Two weeks ago during an interview I was asked a question that keeps recurring with numbing regularity now that I am spending more time at home in Nigeria. “Why do you insist on not answering your husband’s name?”
The response that zings around my head immediately is; why are you asking a question you have already answered? Of course I keep this retort to myself. It is not a polite response to give to what many would consider a perfectly sensible inquiry.
But my answer from my point of view is as simple as the question. The name is his. I know that I am married to him (how can I not?). He knows that I am married to him (this I make sure of). His family knows that I am married to him (the evidence is clear to see). But I also know that he is married to me, and I know that I did not fall out of a tree! There is nothing sacrosanct about a woman taking on her husband’s name once she marries.
In fact in order to change her name, she must follow procedures laid down by statute. Name changing after marriage is not a law, it is essentially a convention, drawn from a particular culture and widely practiced in countries that have certain historical links. In a range of places from Iran to Korea, Malaysia to Iceland and in countries like Senegal women do not automatically change their names at marriage, the common practice is for them to keep their birth names. In Russia a couple will decide which of their two names they will use.
A tradition of Hispanic countries will have the wife using her surname as a middle name along with that of her husband. Their children will bear the mother‘s maiden name and the father’s name as their last name. On marriage the daughter will like her mother did , drop her mother ‘s surname and replace it with her father’s as her middle name while adding her new husband ‘s last name. Pablo Ruiz Picasso, is known by his mother‘s surname. In Iceland they say a woman does not stop being the daughter of her family just because she got married.
A few years ago in Lagos the issue came up of a non Lagos indigene, female, married to a Lagosian, who wanted to run for political office and that was when people remembered that she had a different maiden name. One can imagine the same thing occurring in any other corner of the country when the daughter of the soil comes back bearing a name from “outside” but wants to contest for office in the home of her “parents”.
In many countries where Islam is practiced and Arabic the language most widely spoken changing names is regarded as a Western convention.
Essentially though the issue of what name to answer after marriage by either partner is becoming more and more widely seen as a matter of individual choice and one driven by the recognition of equality between the sexes and the right to free will. Many women still opt to change their names and that is their prerogative.
But what really grates when it comes to this is the attitude here. I do not direct this issue to women because when it comes to marriage in Nigeria, the terrain is largely political. It has its rules, rituals, obligations and hierarchies, but also has its different chambers, social and personal. We do tend to focus on the social.
Ask a Nigerian man to change his name and he will consider it an insult of the highest order. This means that women are considered fair game, mothers, sisters, daughters, all.
The first retort when a woman protests is: Why don’t you want people to know you are married? But that is really a side bar. The people for whom that knowledge is most important are the ones who are in it. Are you married? Yes.
Move on. Or not...
When Fela Anikulapo Kuti was released from prison, following Dele Olojede’s story in Newswatch, on Justice ‘I don beg me’ Okoro-Idogu, he gave what I consider a seminal interview to the Sunday Concord. In this interview Fela declared that any man who keeps a woman in his house and thinks that because of this he now owns her, is a fool. Few Nigerian women will make the mistake of instinctively thinking that they, own a man, even if they take his name. The only ownership that occurs between people is when they give of themselves, to each other. The rest is just an edifice.
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