Before I fell in love with my name, my biggest reservation was that it gave people an impression of my father I knew to be inexact. These days, because of how much I love my name, it is easy to feel as though I never doubted it was perfect for me. In Igbo life, a name is more than just an identifier. It is a snapshot of a family’s mood and thinking at the time it is bestowed. To hear an Igbo person’s name is to learn something important about them: their place in their family, the hopes, dreams, or even the pain that accompanied their birth. Growing up in the Igbo heartland with a Yoruba first name made me not just peculiar, but unreadable in a way that demanded justification. Teachers, friends, my parents’ colleagues, strangers, anyone who found out my name after hearing me speak Igbo would be taken aback. I would see the calculation in their eyes as they decided if I was joking or not. Some would ask me to repeat myself to be sure they heard me right. And after I did, I would see the confusion and doubt deepen on their face and brace myself for questioning.
“Are you Yoruba?”
“Is your mother Yoruba?”
“Where did you get ‘Kayode’?”
“Did your father live in Western Nigeria/Lagos?”
“Did he have a Yoruba best friend?”
Only after exhausting several possibilities would they land on the one that annoyed me the most.
“Oh, your father must believe in One Nigeria.”
I had never known my father to be pan-Nigerian, but had become hypersensitive to how everyone’s perception of my father stood in such contrast to who he was to me. My father is known as a good man. The favourite uncle. An adequate husband—the sort who calligraphed love cards to his wife on Valentine’s Day and was proud of her education—my mother once said in my presence, though not to me, that in another world, she would choose him as her husband again. By the time I was old enough to spend my Saturdays and school holidays helping out at his stop in Ogbete, I discovered, too, his reputation as an empathetic trader who would slash the prices of his wares for the indigent until they brushed up against his markup. It seemed like I was the only one who knew him as cruel.
***
While it beggared belief in the Enugu of my childhood that a boy with two Igbo parents would be named Kayode, it is not so inconceivable in the context of my birth. I was conceived months after the death of General Sani Abacha and born exactly two months after Nigeria transitioned back to civilian rule. I can only imagine that in the afterglow of that victory against sixteen years of military dictatorship, ethnic antagonisms waned. A Yoruba man swept to the presidency with twenty-eight states in his tally, winning the Southeast by a landslide. The version of my father that existed in the euphoria of that transition lost hope long before I was old enough to be conscious of political stances. But by naming me Kayode, he inadvertently put me in the crosshairs of ethnic politics in Nigeria in a way most children are spared.
When I was seven, maybe eight, my father taught me to read Igbo. I could not fathom why he marked me out for what felt then like torture. He did not make that effort with any of my four siblings. I was not his first son or child nor was I his last. In my mind, I was not his anything. Yet only I had to endure slaps, knocks on the head, and harsh insults that I would be smarting from even after the physical pain eased. Those evenings, after he came home from almost twelve hours at work, he would sit me between his knees, his hands holding open Tony Ubesie’s Isi Akwu Dara N’ala while my finger followed the words on the page. I voiced them one by one before attempting to put them together in a coherent sentence. Those evenings would have far-reaching ramifications for me. From the little things, such as being one of the only students in all my Igbo classes in secondary school who could read Igbo with little difficulty, the boy with a Yoruba name who was always announced best in Igbo on Speech and Prize Giving Day. To the more consequential things, such as my appreciation for the Igbo language and its oral tradition. The practical simplicity of that novel’s prose has immensely influenced mine. To me, Igbo is not just a source of cultural pride; it is the spark that heaved me into artistic life.
Seven-year-old me saw in those lessons, not penitence from my father for giving me that name, but further proof that he hated me for “no reason.” I felt this way not because he hit me, but because there was a certain spite in the way he spoke to me. Years later, when I reread Isi Akwu Dara N’ala as an adult, I encountered it as the story of a sexually iniquitous woman who, in the end, suffers ostracism from her family and society for her antisocial behavior.
***
When I was in primary two, my parents transferred me from Holy Child International to a federal school that served officers of the 103 Battalion. It was there that I had my first introduction to all the words, in several languages, that could be hurled as insults at effeminate boys: Woman wrapper, Mummy, Homo, Ọkpọ ntu, and the ones in languages I never learned.
While adults responded with incredulity and interrogation on hearing my name, my peers outright called me a liar.
“How Igbo boy go get Yoruba name?”
They made up everything under the sun to answer that question. Maybe I was adopted. Maybe my parents thought that if another civil war broke out, they could leverage me to negotiate with the Nigerian government. Maybe my father wanted to marry a Yoruba woman, but his family forced him to settle for my mum. Maybe he had a Yoruba best friend that went by this name.
I pushed back, insisting that I was blessed to have no colonial names, and that my father chose my name for its meaning, and what a fitting choice—He who brought joy. A focus on my name, my short height, or anything other than my gender presentation was a reprieve. In Command Children School, insults and brawls decided hierarchies. The worse the insult, the lower you sunk, unless you could outdo that schoolmate with an even worse insult, or beat them up. I was not as experienced in fighting as children who lived in the army barracks. More than a few times, I cried all the way home, overwhelmed by the insults I had to field. I reported the bullying to my parents, but left out the parts that targeted me for being effeminate. Perhaps I was so ashamed of it that I could not repeat it even to my mother, but definitely not to my father. We did not have a rapport that made me comfortable being vulnerable in his presence. By then, I no longer trusted him to empathise with me, not in situations where I could be considered weak. I think now that “weak” was a stand-in for what he really wanted to say, but couldn’t.
I was in my last year of secondary school when the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Bill was signed into law. That was the first day my father mentioned homosexuality by name in my hearing.
“Ọ ihe ndi be anyi na-asọ oyi,” he said. “An abomination to our people.”
I don’t know why I felt compelled to reply. By then, I avoided him every chance I got, left whatever room he walked into, answered everything he said to me with the objective of making the exchange as brief as possible. But I felt I should respond.
“How does that justify jailing them for fourteen years?”
“Well, some things are just not acceptable, both the Bible and our Omenala condemn it.”
Omenala (also Omenani) is commonly translated to mean “culture,”“custom,” as well as “tradition.” Translated directly, it means, “As it is done in the land.” But today, it is used to invoke a way of life altered to near destruction by British colonisation. When deployed, it is usually to assert a claim of how things have always been, never simply the way they were at a point in time. And in doing so, that which is or has been, is presented as that which must be.
I didn’t exactly think of myself as queer at that time. I was still fighting an internal battle, and I felt my preferred side was winning that struggle. It did not occur to me that my father was trying to say something to me.
By the time I entered senior secondary school in 2011, the ethnic disillusionment of the Igbo people with the Nigerian union had reached such a level that my form teacher asked me to my face what my parents were thinking.
“Ọsọ agha daa ọzọ, if war forces us to flee again, this name will condemn you,” she told me. “Do you hear me?”
It was the first day of school and at twelve, I was the youngest in the class being introduced to my name. I stared on, not knowing what to say to such an attack against my name, which I did not think of as Igbo or Yoruba, but as mine.
“Do you hear me?” she asked again.
“I didn’t name myself,” I managed to say.
“Tell your mother I want to see her,” she told me.
My mum waved me away when I told her. “Tell her I said I won’t come,” she told me. “Something must be wrong with her.”
I didn’t share the second part, but my mother’s tone carried across in the part I conveyed. To my surprise, it didn’t get me in trouble.
I didn’t ask my father, even though I knew the name came from him. By that time, any serious conversation I had with my father left me feeling like he knew something evil about me that no one else in the family did. Only three years later, after I was greeted with the same daily onslaught of questioning when I started selling condiments and spices at Mayor market after graduating from secondary school, did I broach the topic with him.
“People keep asking me why,” I told him. “And I don’t have anything to tell them, because I don’t know.”
“It’s a good name,” my father insisted.
“But why did you choose it? Why not any good Igbo name?”
“It’s low self-esteem, that’s your problem,” he told me. “If people are giving you a hard time over your name, instead of you trying to stand up for yourself, you’re coming to question me.”
“That’s what you’ll say?” I was determined not to break into tears in front of him, but I was close.
“You are not the one who will name my child for me,” he retorted, heating up with each question he had to answer. “When you have your own children, name them what you wish.”
“No problem,” I said. “Once I turn eighteen, I will change my name to what I like.”
“You are free to,” he said. “Change it tomorrow sef. Just know—the moment you do, you will stop being my child.”
I stormed to the children’s room before I broke into tears. I swore to myself that I would change my name in court and hand him the newspaper announcement in person. And that I would never forgive him for that threat. By then, the things I swore to never forgive had grown into a list of betrayed promises.
The day in March 2014 that I returned home from school, having stayed back for make-up Physics lessons that my school organized to prepare us for the practical component of our upcoming O Level exams, I was fourteen years old, going on fifteen. Being a child who knew he did not have his father’s benefit of the doubt, I asked the teacher for her phone number so I could give it to my parents as an alibi. My father refused to call my teacher and flogged me until he broke my resolve not to cry.
One day he told me I had Obi na-eji ka unyi—“a heart as dark as charcoal,” because when he and my mum tried to call my phone one morning and found that my line wouldn’t connect, he assumed I had blocked their numbers. He came back from work that evening with the confirmation that Etisalat had a network failure. It was when he admonished me for not pleading my honesty that I broke and cried. And promised myself I would never forgive.
Each time, I told myself I would never care enough for him to hurt me like that again, and each time I failed to keep that promise. Things got worse when I got into university. My father insisted I use his mobile number to open my bank accounts. That way all credit and debit alerts would be sent to his phone. It began to make sense in trickles, but I was held back by my own shame. Before my mother convinced me to apply for Medicine and Surgery at a University close enough to attend from home, she promised me I would live on campus. After she died in my first semester in school, my father went back on her promise, claiming he couldn’t afford the hostel fee. I would later find out a miracle church he went to prescribed me chapters in the Psalms and days of fasting to cleanse me of homosexuality, and that he bought a goat and paid money for them to observe it on my behalf, not having the courage to request it of me.
I needed to make peace with being an Igbo queer man before I could allow myself the realization that I was a visibly queer child. That one realization cohered my entire childhood. Only with it did I understand how much it shamed me that I craved my father’s love and approval.
***
Ironically, it was I who disowned my father, brushing what had until then been a played-down tension into a family problem. When I was young, I dreamed of adulthood, of becoming independent enough to tell him my mind to its fullest extent without compromising my safety. But by the time I moved out at the start of my National Service, I had gone back on my promises so many times my grievances began to feel defamatory. Securing my first book deal gave me the financial wherewithal to support my family, and in that context I tried to let bygones be bygones. I don’t know if I expected my father to deconstruct his homophobia out of his love for me, but it never happened. As I won national recognition for my work advocating for the rights of queer Nigerians, as I won prizes for my queer fiction, he would congratulate me generally, without addressing what they were for specifically.
Before I left Nigeria for the UK to pursue a masters, I went back home to see my people once more before departing. It was the first time I was returning home in two years after leaving for my national service. I had my hair done, my nails painted, my ears, nose, and septum pierced. My father looked me up and down, and welcomed me home. He would wait for me to leave the living room before saying, “Kayode ana go. He’s completely gone. It’s like he no longer wants to be a man.”
I think the cowardice of my father’s homophobia made it even harder for me to process his emotional neglect as something I did not deserve. I sometimes wonder whether being explicit about his motivations would have been a kindness in its own way.
Before blocking him, I typed him a WhatsApp message through my tears without holding back.
“You made me despise myself. And do you know what is the worst part about it?” I wrote, “It never occurred to you even once that you’ve ever wronged me.”
As frowned upon as it is, telling your father off is not rare in Igbo families. But rejecting his fathership over you, that was unheard of. But I needed to name my pain, to say to him and to the whole family that he harmed me more than I can ever hope to articulate, and that I now thought myself so worthy of being loved that I took issue with being denied it as a child. It was at this point that my family intervened. My elder brother and I immediately fell out over it. Aunts, cousins, uncles, my sisters—those I had endured the hard work of building an adult relationship with after they initially treated my queerness with contempt—everybody interceded for him, even my grandmother. That same word was invoked again and again.
“Understand that this is Omenala Igbo, ‘our culture and tradition,’” my maternal aunt told me. “He only did what any Igbo man would have done in his shoes.”
But I do understand. If anything, it is they who have more understanding to do. By being my entryway to the Igbo literary canon, my father became my anchor to Igboness itself. His rejection personalized a societal abandonment. One so great that even relatives who changed to keep loving me think it is I who made the cardinal mistake by expecting that an Igbo father would act in any other manner.
There is an Igbo adage that goes, Egbe bere, Ugo bere. “Let the kite perch; let the eagle perch also.” It speaks to the Igbo philosophy of co-existence but has been hollowed into a superficial argument for the co-existence of Christians and Muslims, and that of the majority ethnicities of Nigeria, of which the Igbos have received the shortest political stick. But the Kite and the Eagle are not equals in Igboland. Whereas the kite is only remarkable in that it swoops down to steal the young of our chickens, the Eagle is a majestic, glorious bird that is accorded respect. Yet, let them both perch. It is, at its core, a reiteration that diversity is a fact of life. To that effect, there is a pantheon of gods and a plethora of oracles to speak their minds, none more valid than the other. Each Igbo person arrives in this world with their own Chi, their own unique soul which must be allowed to perch on the tree of Igbo life.
That saying has a second part, which has a meaning we now struggle to reckon with as a people: Nke sị ibe ya ebe na, nku ya gbajie n’ike. “The one that forbids the other to perch, let its wings break violently.” That is the way things are supposed to be. To become Igbo in philosophy is to abhor the domination of those who have the means to subjugate. Whether or not our Omenala accepts queerness is not relevant to the Igbo philosophy because it is already settled by the fundamental belief that no one has the right to impose on another.
This second part is a recognition that oppression does exist and that wiping it out is a collective obligation. I understand that what my father did, he did to secure a future for me in the now. But in doing that, he helped rob me of my entitlement to my people’s love. It was by finding a love for queerness in my love for the Igbo people that I forgave myself for expecting him to be the Igbo father that should be, instead of the father that custom demanded. I know now that it was never a mistake to expect him to fight for me, for the Igbo society that should be, instead of fighting to change me for the one that is. To the love of that father, and that Igbo society, I would never again question my right.
