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'Yewande Is Right: Deliberately Mispronouncing My Name Is A Form Of Racism'

Joanna Freedman

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'Yewande Is Right: Deliberately Mispronouncing My Name Is A Form Of Racism'

Featured Image Credit: ITV2

Last weekend, Love Island's Yewande Biala catapulted an important conversation into the spotlight.

Taking to Twitter, she accused former co-star Lucie Donlan of failing to pronounce her name correctly on multiple occasions while on set back in 2019, and asking to call her by a nickname instead - leaving cancer scientist Yewande feeling "distressed" and "invalidated".

One person who knows all too well how upsetting this can be is Omoleye Durosinmi-Etti, 23, from east London.

Omoleye [pronounced Oh-moh-leh-yeh] means 'child of my pride' - which made it all the more upsetting for her to spend much of her childhood being subjected to jarring and lazy mispronunciations.

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That's why, at the age of 17, she decided to go by her family nickname, Molly, instead.

Omoleye now goes by Molly (Credit: Omoleye Durosinmi-Etti)
Omoleye now goes by Molly (Credit: Omoleye Durosinmi-Etti)

Omoleye's family descend from a Nigerian Yoruba culture, where, traditionally, your birth name carries significant weight, and forms part of your identity.

"In my culture, children are not named for seven or eight days," says Omoleye, biology student and brand owner of illicitfate.com. "When we are eventually named, those names hold weight. We believe what we name our children is what they become."

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There are also people of Yoruba descent across Benin, Ghana, Togo, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Senegal and The Gambia - as a result of colonisation - and for many their names are of great importance.

"When my mother named me she expected me to become her pride, so if I'm then being 'rechristened' by other individuals that completely undermines what she wanted from my life," she explains.

"I'm more comfortable using Molly so I don't have that weight on my shoulders any more".

Omoleye has told how teachers refused to pronounce her name properly (Credit: Omoleye Durosinmi-Etti)
Omoleye has told how teachers refused to pronounce her name properly (Credit: Omoleye Durosinmi-Etti)
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The mispronunciations first started at primary school, where people would say Omoleye's name with the wrong intonation. At first, she just brushed it off.

"I ended up accepting that, because I was like 'OK cool, it's not far off what my name is'," she says. "But then, in Year 6, for maybe four months, we had [a substitute teacher] who would just butcher my name.

"She would call me some strange variant where, if you look at the letters in my name, I don't even know how you would come to that conclusion - and each time it became more and more frustrating".

From the very first instance the teacher got Omoleye's name wrong, she made sure to correct her.

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"I subscribe to the school of thinking that if you nip it in the bud it shouldn't happen again," Omoleye says. But it did - day after day.

"To all intents and purposes, I was actually a laughing stock," she recalls. "[The teacher] mispronounced my name and sort of smiled to herself, because she could see me getting worked up about it internally.

"I didn't understand what she was gaining from it, but it seemed to make her happy and therefore made everyone in the class want to laugh along, even though it was making me feel so crap."

Omoleye has told how the entire class would laugh along with the teacher's mispronunciation of her name (Credit: Omoleye Durosinmi-Etti)
Omoleye has told how the entire class would laugh along with the teacher's mispronunciation of her name (Credit: Omoleye Durosinmi-Etti)
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Despite being in a relatively ethnic diverse classroom, with other black pupils, Omoleye was made to feel like "the different one".

Eventually, she snapped and decided she wasn't going to answer the teacher until she got her name right.

"It reached the point where I realised, 'I'm actually a human being. You can't treat me like this'," she says. "If you're calling a dog a name it doesn't recognise it's not going to answer to you, or if you're calling a baby and it doesn't recognise its name, it's not going to respond."

When she finally called out her teacher's multiple failed attempts at addressing her, much like Yewande alleges, she was met with a flimsy: "You know what I mean".

"So I said, 'No, I don't know what you mean', because I've actually corrected you on multiple occasions," she recalls.

As a result, Omoleye was excluded from her peers for a full month; isolated in a separate classroom on her own, with just a teacher for supervision, and no contact with anybody her age.

"I find it highly unlikely that if the teacher was a black person and I was a young Irish girl, with a name that sounds different from how it's spelled... I don't think that would have run," she says. "Four weeks in isolation? It's impossible."

Recalling that she didn't even tell her mum about the ordeal, for fear that she was just being "insolent", she adds: "I was quite aware of it being a racial micro-aggression, but nowhere near to the degree I am now.

"I knew it was happening because I was a black child, but I didn't actually view it as wrong. I was like, 'this is just what happens to us'."

Unfortunately, this wasn't the only incident that Omoleye encountered growing up. She was also renamed 'Omi' at a private boarding school in her late teens, which changed the meaning of her name to 'water' in Yoruba, and once again belittled the moniker her mother had given her.

"I believe that it is violent for someone to say 'This is my name' and you to reply 'Can I call you this instead?,'" she says. "But when it is pulled up it's usually the black person that suffers."


Echoing Omoleye's sentiments, Yewande reflects in her public statement to Lucie: "You as an oppressor have stripped me of my identity, you've taken my power in choosing how I want to be addressed.

"It's important to recognise that asking for a nickname can feel invalidating, it makes me feel like a inconvenience... also ascribing a nickname to a person or participating in racialised re-naming can be distressing." Writing in The Independent this week, she later called the incident 'a form of racism'.

In response to Yewande's allegations, Lucie said: "I said on the show I had trouble pronouncing Yewande's name, it's just what I'm like.

"I asked if I could use a shortened abbreviated version of her name instead as a term of endearment - there's nothing sinister to it."

Omoleye was left traumatised after her teacher isolated her as a punishment
Omoleye was left traumatised after her teacher isolated her as a punishment

But there are many who would disagree.

"As a black girl with a Nigerian first name I know EXACTLY how you feel," one woman wrote on Twitter after reading of Yewande's experiences.

Another replied: "The Yewande story is incredibly rattling. Being the only black girl in a white space means a lot of us have a similar story. My heart would literally start beating out of my chest when there was a supply teacher because as soon as they tried to pronounce my name I knew what was coming.

"Everyone laughing me uncomfortably telling them my nickname which was a very gentrified version of my name because I couldn't bear to hear people incorrectly say my full name for the thousandth time."

Lucie branded Yewande a 'bully' in the villa (Credit: ITV)
Lucie branded Yewande a 'bully' in the villa (Credit: ITV)

So, will Omoleye introduce herself with her Yoruba name again one day? "I would like to," she says. "If I didn't have the issue of people mispronouncing my name, I would have stepped into its entirety from a young age and wouldn't have had any qualms about using it as a adult."

Whatever she decides, she just hopes her children won't go through what she has.

"My children will definitely be getting the works," she says. "I have about nine or 10 Yoruba names which will all be just as 'difficult' (or easy) to pronounce as mine, and hopefully they'll be able to live in a world where they can fully embrace those names in a way that, maybe, I wasn't able to".

Topics: Celebrity News, Life, Love Island

Joanna Freedman
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