Elumelu, Angelou and the Politics of First Names

 By Farooq Kperogi UBA Group Chairman Tony Elumelu rebuked a graduate trainee for calling him by his first name, saying he didn’t “subscribe...

 By Farooq Kperogi

UBA Group Chairman Tony Elumelu rebuked a graduate trainee for calling him by his first name, saying he didn’t “subscribe to that kind of Oyinbo life.”

Well, calling a social superior or an older person by their first name isn’t simply “Oyinbo life.” At least it isn’t uniformly American life. In the American South and much of the Midwest, addressing an older person or a social superior by their first name without invitation can still come across as startlingly irreverent, although corporate cultures vary and many workplaces now explicitly encourage first-name informality.

Here, titles such as “Mr.,” “Ms.,” “Mrs.,” “Dr.” and “Professor” are still customarily prefixed to last names when addressing older people, people one does not know well or people who are socially superior. This convention is particularly entrenched in many African American communities and remains customary in many American university settings unless the professor expressly invites first-name address.

Maya Angelou provided a memorable illustration of this Southern African American convention in San Francisco in June 1990 during a taping of KPIX-TV’s daytime talk show called "People Are Talking." Angelou, who was a professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, famously corrected a 20-year-old undergraduate who addressed her as “Maya.”

“And first, I’m Miss Angelou,” she said. “Yes, ma’am. I’m not Maya. I’m 62 years old. I have lived so long and tried so hard that a young woman like you, or any other, has no license to come up to me and call me by my first name. That’s first. That’s first. Also, because at the same time, I am your mother, I’m your auntie, I’m your teacher, I’m your professor. You see?” Watch the video below:

That’s somewhat similar to Elumelu’s response to the young graduate trainee who called him Tony. Elumelu is just one year older than Angelou was when she publicly chastised the undergraduate who called her Maya.

So, even in American “Oyinbo life,” age, accomplishment and the quasi-familial authority of an elder can entitle such people to titular respect, to freedom from being addressed by their first name unless they expressly permit it.

I am aware that it’s slightly different in the UK. Well, the UK, too, once had an elaborate culture of titles and formal address, but that culture began to erode rapidly from the 1960s. There is now widespread egalitarian informality in address even though British society remains incredibly socially stratified in more ways than America is.

First-name address is now prevalent among British adults, including across differences of age and rank. British university students quite commonly call lecturers and professors by their first names.

I once wrote about British exchange students we had in my department who experienced culture shock upon realizing that, in many US university settings, it is considered astonishingly disrespectful and inappropriate to address lecturers and professors by their first names unless invited to do so.

Of course, even in Britain, primary and secondary school students don’t ordinarily call their teachers by their first names.

It’s also worth noting that in many parts of continental Europe, unlike in Britain, age, status and social distance are still explicitly marked in forms of address through honorifics, formal pronouns or other linguistic conventions. The norms vary considerably from country to country, but the point is that first-name familiarity across differences of age and status is by no means a universal European convention.

So, what the young lady did isn’t “Oyinbo life.” It is better understood as a spillover of the un-Nigerian corporate culture of diminished ritual marking of hierarchy that Nigerian banks and other elite workplaces embraced in the name of enhancing approachability. Elumelu, incidentally, is one of the architects of that culture.