Yorùbá people calling my name has to be one of the things that amuses me the most.

The other day in the market, I saw a woman i knew from my erstwhile local church but she was far, three stalls away, chatting animatedly with a woman selling nylons for wrapping eba, in a certain way peculiar to Yorùbá women. I turned my attention to something else—a man with dreadlocks eulogising his rat poison as he dangled a dried rat in the faces of passersby. Yes, the woman was faraway, but I wasn’t in the frame of mind to exchange pleasantries too.

“Oyeka, seé ojú ree re? Mo sá n wo pé eni tó wo face mask yii jo Oyeka. Ah! O ti gerun e”, she shouted loud enough for all of the meat sellers section to hear her.

These people who take a word from another language and hammer it into a form fit to flow over their tongues

Here’s what she said :

“Onyeka, is this your face? I thought to myself that this person wearing face mask looks like Onyeka. Ah! You have even shaved your hair”

<No this is not my face, it’s a mask I wear occasionally and I left my hair at home>

I smiled, caught in that limbo between amusement and embarrassment. I just couldn’t get angry at these beautiful people. Beautiful who wear colourful dresses more than any other ethnic group, beautiful people who tread the path between diplomacy and deceit, beautiful people who drop their H’s and pick it up at random, beautiful people who call bread bùrèdí, beautiful people who call Enugu Enú ń gun, which literally means his mouth hurts him.

How could I be angry at them? How could I be angry at these people who call every Igbo person Omo ína— child of Nna?

These people who take a word from another language and hammer it into a form fit to flow over their tongues with river-like grace in a way suggestive of flexibility, rather than erasure. Ah, add indifference to flexibility, maybe laziness.

People who speak to you in their own tongue—you not speaking their language nonetheless—until the words begin to form in your mouth themselves. Until you begin to sing Lèke lèke bà mì lèke…when you see cattle egrets.

How could I be angry at them? How could I be angry at my own people? Does a little child get angry at his mother? If perchance he does, does he stay angry at her?