From Sola Ojo, Kaduna
Barbing goes beyond just having a haircut. It is a style and like style, it is an identity mark. It brings beauty to the face of the person cutting his hair and shaving his beards. It helps men to remain smart and trim.
In time past, the ideal was to just yank off the hairs with any sharp instrument or object. Then, the mobile barbers were in vogue. These kinds of barbering shops were packaged in small leather bags with many of the barbers moving around the village corners and the thatched homes of their clients to meet their needs.
Today, barbing has moved from the mere casual, easy-to-do exercise to a very noble and sophisticated profession. Some of the barbers are rich enough and some of their salons are very expensive and beautiful to behold. The traditional mobile barbers are fast disappearing. They are being replaced by modern barbing salons, which cut and shave the hair with the ease of sophisticated clippers and other barbing equipment.
Yet the traditional mobile barbers are still well acknowledged and adored by their kind of clients in the North. It is common to see a mobile barber and his client sitting under a tree shaving. It is also common to sight them at different spots on a typical market day. They simply refuse to finally die away
Daily Sun ran into one of these few traditional mobile barbers in Kaduna. He is 28-year-old Mustapha Useni. He moves from place to place across the metropolis and he renders his service to whoever is ready to pay for it.
He said he was apprenticed to the business by his father who taught him the A-Z of the craft. He added that his father was too willing to expose him to the skill given that he too learnt it from his own father. He said he was also planning to handover the knowledge to his male child at the end of the day.
Having the knowledge of this business from his father and uncle has given him an edge over his peers as he now earns a living for himself and care for his wife and two children, apart from caring for his other dependants.
He described traditional mobile barbing business as the best thing that had happened to him within the last six years that he took it upon himself to become a mobile barber. He said his odyssey into full time traditional barbing was a result of necessity having severally failed to get him employed with Kano State Government due to his poor educational qualification
According to him, the business today is not as lucrative and interesting as it was in the past due to proliferation of modern barbing shops in the state. He observed that most male persons, especially younger ones, preferred to go to the modern salons for their hair cuts, leaving back the older ones, who are fewer in number for the traditional stuff:
“I do make between N1,500 and N2,500 on a daily basis depending on the number of people I come across. It is not a bad deal for people like us.” Useni was thankful to his father for letting him into the knowledge of the craft way back in their Kano village. He said when things were not moving well for him in Kaduna, it was just natural for him to take to cutting the hair of both the high and the ordinary members of the society:
“I started in Kano but had to move to Kaduna for greener pastures as we have more people in Kano who are engaged in traditional mobile barbing than in Kaduna.” He has a wife and two children all of whom he left behind in Kano: “The truth is that, with the way Nigeria is today, it is difficult even for people with school certificates to secure jobs after graduation.
“That does not mean they will not get work, they will of course. But whether they can get the jobs that can satisfy them is something that I cannot answer.” When asked how he handles his customers and where in fact he meets them: “The customers are mostly old men and they abound at different spots in the metropolis, places such as offices, markets and shops.”
He said the traditional barbing model has taken a clue from modern times: “They are sensitive to health issues in the same manner as the modern barbers as they dispose each blades after use. What I do is to use blade. We don’t use that small knife that looks like nail cutter (haska) anymore to avoid transfer of communicable diseases from one customer to another.
“That is our way of sterilizing our equipment. In those days that we used haska, we just wiped it and moved on to the next customer. Today, we use separate razor on each customer.