The Names We Keep

I am reading Igbo Worlds by Elizabeth Isichei, and I keep stopping at the names of the people she interviewed. They are names like Ogbuamazie, Odada, Amaruife, Anyanta, Okwumabua. You cannot mistake them for anything other than Igbo. They speak of a heritage untouched by Christianity or Western influence. Reading them, I feel I am hearing echoes of a world before my own.

Then I think of my own name: Adachukwu Onwudiwe.

Adachukwu—literally translated as God's Daighter but really means 'a child of God’s will'. It is beautiful, but it is shaped by Christianity. The Chukwu is Igbo, yes, but the naming impulse that produced it belongs to the church. Onwudiwe, though, is different. That name ties me directly to my ancestral roots. It has a story encoded in it, one that existed long before any missionary arrived. My surname, too, is the final link that still connects me to an ancestor’s story.

I find myself wondering how many of us still carry such names. Not the Christian-influenced ones, lovely as they are, but the older ones: names born from circumstances of birth, from the farm, from the market, from the gods, from hardship or joy. We have largely replaced them. Today, most Igbo names are either biblical or aspirational in a modern sense. And when we shorten them for easy pronunciation – Chuks, KC, Mandy – we water them down further. We complain about the Igbo language facing extinction, yet we rarely think of this as erasure.

But here is where I hesitate. I know that culture is dynamic. It has to be. If Ulo Mbari still stood today—those beautiful ceremonial houses that once reflected the living world of a community —they would not show only the old oracles. They would show churches, smartphones, politicians, etc. They would show our present-day stories. That is honest. That is what living cultures do.

So I understand why our names have evolved. We have accepted Christianity and joined globalisation. We are creating new stories, and that is normal. Our names now serve as an intangible documentation of this era—an era of faith, of foreign sounds, of convenience.

Even so, I cannot help but feel a loss.

I have two Igbo names and an Igbo surname. My second name is rooted in pure Igbo affirmation, no external influence. My first is a version rooted in Christianity. And my second name and surname holds the last thread of the older world. Perhaps it is just me being obsessed with the past. Perhaps I am romanticising something that was never simple. But when I read those names in Isichei’s book—names not tainted, names that carry whole histories in their syllables—I feel a connection to my ancestors that my own first name does not always give me.

I am not writing to argue. I am not saying we should all go back. I am simply sitting with this tension: knowing that change is inevitable, yet grieving what gets left behind. And wondering if it is possible to hold both—to move forward without severing the last links we have.

Because a name like Onwudiwe is not just a name. It is a story that survived. And I would hate to be the one who lets it end.