Opinion: The views and historical claims in this article are those of the credited author.

Recently, I met a Nigerian named William Benson at the Casablanca Airport. After he introduced himself, I asked him for his Nigerian name, and he said it was William Benson. Having a name without an identity is terrible.

William Benson and other names like that are not Nigerian names. And if you hear such a name, but all your genes are from the geographical location now known as Nigeria, you are not being fair to yourself and your descendants because you are robbing them of their identity.

Arabic, English, other European languages and cultures have already eroded the way we speak, dress, and communicate with the outside world. The least we can do to sustain our culture is to retain our names, and in that way, we can at least detain the cultural forces that are seeking to eradicate our customs from our terrain.

Some of you may call me a hypocrite because I am perhaps one of the best-known loyalists and admirers of former President Jonathan. However, there is more to that story than meets the eye.

How the moniker emerged

Think back to when the former President was Vice President and later Acting President, before being sworn in as President on Thursday, May 6, 2010. How did the Nigerian public know him?

Simply as President Goodluck Jonathan.

But all that changed in September when he started communicating directly with Nigerians via Facebook.

I opened President Jonathan's Facebook page. And when President Jonathan's Facebook page was to be opened, his then-handlers preferred “Goodluck Jonathan” as the moniker.

I insisted that the name Goodluck Jonathan would not achieve what we wanted it to if we did not add a Nigerian-origin name.

Then the name Azikiwe was suggested from his other names, and I objected, because I knew even then that he was going to contest. I said that the public had a tendency to call well-loved leaders by their initials, and GAJ sounded too much like GAG, and I did not want the Nigerian public to have it in their subconscious that the President, if reelected, was going to gag them. I know too well how the human psyche works subliminally.

And then I was told that Ebele was also his name, but was not in wide usage. And that was how I seized on that name, and the President began signing his Facebook messages as GEJ.

It was from that date in September 2010 that the Nigerian public began calling him GEJ.

And because we did not use the full form of the name, even his fellow Izon people assumed it was a common Ijaw name, Ebelemi, shortened to Ebele.

Actually, the full form of the Ebele used in GEJ is Ebelechukwu. And that is the name I gave to my daughter because, in a sense, I brought that name to limelight.

And no, President Goodluck Jonathan is not Igbo. Dr Goodluck Jonathan was born on November 20, 1957, in what was then Eastern Nigeria, and, for reasons I will not reveal here, many non-Igbo parents from the Eastern Region of Nigeria chose to give their children a token Igbo name.

The point I am making is that if you walk around with two European or Arabic names, you may have a name, but you do not have an identity.

Names and cultural identity

Learn from former President Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida. I read his book, A Journey In Service, when it came out.

General Babangida was not born as Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida. His birth name was Ibrahim Badamasi.

But the name Badamasi is Arabic. It originates from the Arabic noun al-Badamasi, meaning a person from Damascus. In the Arab world, and in French, Damascus is known as Damas.

Knowing this and to centre himself as a Nigerian, Mr Ibrahim Badamasi added his grandfather's name, Babangida, as his official surname.

For those who do not know, Babangida is a wholly Nigerian name without any foreign influence.

As a people, we should realise that nobody has the obligation to preserve our culture but us. If we walk around telling people our name is William Benson or Yusuf Isa, what we are actually telling the world is that we prefer a foreign culture to our own indigenous heritage, and that will make the world treat us like a vulture.

And you do not need to change your name to fit into Western society. Look at the most successful Nigerians in the West. They kept their African names.

In terms of national politics in the Western Hemisphere, the most influential Nigerians are Wale Adeyemo, who was Deputy Secretary of the Treasury in the cabinet of President Joe Biden, and Kemi Badenoch, who was almost Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and then became that country’s Secretary of State for International Trade, and is now the official leader of His Majesty's opposition in the United Kingdom.

The first Black African Nobel laureate for an academic category, Professor Wole Soyinka; the first Nigerian to win a Grammy Award, Sade Adu; and the first person born and bred in Africa to have won a Pulitzer Prize, Dele Olojede, all did so with their Nigerian names.

Finally, the most prolific and successful novelist from Nigeria today gave up her European name, Amanda, and adopted a never-before-used but now popular Igbo name, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Whether in Nigeria or abroad, your indigenous Black African name will work better for you.

© Bemigho Reno Omokri