Re: Elumelu: Addressing Elders by Their First Names Is African Culture -By Vitus Ozoke, PhD

My recent piece about the young woman who addressed Chief Tony Elumelu as “Tony” has generated quite a response. Good. Public commentary should provoke thought, disagreement, and, occasionally, the useful discovery that some of the things we confidently call “our culture” may not be our culture after all.

One argument has appeared repeatedly in responses to my piece: “It is not African culture to address an elder by his first name.” Really? I am beginning to wonder which Africa some of us grew up in, because, at least in the African cultures I am familiar with, the exact opposite is often true.

We routinely address elders by their first names. What changes is not necessarily the name. What changes is the honorific attached to it. And that distinction appears to have escaped much of the cyber army currently hyperventilating over a young woman saying “Tony.”

Let us make this very simple. Suppose a man’s name is Maduabuchi Okafor. Among his peers, he may simply be called Maduabuchi. To people older than him, he may also be called Maduabuchi. To younger people who owe him culturally appropriate deference, he may be called Dee Maduabuchi. What he ordinarily does not become in traditional Igbo social relations is Dee Okafor. Why? Because “Okafor” is his last name. The culturally significant personal name is Maduabuchi.

And this is not some archaeological discovery from precolonial Africa. This is contemporary practice. We do it today. Go into your villages. Attend your family meetings. Listen to cousins addressing older cousins. Listen to nephews speaking to uncles. Listen to younger members of your extended family addressing older relatives. The evidence is everywhere. Yet Nigerians have spent days lecturing a young woman that addressing an older person by his first name is somehow an abomination against African culture. Perhaps before sentencing the young woman to cultural damnation, we should examine our own lives.

Let me ask those shouting “African culture!” a simple question. What do you call your uncle? Suppose your uncle’s name is Silas Okeke. Do you call him Uncle Okeke or Uncle Silas? If you are Igbo, perhaps Dee Okeke or Dee Silas? We all know the answer. It is Uncle Silas. It is Dee Silas. His younger relatives do not suddenly become anthropologists of African respect and insist on calling him “Mr. Okeke.”

And I would wager that Chief Tony Elumelu’s own nephews and nieces – some perhaps around the same age as the young woman subjected to this national cultural inquisition – call him Uncle Tony, not Uncle Elumelu. Think about that for a moment. If “Tony” is inherently disrespectful when spoken by a younger African to an older African, then surely “Uncle Tony” should also constitute a cultural emergency.

But it doesn’t. Because the problem was never the name Tony. The question is the relationship between the people using it. Once we admit that, the simplistic argument that “African culture forbids addressing elders by their first names” collapses. African culture does no such thing. Indeed, in many of our cultures, the first name is precisely the name to which the culturally appropriate marker of respect is attached.

Here is where the whole episode becomes almost comical. Chief Tony Elumelu reportedly rejected being called Tony and said he preferred Mr. Elumelu, Chairman, or TOE, explaining: “I don’t subscribe to that kind of Oyibo life.”

But wait. Which part is the Oyibo life? Because the last-name-based formal address he demanded is itself deeply associated with Western formal conventions. Mr. Elumelu. Mr. Smith. Mrs. Johnson. Dr. Williams. Professor Brown. Judge Roberts. Senator Jones. That is the Western formal naming structure many of us inherited through colonial institutions, schools, bureaucracies, and professional life.

The African familial structure often operates quite differently. Uncle Tony. Auntie Ngozi. Mama Nkechi. Papa Emeka. Dee Silas. Dee Maduabuchi. The honorific conveys respect. The personal name preserves the relationship.

There is an exquisite irony in rejecting “Tony” as Oyibo life while prescribing Mr. Elumelu as the culturally preferable alternative. That is precisely where the cultural argument becomes confused. If we are going to invoke African culture as an authority, we should at least be certain that the practice we are defending as African is actually African. Otherwise, we end up doing something quite extraordinary: defending a Western convention against an African naming practice – in the name of resisting Western culture. You could not script the irony any better.

This also reveals a broader misunderstanding. Respect in African culture has never rested solely on whether someone uses a first or last name. It is communicated through an entire social grammar. Tone. Gesture. Posture. Honorifics. Kinship terms. Greetings. Context. Age relations. Social roles. Even the circumstances of the encounter.

A younger person saying “Dee Tony” may show considerably more culturally recognizable respect than someone stiffly saying “Mr. Elumelu.” The first may encode kinship, seniority and affection. The second may encode professional distance.

When people reduce the immensely complex African culture of respect to the claim that “young people must never call elders by their first names,” they are not defending African culture. They are flattening it. Worse, they may be importing a Western convention, forgetting its origins, and then accusing someone else of being too Western.

The second response to my article has been even more fascinating. In the original piece, I posed a hypothetical question. I asked, in substance: If one of Femi Otedola’s daughters had addressed Tony Elumelu by his first name under the same circumstances, would Elumelu have reacted exactly as he did to this young woman?

Simple question. The purpose of the hypothetical was obvious – or so I thought. It was not an inquiry into the upbringing of Femi Otedola’s daughters. It was not an assessment of their manners. It was not a sociological study of the Otedola household. It was not an allegation that Temi, Tolani, or Florence Otedola routinely wander around Nigeria, calling elderly billionaires by their first names.

No. The hypothetical concerned Tony Elumelu. The independent variable was the young woman’s identity and social status as she addressed him. The question was whether changing that variable would alter Elumelu’s reaction. That was the argument.

Could the same behavior elicit different responses depending on who performed it? That is a question about power. That is a question about class. That is a question about status. It is the same reason one might ask: Would a policeman who slaps a commercial bus driver for speaking back to him also slap a senator for speaking to him in exactly the same way? The question is not: Are senators rude? The question is: Does power affect the policeman’s response?

This should not be difficult. Apparently, it is. One respondent to my piece – on WhatsApp – devoted about three pages to explaining how cultured and properly raised the Otedola daughters are. Three pages! And, remarkably, scarcely mentioned Tony Elumelu – the actual subject whose hypothetical reaction was under examination. I confess I found this more fascinating than annoying, because at that point we were no longer debating Tony Elumelu. We were conducting an unintended experiment in reading comprehension.

If I write: “Would Tony Elumelu have reacted the same way if an Otedola daughter had called him Tony?” and your answer is: “Otedola raised his daughters properly, and they would never call him Tony,” you have not answered my question. You have changed it. The hypothetical asks you to assume, for purposes of analysis, that the event occurred and then to examine the predicted reaction. Whether you believe the hypothetical person would ordinarily behave that way is irrelevant to the logical exercise.

Suppose I ask: “If an elephant walked into your living room tonight, what would you do?” “I keep my doors locked, so an elephant could never enter my living room” is not an analysis of the hypothetical. It is an escape from it. If we cannot distinguish those two intellectual operations, we have stumbled onto a much bigger problem than whether anyone should call Tony Elumelu Tony.

Perhaps our curriculum should join the conversation, because this is where the debate unexpectedly leads us to Nigerian education. One respondent apparently invoked what a Nigerian professor had taught in class while producing an extended response to an argument that was never made. That should concern us.

Education is not primarily the accumulation of what a professor has told us. Education should teach us how to think. How to identify an argument. How to distinguish a premise from a conclusion. How to recognize a hypothesis. How to isolate the variable under test. How to distinguish evidence from assertion. How to answer the question actually asked rather than the easier question we wish had been asked. How to entertain a proposition temporarily without necessarily accepting it. How to recognize nuance. How to disagree with an argument only after understanding it.

Those are critical-thinking skills. No educational system can claim success merely because its graduates can quote their professors while missing the argument right in front of them.

Perhaps Nigerian education spends too much time asking: “What did your professor teach you?” and not enough time asking: “What do you think – and can you demonstrate how you arrived there?” We reward recall. We reward reproduction. We reward authority. The lecturer said it. The textbook said it. The elder said it. The chairman said it. Therefore, it is true. Notice how neatly that educational culture reproduces the very hierarchy at the center of the Tony Elumelu controversy. Perhaps that is not coincidental.

There is a final irony here. Some Nigerians passionately defend what they believe to be African culture against “Oyibo life.” Yet they uphold the Western convention of using formal last names. They insist that an African elder be addressed as “Mr. Elumelu,” even though they would probably call their own uncle “Uncle Tony.” When confronted with a hypothetical meant to test whether status affects social treatment, some cannot separate the hypothetical from the actual people used to construct it. And all of this is offered confidently as proof that the young woman lacks education, manners, upbringing, and culture.

Perhaps everyone should slow down before diagnosing her deficiencies. Perhaps the cultural confusion isn’t hers. Perhaps the educational problem isn’t hers. Perhaps the lack of reflection isn’t hers. Maybe the people hyperventilating over “Good morning, Tony” should run a little experiment this weekend.

Visit your family. Find your mother’s brother. Find your father’s brother. Find the older cousin you have respected since childhood. If his name is Silas Okeke, walk up to him and say: “Good morning, Mr. Okeke.” Then observe his expression. He may wonder when you became a bank manager. He may wonder whether you have forgotten who he is.

He may even ask you: “Mr. Okeke kwa? What happened to Uncle Silas?” When he does, remember the young woman everyone has spent days condemning for supposedly importing Oyibo life into African culture. Then ask yourself one final question: Who exactly was importing Oyibo life? African culture never needed Tony Elumelu to stop being Tony. It simply taught the younger person how to put some respect around his name. Uncle Tony. Dee Tony. Chief Tony.

But still, Tony.

Dr. Vitus Ozoke is a lawyer, human rights activist, and public affairs analyst based in the United States. He writes on politics, governance, and the moral costs of leadership failure in Africa.