On Nigerian Nicknames
Moses Ebe Ochonu
On Nigerian Nicknames
By Moses E. Ochonu
Those who have followed my public intellectual life for a long time know about my interest in Nigerian names and onomastics. I am fascinated by our culture of naming, by the meanings and (auto)biographical stories our names carry, express, archive, and curate, and by the accidental witticism of the names we bear.
My interest in names led me to pen a long essay on Nigerian names in our recently published book, Dis Life No Balance.
I wrote the essay to be both a profoundly insightful intellectual excursion into the sociolinguistic world of Nigerian names and a witty, lighthearted discussion of what Nigerian names say about Nigerians as a people immersed in certain strange predilections, rituals, and superstitions.
One aspect of Nigerian names that's not covered in the published essay, and which I've lately been reflecting on, is nicknames.
Nicknames are fascinating in their own rights and open windows onto new universes of meaning because they're not given by parents but are self-consciously chosen by the bearers or given to them in adulthood by peers.
Nicknames are thus nomenclatural artifacts of self-narration and self-representation.
In the two secondary schools I attended in Nigeria, almost everyone had a nickname, which they picked for themselves or were given to them by their friends.
The nicknames ranged from the generically familiar, to the unique, to the bizarre, to the vulgar. Some were simple adoptions and adaptations of American actors' and musicians' names, an indication of the penetration of American soft power popular culture and our voracious, appropriative consumption of same.
Some nicknames were so common as marks of notoriety and vulgar distinction for boys that you'd find someone bearing them in most schools. At both of my secondary schools, we had a T-Brusher.
Side note: I recently reconnected with one of the T-Brushers through our school's WhatsApp group and to my great amusement he was still relishing being called T-Brusher despite recently becoming a grandfather.
If you don't know what the "T" stands for, na you sabi, and you're either not conversant with pidgin or you're not in the generation I envisioned as audience for this post.
Female schoolmates' nicknames were, as I remember them, mostly made up "cute" names. They held no interest for us boys, who wanted our nicknames to say something bold and mysterious about us.
Later in life I knew of an older guy in my village whose nickname was "iniquity."
The name so stuck to him that very few people knew his actual given name, and everyone called his mom En’iniquity (Iniquity's mom). I always wondered why anyone would want to be named "Iniquity," one of the worst words in the Bible. It's like saying "I am not just a sinner; I'm sin personified and I'm proud of it."
Another person in my village named himself "Anarchy" and became known only by that name. To this day, I don't know Anarchy's real name. He established a thriving provision store business in the village, further popularizing his nickname. Everyone referred to his store as Anarchy's shop, and when elders would send kids to buy stuff from there, they'd simply say "go to Anarchy's shop and get me this or that."
One of my cousins gave himself the nickname "Wicked Soul.” Just as the name was catching on in his secondary school and he was basking in the notoriety of it, a kinsman of ours who taught at the school summoned him to his office and scolded him for taking pride in such a horrible nickname and attracting back luck and curses to himself.
Did he not know, the teacher asked him, that the meanings of names follow the bearers and that names are self-fulfilling prophecies? By proclaiming himself a wicked soul, he would truly become a wicked soul, he was told.
His peers did not stop calling him the nickname but my cousin stopped enthusiastically answering to it.
Years later, when I was an undergraduate in Kano, I encountered a neighborhood footballer that his teammates and opponents called "Agenda." That was his nickname. I always wondered how a semi-literate Hausa footballer came to acquire the nickname "Agenda." It's not a particularly football-inflected nickname either.
I have encountered many other Nigerian nicknames that left me scratching my head and that I have wondered about over the years.
The common denominator in my reflections on these nicknames is the mystery around them. I wonder about their provenance, the stories of their acquisition, and why and how the bearers chose the names or had the names put on them.
In instances where a nickname is bestowed on a person, a rich story is usually behind it, and that story is usually as interesting as the nickname itself.
I guess that's the fascinating thing about given names and nicknames for the non-bearer. You wonder where the names came from, what circumstances produced them, and how and why they stuck to the bearer.