On 1^st July, Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún and I were invited by IFRA Nigeria to present the Yorùbá Name project at the University of Ibadan. As I’ve been contributing remotely from Nairobi and other places, I could never have imagined how warm the response from both students and professors would be. It’s one thing to be told that people at UI are taking the project to heart, it’s another to sit in front of a room full of knowledgeable, passionate Yorùbá speakers loudly debating the breakdown of the name Sójìmí. If this is what linguistic research allied to technology can do, I definitely want more of it!

Beyond the heart-warming feeling of speaking to an enthusiastic audience, our trip to Ibadan was a great opportunity to establish links with a dynamic university community, and UI didn’t disappoint in this regard. We left convinced more than ever that the geolocation of names is going to be of crucial importance to establish patterns, due to the dialectal distribution of the Yoruba language. This was illustrated in particular by a couple of names from Ondo State that had previously eluded the Yoruba Name community, yet were well-known to some participants from this area, who could explain their meaning and origin. This observation certainly highlights the need for finer research into local naming practises in the various regions where Yorùbá is spoken.

One underlying current behind all the questions and comments that kept us engaged until time ran out, was how personal the project felt to participants. Some worried about how ‘funkifying’ one’s name could affect the course one’s destiny as inscribed in the name given at birth, while others recalled the long road they had taken to understand the meaning of their names and it seemed that all had a sense of how meaningful a name can be.

After hearing a few personal accounts of how a person’s name came to be, I have become increasingly interested in listening to more such stories, because meaning is never univocal. Instead, it is found in carefully peeling back the layers to gradually expand the perspective: first the combination of words that form the name, then the deeper signification of this utterance in a particular context. And there is more. In there is the back story of a person’s birth which is a family history, ensconced in a vaster community of memory. A website such as this one can never capture all these family histories criss-crossing the bigger canvas of History, but it can probably do a little to help those looking for a clue.

I left Drapers Hall with a renewed desire to continue devoting time to this project, to follow these threads of meaning across language and time and to keep on learning from all the people I meet along the way.

The full report of the Drapers Hall event can be found here on the IFRA website.