Tunde and I exchanged a look.
“My thoughts exactly …” I whispered, “be tactful.”
We’d been running through a variety of possible baby names with
our son and daughter-in-law for their first child. They were still thinking
about English names but had decided on the Nigerian name if the baby was a boy.
This was Tunde’s territory
“We like Taiwo,” our daughter-in-law smiled.
“Ah,” managed Tunde without adding to the ‘ah’.
“Dad?” said our son.
“Ah,” repeated Tunde – perhaps remembering the eggshells
he’d had to dance over to maintain the peace between his wife and his mother
when we were naming our first child.
“Ah,” he continued, without elaborating.
The conversation
paused a microsecond too long. I jumped in - tactfully - with two left feet.
“If you call your baby Taiwo, Nigerians when they first meet
him will probably politely enquire about Kehinde.”
“What?” neither son nor daughter-in-law were smiling now.
They liked the sound of the name, they’d got used to the idea of welcoming a Taiwo, Taiwo had
become real to them – they didn’t want to change.
“Why Mum?”
“Taiwo is the name you give a first-born twin. It means the
first to taste life and is usually used for boys. Kehinde is the second twin – the one who came
second, the last to arrive. Taiwo and Kehinde – they go together like bread and
butter, like fish and chips. You can’t have one without the other.”
“Are you comparing our baby to fish and chips Mum?”
“Of course Mum’s not,” said Tunde sensing the possibility of
a sensitive conversation veering into a crash zone. “It’s just that Yoruba
names have very particular meanings.”
It was something that they hadn’t thought about – despite knowing that our Nigerian family names all bore meanings: maybe reflecting the circumstances of their birth, like Babajide meaning ‘father/grandfather has woken up or arrived’ – a name always given to the first boy to be born after their father or grandfather has died. Babatunde, ‘father has returned’, has the same meaning. The names get shortened. We already had one Tunde, so our first baby boy was to be called Jide, for the grandfather he would never meet. Our second son Adekunle means ‘the crown fills the house’ or ‘we have arrived to fill the house’. My mother-in-law had been very keen that we would fill the house with more sons but we left it to Kunle to fill the house with friends and his noisy, big-hearted presence. Also living up to her name is Adenike our first born, her name means ‘one who is cared for by the crown’ and indeed Nike did need watchful care as she grew up learning to live with diabetes.
You might have noticed that I have dropped the ‘Ade’ from both Adenike and Adekunle’s names. To us they are just Nike and Kunle – the final ‘e’ is always sounded in Yoruba. Sometimes people drop the second part of their name and just go by the name ‘Ade’ – or even ‘Prince’ if they’re inclined that way – for ‘ade’ means crown and people born into a family that produces a king (an ‘Oba’) carry that ‘ade’ prefix in their name. Just to mention here that succession amongst Yoruba kings is not from father to eldest son (or daughter) as in Europe. Various families bear the right to produce the next king when the old king dies. They take it in turns and the elders of that family enter into a long drawn-out debate about who would be the best candidate from that family to produce the next monarch.
However, although names can tell a story about that person’s position in the family and in society, people are mostly named reflecting either the circumstances of their birth or their family’s aspirations for them. Choosing a name is not left up to the parents alone – the elders of the family have a role to play which was something I found difficult to understand when we named our first baby.
‘Folasade’ was the name my mother-in-law sent for our daughter. My mangled English pronunciation of it rendered it entirely unacceptable – though had I realised it would be shortened to ‘Sade’ pronounced ‘Shadday’ – like the singer – I might have been more amenable. As it was, I was given more options and now I can’t imagine my daughter being called anything else but Nike! I actually thought that my children might choose to use their English names which I did choose with great care, although my first choice for Nike, Jennifer, chosen for a very close Jamaican friend, was vetoed by Tunde when our baby-naming book said it meant ‘white hope or ‘white wave’!
So names do have meanings, and Yoruba names are usually compound including a prefix: ‘Olu’ (God) and 'Ola' (wealth) are two very common ones. So Olumide means ‘My Lord has come’ whilst Olamide means ‘my wealth has come’. The ‘ola’ or ‘olu’ or ‘ade’ might be quite buried in a name. So Abimbola means ‘we gave birth to wealth’ and Abiodun means ‘we gave birth during a festival’ but people bearing these names will most likely be called Bimbo, Bola, Biodun or simply ‘Abi’.
Even I ended up with a Yoruba name bestowed on me by work colleagues in my first job in Lagos. They called me Adejoke ‘one who has come to be taken care of’. I felt honoured and flattered but in my weekly letter home my news fell flat. Having explained that the ‘ade’ prefix would be dropped and I’d be called by the shortened version, my father during our next phone call mourned that not only was his daughter far, far away – but would henceforth be called a Joke. He didn’t like it! He didn’t get ‘what was in that name’ at all.
Another column also called ‘What’s in a Name?’ by Elizabeth Obadina, written in 1993 can be found on page115 of ‘Letters from the Edge’ (2008) – a ‘New Internationalist’ publication: Letters from the Edge: 12 Women of the World Write Home: Brazier, Chris: available on Amazon.co.uk
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