What’s in a name?

When Ebose & I first found out we were having a daughter, our minds immediately turned towards names for her. A part of Nigerian post-colonial heritage is that people will often have two names; an English or continental name and then a traditional name from one or both of their parent‘s tribes. The English name almost always gets more widely adopted as its often easier to pronounce (even in Nigeria, it was the case that my name was terribly mispronounced every time I ventured away from home) Early on, we had decided that we weren’t going to christen our daughter with anything other than an Edo name and so we went on the hunt for a name. We wanted something loaded with meaning and personal stories. Traditional names are often phrases with a lot of implicit meaning and subtext. Unfortunately, a lot of translations end up reducing this context to a one word translation and in some cases, a complete mistranslation. So with this project, I’m hoping to fix that for Edo names by crowdsourcing names and as much of their subtext as possible. This is like StackOverflow (RIP) but for Edo names.