Over a week ago, I was announced as the winner of a prestigious international prize. Since then, I’ve been tagged in a number of Facebook postings of the news about the prize, and something has caught my eye: the spelling of my name.

It’s not a recent issue, anyway, as some of the variations on the spelling of Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún have come to my attention in different circumstances from the time I’ve started thinking about it: completing forms, applying for jobs, newspaper interviews, emails, and in other less formal circumstances. In each of them, when it’s convenient, I gently correct the user. In others, I simply ignore.

In any case, my writing it completely with the tone marks is not an ancient phenomenon either. A while ago, I realised that it made no sense to care about the survival of Yorùbá (and other African languages) in writing if one does not lead by a good example. The orthography of Yorùbá that we use for conventional writing came from the hard work of generations of volunteer linguists, returnee slaves, missionaries, and scholars.But contemporary use, especially in written English (in newspapers, books, and other publications) seems to have totally ignored that earlier work. And it has become commonplace now to write African names with English conventions.

It seemed counterproductive for a country with regular lip-service to pursuit of cultural development. After all, a name like José in Spanish would mostly likely never be written without that accent on the last vowel if it must be contrasted with the word Jose. Nor would Molière be written as Moliere by anyone willing to be considered scholarly. So why then should Kọ́lá, a name with its own distinct meaning carrying generations of cultural viewpoints, be written as Kola? The kola is a fruit, out of which Coke is made. He who brings kola brings life. But when that proverb was formed, they certainly weren’t thinking about me.