I am Igbo, my name is Ogu and it doesn’t mean fight… or What there is in my name?
So many times when people ask for my Igbo name, I pause, either to cook up a quick excuse or to explain hesitantly, usually beginning with its a long story but not anymore!
It’s a short story, depending on how much time you have.
At birth(or after eight days depending), each pink or slightly brown bundle is given a name for the sole reason of identification. What name a child will bear depends on the naming system available in the culture. And for the next century or less, he will live bearing this identity except of course there’s a change for any reason . For example when I say my name is Theresa, people immediately sense that I’m Catholic and when someone else identifies as Ayo, we assume he’s Yoruba.
In Ehugbo, the naming system demands that the first female child takes the name of the paternal grandmother while the first male child takes the name of the paternal grandfather. The second female child takes that of the maternal grandmother and the male likewise. The third set will take names of parents according to their gender. In the case of a next set, the parents are now free to give names of other relatives or friends as the case may be. And the recycling of names continue in generations, this often leads to cousins bearing the same names. This system is directly tied to ibia ụwa,reincarnation an important aspect of the Ehugbo culture.
From the above, my position as the second female child automatically gave me the name Ogụ.
It might help a little to explain that the Ehugbo dialect is a bit different from the Igbo lingua franca-Igbo ịzụgbe. With minor changes like eka for aka, enya for anya, ali for ala and also major differences like ekpanyi for ngaji. Tonal differences also exist leading to differences in pronunciation for even words that remain unchanged both as dialect or lingua.
Borrowing occurs a lot in every language and the Ehugbo dialect is not an exception. A lot of factors are responsible but most likely is where towns share boundaries, mostly because of trading, they learn these new tongues and sometimes intermarriages also happen. Ali Ehugbo shares boundaries with Ikom(Cross River state) and due to this, some of their vocabulary(and food too) slipped into ours and became ours. Basically, no language is an island.
The most common interpretation of my name by a typical Igbo person has been that it came from ọfọ na ogu. Ọfọ na ogu are ancient symbols for truth and justice. In discussions with much older people, I remember they say things like e jikwem ọfọ ọ, an emphasis that they’re speaking only the truth. So when people take this to be my name, I’m not entirely pissed, I understand their misinterpretation . As a matter of fact, many people from Anambra state bear it, mostly as surnames. I recall an experience where a lecturer was forcing this particular meaning on me, he insisted it was my surname. It became more hilarious than annoying when he said it was a shame for a grown-up like me not to know the difference between my surname and middle name.
The naughty ones will say Ọgụ means fight. They can only be right were my name pronounced in that manner. No parent will give birth to a child and name her fight, not even a lunatic.
The ones that say it means medicine probably don’t know their 36 Igbo alphabets. Medicine is Ọgwụ not Ogu. In the 36 Igbo alphabets, ‘gw’ is among the three variations of ‘g’( gb, gh,gw).
So Theresa, how is your middle name pronounced then? In answering this, I’ll use something that I now find funny but back then, it could rank you top on my list of enemies. In nursery school and early primary school my mates made fun of my name. They called it thorn-Ogwụ. With a bit of nostalgia, I remember how they’d say to my face Ogwụ na dụ adụ (thorn that pricks) and they’ll run away. So if you take away ‘w’ and pronounce It exactly the same way, there you’d have the name handed down to me by my namesake, my grandmother.
The meaning of this name is quite tricky to define but from what I’ve been told and what I’ve observed as well, Ogụ is a verb which means to show affection. Some persons translate it directly as Pet because in cases where you take too much care of your dog or cat, it’d be said that ini gụrụ e ogu(you are showing a lot of attention or simply you are petting it a lot). So there are variations to the name, the most common being; Ogunnia (father’s pet), Ogudie(husband’s pet). Mine is just Ogu but some refer to me as the former.
*Ehugbo-Afikpo, the second largest town in Ebonyi State.
*this piece was written from what I’ve been told by other people and a little of what I remember from Ehugbo history books.
