Among the myriads of problems facing the Igbo people, apparently the most fundamental of the problems is that of identity. The first thing given to any new child is the gift of identity. It comes from the community, the family which comprises the immediate family and extended family, and the given name.
To explain the importance of identity is in the celebrations accorded to the coming of and naming of a new child. The Igbo people have not been taking this celebration seriously in the past few decades. The celebration is to rejoicingly welcome the new child into the family, ụmụnna (kindred) and community and give him, his life’s identity.
With the foundation of identity established, the next is how the name of the child is written. The name which carries the culture of the people he is born into is also written according to the accepted format, recognising the rules of the language in order to project the actual meaning.
As the child grows, he begins to learn how to identify with, pronounce and write his name, family name, ụmụnna and community’s name. This allows a child to be able to integrate and to correct a stranger to the correct way to write his name according to the accepted orthography, pronunciation and meaning in the particular language. This informs why some people go to the extent to reject their wrongly written name and do not respond when pronounced wrongly.
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With this, it calls to worry how the Igbo have chosen to act on their own collective identity. They have the propensity of anglicising or changing the written form of their names in various ways.
At the coming of the colonialists, the toying with the Igbo identity began. It permeated that Igbo progenitors did not bother to correct the colonialists who could not pronounce Igbo but christened it Ibo. It may be political too. Many of the educated and respected Igbo people rather went with such misspelling as found in books and archives. But such had sowed confusion.
The first thing this generation did with the coming of the social media was to correct the written form of Igbo. Yet, some people resisted that. In their thinking, Igbo is the language and Ibo is the people. It took several teaching and persistence for that anomaly to be corrected which has also been corrected by many national and global institutions.
Having succeeded in the fight to correct Ibo to Igbo, there is yet another issue with the written identity lurking around.
Some months ago, I made a post on Facebook stating that I used to write Ndigbo and have corrected myself. Many of those engaged with the post defended the Ndigbo. Some people said it should be written as Nd’Igbo or Ndị-Igbo as the rule of double vowels was implied. The one statement that struck me in the course of the conversation is, “Ndigbo sounds better than Ndị Igbo…” Are we talking about what sounds better or what is the right way to write the name?
In writing Ndigbo, Nd’Igbo, Ndị-Igbo, it will in long run be taken as the ethnic name.
While those who want to apply the rule of double vowels may want to justify that, let me explain that in this context the Olilo udaume does not apply.
Ndị is the adjective qualifying the noun Igbo. Ndị is “the” and “people”, while Igbo is equally the people and the ethnic name. If ụlọ akwụkwọ – school, cannot be written as ụl’akwụkwọ or ụlakwụkwọ or ụlọ-akwụkwọ, why should there be Ndigbo? By writing Ndigbo, you are converting the adjective into a noun which now gives Igbo a new name called Ndigbo.
This is evidenced in a post I came across a few months ago on X which the poster proudly stated that Igbo is language and Ndigbo is the people. It is also shocking that Ọhaneze also writes Ndigbo in Ọhaneze Ndigbo which instructs the media to write so as well. Ndị-Igbo as some others write is equally not right. Hyphen is used to make compound words a single word making two adjectives a noun. This is also not applicable to the subject.
Many people find favour in writing Igbos as the plural form which I also think is not correct. Given that Igbo is the people and the language within a layman’s explanation, Igbos should be wrong. There are examples. French, English, are also the people and language. None is written as Frenches or Englishes, why then will the Igbo accept their own to be Igbos in their attempt to anglicise the name?
Emefiana Ezeani, “In Biafra Africa Died: The Diplomatic Plot“, argued, “here are the reasons why the people are Igbo and not Igbos, Ibo or Ibos, the meaning of Igbo words are determined by their sound. When one says Igbos, the meaning changes and sounds Igbosu. But the people are not Igbosu but Igbo…”
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Chukwudi Okolie Ugbaja also argued in a post I made on Facebook on the subject about five years ago, he wrote,” There’s a simple solution to all this to prove that ‘Igbos’ is out of place. You can say ‘He is Russian (adjective) or ‘He is a Russian’ (noun). You can say ‘He is Igbo’ (adjective); but you can’t say ‘He is an Igbo’. If you can’t say ‘He is an Igbo’ it follows that you shouldn’t say ‘They are Igbos’. You can’t form the plural of what you can’t have the singular form of. ‘The Igbo’ or ‘Igbo people’ will be correct. ‘The Igbo’ would in this case refer to the collective i.e. the Igbo people. ‘The English’ in this sense will be correct too of course. You can’t say ‘An English’ and so, never the Englishes’. Rather you say ‘The English man’ or ‘English men’. Same thing for ‘Igbo man’ or ‘Igbo men’. Let’s just remember that since we can’t say ‘I saw two Hausas’ you can’t have ‘Hausas’ as a word. Rather you would say ‘One Hausa man’ or ‘Two Hausa men’. ‘Igbos’ is OUT OF PLACE.”
Kafomdi Anene thought otherwise. He said,” It depends on the qualifier used: “Ndi” is a plural form of “Onye”, therefore if “Ndi Igbo” is used, pluralizing Igbo as Igbos would be tautologous. However, if the qualifier “The” is used, it could be singular or plural, hence pluralizing “Igbo” as “Igbos” is permissible.”
The debate on the subject matter often elicited mixed reactions. While some people see reasons to wrongly write the name of Igbo, there is a fundamental agreement that we are ethnically Igbo people and not Ibo or Ndigbo or Igbos. At some point, there will be total agreement that in writing Ndigbo, Ndị-Igbo, Ibo, and Igbos, the writer is inadvertently changing the given name and as well the identity of Ndị Igbo – the Igbo people.