The erasure of African women through surnames is not tradition, and it is not culture. It is a quiet editing of who we are.
By Ijeoma Ntada
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.”
Shakespeare’s Juliet believed names were just labels, interchangeable and inconsequential. But I keep wondering, can we really compare an African woman’s surname to a rose that still smells like a rose even if you call it a lily? A flower does not lose its scent when renamed, but a woman is not a flower. Her surname carries lineage, history, and belonging. It shapes how society recognizes her, how her place in the world is recorded, and often, how she sees herself.
I first felt the weight of surnames as a girl in secondary school. Teachers rarely called us by our first names; it was always our surname. If I introduced myself as simply Ijeoma, a question would follow immediately.
“Ijeoma what?”
Only when I said “Ijeoma Ntada” did the introduction feel complete. In Ukwuani, where I come from, the surname is called ẹfa nnalí, your father’s name. It is proof of your identity and a daily reminder that you are your father’s child, that your existence is entwined with a lineage larger than yourself.
That is why the question of what happens to a woman’s surname after marriage has never felt trivial to me. It is not just a matter of paperwork or social media posts. That is why the question of what happens to a woman’s surname after marriage has never felt trivial to me. It is not just a matter of paperwork or social media posts.
Consider Temi Otedola, an actress and fashion entrepreneur, and daughter of Nigerian billionaire, Femi Otedola, whose wedding to musician Oluwatosin Ajibade, popularly known as Mr Eazi, captured the attention of the internet. Soon after the wedding, she updated her social media from Temi Otedola to Temi Ajibade to reflect her marital status.
That single digital change sparked debates far beyond social media. For many men, it was a beautiful gesture of respect and submission to her husband’s headship—a sentiment that was also echoed by her father. In his remarks at the wedding, Femi Otedola advised his daughter, “You found a great and blessed guy from a decent family. My advice is to succumb to him, he is your husband and boss”. This aggravated many feminists further and led to the reopening of old conversations. Why must marriage still ask women to step out of their own names? Why must a woman’s identity bend while the man’s remains untouched?
As expected, the loudest defenses leaned on “culture” and “tradition”, which is ironic because surnames, in the form we know them today, are not indigenous. They are colonial imports mistaken for tradition. Precolonial African naming was fluid, abundant, and layered. A child could bear multiple names throughout a lifetime, each reflecting the circumstances of birth, a parent’s hopes, personal traits, or even events passing through the household or community. There were no rigid limits or rules on names and naming.
It was colonial schools, census takers, and tax collectors in the nineteenth century, who insisted on fixed surnames—usually the father’s name—frozen into official records. What had once been a layered practice became a rigid label imposed for administrative convenience. Later, patriarchal religion and law reinforced this rigidity, naturalising it as “tradition”, and ensuring that women’s identities would be measured by their relationships to men rather than by their own lineages or achievements.
When people defend today’s surname practices as “our culture”, I cannot help but ask: which culture? The precolonial one, where naming was fluid and sentimental? Or the colonial-patriarchal one, where a woman was folded into a man’s line and her own heritage flattened?
Temi Otedola’s name change, for all its visibility, will not erase her. The Otedola name is already inscribed in Nigeria’s economic history, and “Ajibade” carries its own weight. In the public eye, she remains visible. Her autonomy is shielded by wealth and societal status. But the stakes are higher for the average Nigerian woman.
For her, a surname is not cushioned by privilege. It is the thread that ties her to her past and secures her footing in the present. To lose or alter it is to unsettle the records by which she is known and remembered.
A surname is not only a flourish on a wedding invite. It is also the name on school certificates, land documents, bank accounts, and even hospital records. Changing it can mean hours in queues, legal fees, and administrative headaches. For rural women, it can mean losing recognition in inheritance disputes.
Landesa notes that discriminatory inheritance practices remain widespread, and colonial systems of record-keeping only reinforced these exclusions. What might appear as a simple name change is in reality a subtle mechanism for writing women out of property, memory, and history alike.
Even beyond land and inheritance, bureaucracy weighs heavily. Women recount paying for affidavits, newspaper notices, and multiple corrections across BVN, NIN, bank accounts, and passports. As Zikoko reports, the process is exhausting and disruptive. For working-class women, it can cause delays in jobs and other important aspects of life.
Here, autonomy is not as simple as “choice.” A wealthy woman can frame her name change as an act of love. For countless others, it is a requirement embedded in social expectations and systems that presume a wife must take her husband’s surname.
A woman who keeps her maiden name is accused of defiance. Churches may preach entire sermons on the virtue of “answering your husband’s name”. Families can treat refusal as shameful and it may also be seen as female stubbornness and pride. The surname becomes a battleground where loyalty and a woman’s moral character are judged. Meanwhile, men face none of this. No man is ever asked to drop his father’s name to demonstrate love. No man’s belonging is measured by his willingness to surrender his identity. The patriarchy cloaks itself in “culture” and “tradition,” but at its core, it enforces one-way surrender.
This pressure explains why women who resist today are often labeled as Westernised rebels or “difficult” women. In truth, their refusal to relinquish their names is a subtle act of historical awareness that exposes just how alien the surname system really is. The impact of surrendering a name reaches beyond social judgment—it can obscure a woman’s accomplishments and complicate access to official records. It also leaves future generations searching for her presence in archives or databases with little trace of her life.
This danger is not hypothetical. On a post celebrating Professor Chinwe Christie Achebe’s birthday on Facebook, the comments revealed that many people did not know her as a scholar in her own right. When you search for Achebe on the internet, most results lead back to her husband. Despite her decades of teaching, over sixty publications, and four books spanning Nigeria and the U.S., she is still just “Chinua Achebe’s wife.”
As commenter Adesola Ayo-Aderele observed, “It is precisely cases like this that make women today hesitate before surrendering their names.” Jennifer Chinenye Emelife added bluntly, “That’s why y’all should keep your name.” These reactions underscore what African women have long understood. A name is not a mere label. It is a record of existence and a claim to memory.
This name problem is also visible in contemporary life as well. Take May Yul-Edochie as a case study. Once known as May Aligwe, she built a public identity and professional presence under her marital name. When the marriage ended, that same name became a point of contention. Social media users treated it as borrowed property. If she kept it, she was accused of clinging to a man. If she dropped it, she risked losing the recognition she had painstakingly built. Her experience illustrates the double bind African women face. The very name that can anchor visibility and professional authority can also be weaponised against them. Conditional autonomy?
The erasure of African women through surnames is not tradition, and it is not culture. It is a quiet editing of who we are. When a woman is expected to fold herself into her husband’s identity, society effectively erases her. Generations grow up learning men’s stories, while women appear only as footnotes. That’s if they appear at all. Every document that forces a different name and every expectation that she “answers” to another person chips away at her life and her presence in the world.
Still, there is resistance, all thanks to the difficult women. Women who keep their surnames are refusing erasure. They are declaring that their histories belong to them. Their lives and legacies matter. Holding onto a name is a quiet rebellion and a fight for themselves and the daughter who will come after.
So, a surname is never just a name. It is the boundary between being remembered and being forgotten. When someone asks, “What’s in a name?” The answer is everything.
Ijeoma Ntada is a Nigerian writer and content marketer whose work explores culture, identity, and the textures of everyday life.
Cover photo credit: Jose Villa.