority of the Hausa language which was developed at the expense of almost all the languages spoken in northern Nigeria.