Some of you are out here naming your children like they were born in a vacuum. No roots. No tribe. No story. Just floating names with borrowed accents and no address. A country like Nigeria where who you are matters just as much as what you are.
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A friend once told me his uncle got a scholarship just because someone saw his name on a list and said, this one is from my place. That single name opened the door. That’s how this country works. Not fair, not perfect but real. So I always wonder why we name our children in ways that make them invisible in their own land.
In a world increasingly obsessed with individuality, a name should be your most personal asset. But here, in Nigeria, it is far more. It is a passport. A compass. A password to belonging. And in the coded language of our society, it is often the only whisper that says, This one is ours.
Yet, more and more, we are watching our names disappear, buried beneath layers of borrowed syllables and English aspirations. We baptize our children with names like Sonia, James, David Joseph, Charity Moses, Sunday, Abraham and somehow, we believe we are setting them up for success. But are we?
Or are we slowly stripping them of the very lifelines that could anchor them in a country that barely remembers its own children?
Nigeria is not a neutral place. We are not a nation that floats on pure merit or blind equality. We are tribal, compartmentalized, deeply emotional in our affiliations. Whether we admit it or not, we respond first to the scent of familiarity. And the first scent we catch is your name.
That name that enters a room before you do. That name that, when heard, either opens doors or shuts them. A child without a rooted name is like a letter with no address lost before it’s even opened.
I have marked thousands of scripts. Sometimes, I am stunned by the brilliance in front of me. I pause to salute. And instinctively I turn to check the name. More often than not, it’s a native name. One that carries weight. One that carries memory.
But then come the blank slates Deborah Simon. Emmanuel White. Names that could belong to anyone, and somehow belong to no one. They float in cultural limbo unmoored, unanchored, untraceable.
Who are we trying to impress? A society built on memory, erasing your name is the first step to erasing your power.
The colonial ghosts that told us our own names were unworthy? The corporate firms that scan for international appeal? Or a society that still, quietly, organizes itself along lines of tribe, language, kinship and memory?
Let me be practical. Suppose I am in a room of power, a minister, a director, a Vice Chancellor. And your child walks past me. Do you know what might make me pause? Not their accent. Not their degree. But their name.
One native name. One ancestral echo. One whisper of Tiv, Igbo, Bini, Kanuri, Fulani, Ibibio, Yoruba. That name tells me, this one is part of the story. This one is woven into the fabric. Call it sentiment, call it tribalism but in Nigeria, your name is your first advocate.
It is not nepotism. It is nature. People help where they feel connected. It is the logic of survival, and it’s not unique to Nigeria. Italians help Italians. Jews look out for Jews. The Chinese build Chinatown in every major city for a reason.
So why are we the only ones trying to wash away the last drops of who we are?
In our desperation to sound global, we have renamed our children into oblivion. We renamed our children to fit in, and in doing so, we made them invisible to the very people who could help them rise. We have fed our children bland, borderless names and hoped the world would love them more. But all we have done is leave them without a tribe in a country that runs on invisible strings of belonging.
It’s ironic. In our country where electricity is inconsistent, the economy unpredictable, and systems unreliable the one thing we can gift our children, a sense of rootedness, we deny them.
Do you know what a native name does? It reminds a child where they come from. It tells them they are not alone. That somewhere, someone will recognize them even when the world looks away. What you name a child is what you believe about their place in the world.
This is not an indictment.You can name your child Brian, Michelle, or Kelvin but give them just one name that says, This is who I am.
A name that means something.
A name that tells a story.
A name that signals belonging in a room of strangers.
Because one day, that name may be all they have. Don’t give your child a name that has no country, no memory, no bloodline.
In this country of over 200 million citizens, names are not decoration, they are navigation. They are emotional GPS coordinates. You do not know when your child will need that single tribal thread to pull on. That thread may lead them home. It may lead them to help. It may lead them to hope.
I often think of Kunta Kinte and how fiercely he resisted being renamed. To him, that name wasn’t just a label it was his story, his bloodline, his homeland. It was everything. Had his identity been lost, Alex Haley might never have traced his ancestry back to The Gambia. That single act of resistance preserved a lineage. That’s the power of a name it carries memory, dignity, and place.
In the same spirit, I believe names should speak of where we come from. For those whose names conceal or blur their origins, there must be an intentional effort to reconnect whether through language, dress, traditions, or community ties. A name might not tell the full story, but it should at least whisper something about your roots. Because when names are stripped of identity, it’s easy, far too easy for the rest to follow.
Name your children like you love them. Name them like you want them to survive.
That name that enters a room before you do. That name that, when heard, either opens doors or seals them shut. A child without a rooted name is like a letter with no address lost before it’s even opened.
The post The Power in a Name: How Nigeria works, by Stephanie Shaakaa appeared first on Vanguard News.
