The Western world, however, is a different case entirely, depending on a totally arbitrary system of child-naming. Not only is there no special day when the name of the child is declared to the world, it is perfectly acceptable to call someone Lemon or Bush, or Focker, Iron or Stone. I mean, what were the parents thinking? A few months ago, Congressman Anthony Weiner became a news item not just for what he did wrong, but for how his name had not served as a warning to anyone around him since he was a kid. A last comment on strange associations will go to the strangeness of calling people who practise same sex associations fruits. I’ve never understood why this is the case, but when CNN’s first openly gay man happens to bear the name of a real fruit, it makes one take a second look at serendipity. (No slight intended here, seriously).

I do not want to cheapen this subject so I’ll stop here. But let’s hear what George Carlin has to say: ”Soft names make soft people. I’ll bet you anything, that ten times out of ten, (guys named) Nicky, Vinnie, and Tony would beat the shit out of Todd, Kyle, and Tucker.” I return to Yoruba roots where everything has already been patiently explained. Ile la n wo k’a to so omo loruko. A name is not just a name. A rose called by any other name might not always smell as sweet, so if you are naming one, be careful not to name it after a killer bee or a poisonous cantaloupe.

(The three previous precursors to this post are also worth checking out. Check the “related post” section down below.)

Related Posts

• On The Origin of Names (III) Sun 23 Jan 2011
• On the Origin of Names: The Sequel Mon 09 Aug 2010
• On The Origin of Names Sat 02 Jan 2010

The problem began when she started calling the names. I – a sometimes overconfident believer in my own ability to pronounce and spell any name as long as it is pronounced correctly – stared however into the screen confused each time I wrote out what I heard of a name, and my colleague told me that I’d written a totally different thing from what is correct. First there was Shawn which I thought was “Sean”, then Tiffannie which in my mind could only have been “Tiffany”. When she called “Lindsi”, I thought she meant Lindsay, and I wrote it, only to be corrected once again that the name is written just as it pronounced, and not Lindsay. And there came the others: Kathryn, Catherine, Kathrine, Brittney, Brittany, Lindsey, Devan, Devon, Kaitlyn, Cathlyn, Caitlin, Katelynn, Elisabeth, Elizabeth, Ashlee, Ashley, Megan, Meagan, Staci, Stacy, Alexandre, Alexander, Kelli, Kelly, Halle, Haley, Jasmyne, and Jasmin. Of course, before we finished typing in all the names, I’d simply given up on trying to type them from sounds. I would listen, and then peep into the student register myself in order to see how the names are spelt.

The occasion reminded me of so many instances in which my name is misspelt by many people who one would expect to know better. I remember very many exasperating moments in school in Nigeria where an overzealous teacher or secretary would insist on putting another “n” somewhere in-between my last name just because some other variation exist with that kind of spelling. A few months ago – last year – when I returned to my home university in Ibadan to pick up my long overdue certificate, I found out that they had written my last name on it with their own spelling in mind, and they had kept it for me since 2005, waiting for me to come pick it up. Since the document itself had started to look aged from dust and poor keeping, it was very convenient for me to complain as loudly as possible that the name written on it actually doesn’t belong to me. When I was in Kenya in early 2005, I remember having a similar discussion with a friend of mine, co-traveller from Nigeria, whose last name was Olarewaju but who had almost always had to deal with people who (by their own assumption of correctness) always insisted on writing it as Olanrewaju, the most conventional spelling.

So, here I am in America – the land of the free, with liberty and a thousand name variations. It used to be hard enough to accept people’s inherent laziness to even try to pronounce one’s name as soon as they just see that it is a foreign one – even if that name is “Amory”, as my room mate from Philippines said to me a few weeks ago. All they have to know is that you are a foreigner and your name suddenly assumes a certain difficulty to pronounce that wasn’t there before. I have always attributed it to laziness and an inability to even make an effort. It’s not as if the letters of said names were brought out from the sky. I understand not being able to write down a name you hear because of ambiguities that I myself have acknowledged above, but not being able to pronounce ones already written must require a certain level of intellectual laziness.

To encounter names and variations from this new angle of spelling, for me, makes for an interesting humbling, and a realization that in the end, man’s need to confound himself with his quest for identity really transcends geographical or linguistic boundaries. This explains why, sometimes in December, the editor of a Faculty publication insisted over our email conversations that instead of writing my name as simply Kola Tubosun as I had advised, she would write it in full along with the tone marks. She was afraid that, by asking her to write my name without the marks, I was compromising the integrity of a meaningful name for the convenience of American pronunciation. We eventually settled on a compromise: “Kola Tubosun, born Kóláwọlé…” and that was how it appeared in the publication. Her insistence touched me and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

Now, having been on the many sides of this naming experience, I don’t know how to conclude. Maybe there’s not even a nice summary to it, except that when next I meet someone whose name is Chris, it might be better to ask him first if his begins with a “C” or a “K”.

Related Posts

• On the Origin Of Names (IV) Mon 03 Oct 2011
• On the Origin of Names: The Sequel Mon 09 Aug 2010
• On The Origin of Names Sat 02 Jan 2010

Now let me review a few things that has happened since I wrote the article. I have discovered some even more bizzare naming patterns across the continent. While having an evening conversation with our host in Ife, a German professor originally from Uganda, I found that a tribe of people exist – the Muganda, where he was from  - who never give the same last names to brothers of the same family. I mean, if I give birth to two boys, none of them would have Tubosun as their surname. Now assuming that their first names are Demoke and Murano, they would be something like Demoke Agboreko and Murano Adenebi respectively. (You can tell which play I’ve been reading lately.) In the Muganda clan, there are about fifty male last names to choose from to give to children and “Agboreko and “Adenebi” will just be two of them. And each of the clans in Uganda practice this, with each of the having different numbers of names to give to their sons as last names. So when they grow up, two or more brothers will have different last names, and would have to explain the culture to anyone who asks, e.g the visa office saddled with the responsibility of allowing one of the brother to go and meet the other in a foreign country and verifying that they are actually brothers even though one bears Shaban and the other (perhaps) Dada. How does the visa offer convince himself that they’re not playing tricks on his intelligence? The same applies to the women as well. It turned out to be the most interesting naming phenomenon I’ve ever heard of, and I was suddenly glad to be staying a night within the University campus on that night.

As the conversation progressed into the night, I found out that there were some even more peculiar ones not related to any particular culture, but rather government policy of orderliness. I have a German friend, present at the gathering, who has been stuck with a last name only because her mum did not get a divorce from the man (whose name she’s now stuck with) before having children with her own father. German laws do not allow children born of that union of have any other man’s last name except the man to whom their mother is currently married, even if they are no longer together. And more from Germany, if you ever bring a name to the registry to give your newly born child, you must also have proof that the name exists in real life, and that it doesn’t mean anything ugly either in German or in another language. Gerd Meuer jokes that when he chose to name his first child after his friend Wole Soyinka, he was turned back because “Wole is not a real name (in Germany)” and he had to return with a stack of the author’s books before he was granted the priviledge. I’ll tell you one more. In China, women’s names are the ones that end in “a”. e.g “Aya”, “Anja” etc. If you enter China with a name like Kola, she said, and you’re a man, don’t be surprised if people start looking at you funny. It was for this reason that I forgave my friend Yun Hsin from Taiwan just concluding her field trip in Nigeria who, in her postcard to me, had written her adopted Yoruba name as Funmilaya. The last vowel is originally and “o” in Yoruba.

Now, poet Ogundare Foyanmu’s family name is Akinlabi – as his nephew kindly informed me a few weeks ago (and corroborated by someone who ought to know). King Sunny Ade’s family name is one of Adeniyi and Adegeye (talk of a double heritage). And so one day in my youth when it occured to me that my surname is actually my father’s first name and not his own last name or our family name, I approached him, worried, especially since my mother bore his own name as her last name. I wondered aloud what kind of point he was trying to prove. My mother and I bear two different last names, each belonging to the same man. “Look to the Bible,” he said. Patriarchs and other notable people did not automatically become inconspicuous when they had children by retaining the name of the dead great grandparent. “How could you all retain the grandfather’s name and render all descendants inconspicuous? There was J.J. Ransome-Kuti, then I.O Ransome-Kuti, then Olikoye Ransome-Kuti. His own children would also be Ransome-Kuti. Many years down the line, how would we be able to know which of the Ransome-Kuti someone actually came from?”

His logic seemed a little sensible, but faulty. Thus although my mother became Mrs. Hisownlastname, we all – children – became Name Hisfirstname and have remained like that ever since, except my sisters who have now got married and changed their names. So whenever I filled forms that asked for my mom’s name, I wrote Mrs. Myfather’slastname. When it is time to write my name, I wrote it, and then proceeded to explain. What pop didn’t consider, of course, is that if my brother and I choose to go by that same rule of having our children be Whatevertheirnameis Myfirstname, then my father’s first and last names will also be lost forever. Doesn’t it then seem like an extreme measure to battle mortality? And what’s the solution then? Perhaps the Kutis can help us again. Fela rebelled and became Anikulapo-Kuti after a while, while his own son became simply Femi Kuti. Of course, the name was originally Kuti before the British brought the Randsome in so not much has changed. Many generations down the line, we still won’t be able to tell who was from Femi, Seun, or any of Olikoye or Beko’s sons. I’d better not confuse myself trying to figure it out. The family already have that as a lifetime task. Some people in America have changed their names from Clay to Ali, some from Little to X to prove political points. In Nigeria, some have change their names Ogundare to Oludare, and Sangobiyi to Jesubiyi, and Ifadeyi to Ayodeyi in order to ward off the siege by imaginary gods and spirits in the original prefixes. My last name too (my father’s first name) is not Tubosun. I’ve cut out the first three letters just to make space (a long story), and to make it faster to pronounce. Some people just have all the time in the world .

“What’s in a name?” Shakespeare had wondered. I’m guessing that he won’t have loved this century very much.

PS: Happy Birthday Yemi. Good thing you’re beyond the problem of the family last name

Related Posts

• On The Origin of Names Sat 02 Jan 2010
• On the Origin Of Names (IV) Mon 03 Oct 2011
• On The Origin of Names (III) Sun 23 Jan 2011

I remember my Kenya days, reclining under the mango trees on the grass lawns around the Margaret Thatcher Library on the campus of Moi University, Eldoret, discussing words and languages. All of us were guys, men, so the topic inevitably led to the risqué. All I wanted really was a chance to gather knowledge about the Kiswahili language to add to my vocabulary, and until then, everything was going smoothly. I would come out in the morning, lay on the grass while my informant, Ng’ash, a photographer (whose name also rhymed with nyash) did his work and dealt with my endless list of questions at the same time. After going through a list of over four hundred words in Kiswahili with him and his other equally fascinating and mischievous co-photographers in that spot of the campus, I found that ngozi meant “skin”, pole pole meant the same as pele pele (go gently), kiboko meant “buffalo” whose skin is used to make what we called koboko (the whip), Mungu meant “God” and jana meant the same as àná (Yoruba for “yesterday”), among many other amazing similarities. I also found out that kuma meant “vagina”, and that moto meant “hot”. The joke Ng’ash liked to make was that the first time a Kenyan found himself in Japan, he could not get his mind off the fact that the institution he was enrolled in was called the Kumamoto University. Kuma in Japanese is a popular name for children, meaning “bear”.

And so in Washington DC in December, I found myself on a dinner table with half a dozen Tanzanians who dared me to prove to them how much of Swahili I spoke. I did, starting with the everyday ordinary words. But they kept egging me on and I told them that I had actually learnt the private words first while I was in Kenya, and that I still remembered them even though I found a dinner table the least appropriate place to discuss such things. They would have none of it so I said, “I know that mbooro is for penis. Do you believe me now? I know that one for females but the point is proven, no?” The boys looked surprised, and the girls kept giggling mischievously, now resolved not to let me off until I gave voice to their body parts as well. It was an embarrassing almost awkward moment. But I did, and then shared the joke about the Japanese University. What else I found out afterwards was how easier to mention the word for privates in another person’s language. When asked to tell them what they were in my language, I could only tell them the word for penis. For vagina, I referred them to the Nigerian women in the hall, and as I correctly guessed, none of them took up the challenge to ask.

What I also learnt at the table was that the Nigerian name “Uche” in Tanzanian Swahili also meant the same as kuma, and that every time they heard the Nigerian name while watching a soccer game, they were giggling aloud not for the style of his dribble or the grace of his feet. Since I found out in Kenya in 2005 that Titi means breasts (as in matiti in Swahili), and “titties” in American English, I’ve always wondered what my name means in all the languages of the world if there was a way I could go on and find out. In American English, it means “a dark carbonated drink with a secret formula bottled in cans and bottles.” Not bad. What does it mean in Chinese, Malay, Emai, Nepali, Farsi, Akan, Ikaan, Uwu or Arabic? Maybe I should ask Reham about the Arabic part. I hope the meaning would not be too x-rated for her to tell me. I also remember one of my class sessions last semester when we were discussing colours. I had written the Yoruba ways of expressing colour on the board, and it included pupa for “red”, bulu for “blue”, funfun for “white” and dudu for “black” among many others.  By the end of the class, I was told by the students why of all the colours we learnt that day, they would most likely remember dudu for a longer time to come. In American English (slangs), the word doo-doo refers to excreta, they said. Talking with my Swahili friend recently about these, she told me that dudu in Swahili also means “a large insect”, in addition to being the word now used to refer to the HIV/AIDS virus. Very nice. So now, although eniyan means “person” in Yoruba, all of a sudden, I am never going to refer to myself as an eniyan dudu ever again! Not in America, and definitely not in Kenya.

Related Posts

• On the Origin of Names: The Sequel Mon 09 Aug 2010
• Saving the Words Sun 14 Nov 2010
• Break Time/Tone Tue 01 Nov 2011