As social cohesion breaks down the way it is currently in Nigeria, it is tempting to quote Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller’s 1946 postwar confessional prose piece in the effort to exorcise this baleful spectre. But the tribal laagers in which Nigerians are increasingly comfortable elevating narrow identitarian concerns over much broader human ones carry a more active threat. One captured by John Donne’s insistence (“No Man is Island”) that we are all diminished by every other person’s death.
One of the more consequential decisions that I have taken in my life was reached a couple of years back, when “Comrade Editor” Dapo Olorunyomi invited me to start writing a column for the Ilorin-based Nigerian Herald newspaper – where Mr Olorunyomi edited the editorial pages. The concerns around which our conversations were based back then were the same as they are today: how to move Nigeria rapidly along a development path that did not present the extremes of affluence and want that our economy seems to be unusually susceptible to. My vantage, though, was radically different those many years ago: Marxism-Leninism appeared to offer a neat conjurer’s trick for fixing what were our economy’s countless “antagonistic contradictions”.
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At a further remove, though, the non-antagonistic contradictions generated by the demands of writing a weekly opinion piece were far more quotidian. I was in no doubt, for instance, that “Augustine” (my baptismal name) did not make the grade. It was manifestly “White racist”, then, for the Catholic Church to insist that young Africans could only be baptised after European saints. There is absolutely nothing sacerdotal about the name “Francis”, for example, except for the fact that in 13th century Europe, Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, whose father, enamoured of the French, nicknamed “Francesco”, became one of the Church’s more popular saints.
Thankfully, I am told that the Church has reconsidered this matter. But imagine if all the Clements, Nathaniels, Josephs, Elizabeths, and Marys, whose presence my childhood was sprinkled with somehow, make it to beatification? They would all be St. “White man’s names”. The church would, then, have denied itself and, for what it is worth, humanity the diversity of cultural experiences that faith-based activity is nothing, if it does not have.
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My cultural mongrelisation was far from complete though. Born in Ilorin, Yorùbá was my first language, as it was my father’s – he was born in Lagos, and his “Taiwo” was de rigueur (according to a transliteration of the Yorùbá description for this, “something he brought with him from heaven”). In result, I also have a Yorùbá name. Besides English (and the baptismal name that was its millstone), I spoke (and still speak) both Yorùbá and passable “Delta Igbo”. I still think in Yorùbá.
That said, I was spoilt for the choice of names. At my naming ceremony, Alhaji Elelu, God bless his soul (then, my parent’s landlord), arranged for both the Tasmiya and Aqiqah for me – he would do the same for my two immediate younger siblings. Alhaji Elelu was catholic enough to anticipate the possibility of my latter-day conversion to Islam. The Islamic naming ceremony was, thus, anticipatory of this. My Ẹsan father meant I had two Ẹsan names. My (Delta) Igbo mother bequeathed me an Igbo name. In addition, I was born on a Sunday.
My cultural mongrelisation was far from complete though. Born in Ilorin, Yorùbá was my first language, as it was my father’s – he was born in Lagos, and his “Taiwo” was de rigueur (according to a transliteration of the Yorùbá description for this, “something he brought with him from heaven”). In result, I also have a Yorùbá name. Besides English (and the baptismal name that was its millstone), I spoke (and still speak) both Yorùbá and passable “Delta Igbo”. I still think in Yorùbá.
The choice of a name for the column I was expected to start writing sometime in July 1987, or rather, the rejection of “Augustine” as the first name in my identification with that column thus morphed into an attempt at resolving multiple (non-rivalrous, but) coterminous identity streams. Thus, whatever name I settled for had to be as expressive of my sense of self as possible. I still cannot speak Ẹsan. I do not speak Arabic. And so, my names in both these languages failed the “oral language-use” test. A Yorùbá or an Igbo first name, then, for my column? It was not an easy choice. But ironically, the very same English alphabet rendered it a simple chore. “I” precedes “Y” in that language’s ordering of its alphabet. And so, “Ifeanyi Uddin” came about.
Whatever the explanation, there are few things more disorienting than being forced into conceptual pigeonholes by my new interlocutors, not because of my thoughts or how I choose to express them, but because of my name. Arguably less palatable is the more standard divergence of support for people, processes, things, and events, according to their ethnic (or tribal?) provenance.
Fast forward almost 40 years later, and the milieu within which I resolved that identity crisis has changed markedly, if not totally malignantly. True, I have since moved from a laid-back, provincial, and (then) relatively non-rivalrous (of its sundry “contradictions”) Ilorin to über-competitive Lagos. But the malignancies that newly afflict my cultural settings are, fortunately, non-spatial. They show up mostly in interpersonal exchanges, where social media platforms help to amplify their reverberations. One reason why some of my friends swear that these failings have always been there – they have simply been boosted by a more effective and ubiquitous echo chamber. Others argue that it is not just the reach of social media that conduces to the spread of the virulent identitarian crisis that bloomed in Lagos in the build up to the last general elections. The anonymity and impersonality of these platforms also work in favour of malodorous conduct.
Whatever the explanation, there are few things more disorienting than being forced into conceptual pigeonholes by my new interlocutors, not because of my thoughts or how I choose to express them, but because of my name. Arguably less palatable is the more standard divergence of support for people, processes, things, and events, according to their ethnic (or tribal?) provenance. As this process evolved, most threatening was the danger of my being shepherded into the Atlantic Ocean, along with the entire Igbo population of Lagos for the latter’s apparent political preferences. In my defence, I could have said “I am not Igbo, I only chose ‘Ifeanyi’ in opposition (this word again) to ‘Augustine’!” Such thinking, unfortunately, was how and why the Nazis were able to perpetrate the outrages of Auschwitz.
As social cohesion breaks down the way it is currently in Nigeria, it is tempting to quote Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller’s 1946 postwar confessional prose piece in the effort to exorcise this baleful spectre. But the tribal laagers in which Nigerians are increasingly comfortable elevating narrow identitarian concerns over much broader human ones carry a more active threat. One captured by John Donne’s insistence (“No Man is Island”) that we are all diminished by every other person’s death.
Uddin Ifeanyi, a journalist manqué and retired civil servant, can be reached @IfeanyiUddin.
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