UKAZI is UKAZI!

I marvelled at this girl's brilliance and sense of cultural identity that day i met her. She's just like any other teenage girl in Nigeria but she exudes a lot of unusual and contagious confidence that caught my attention.
Her name is Ngozi and she's between 11 and 14 years old. She lives with her aunty and helps out at her shop; that was where i met her.
My conversation that day with her started by my explaining what Ebola virus was before i picked up a leafy vegetable common to those from the eastern part of the country called "UKAZI". I teased her by asking for the English name of the vegetable (thinking she would be a bit let down by not knowing it owing to her low level of grammatical sophistication). To my chagrin however, and with some air of incredulity, she simply told me "ukazi is ukazi, i don't want to know what the English name is".
After her submission, i simply kept quiet and thought about the stand this girl had just taken and i wondered, in how many areas of our personal and national lives have we not looked for English substitutes to what we have.
We seek these substitutes because in our estimation, they sound better, but worse and perharps more fearful is the unspoken reason of the inferiority complex we feel when we compare the names we give to things or people to foreign or English ones.
We think it wouldn't be exactly right if we allowed "eba", "fufu", "akara", "amala" and so on to be just what they are.
South Africans never sought an English equivalent to the Vuvuzela (even when these English people were contesting if it was proper to use it in the stadium) but it has made its way to the English dictionary.
I wish as a people we could adopt this stance as it concerns our cultural identity. I wish we could appreciate what we have and even promote them.
The greatest countries in the world today don't just have bulging GDPs, they also appreciate and aggressively spread their culture.
In the end however, Ukazi remains Ukazi.

Be Inspired!
Remain Motivated!