Fr. Dr. Okhueleigbe Osemhantie Ãmos
“The shortest route to preserving history is not always through books. Sometimes, it is through the words people refuse to stop saying.”
There is something remarkable about language. It is history’s most faithful archivist. Long after monuments have crumbled, newspapers have yellowed, and eyewitnesses have passed on, ordinary words continue to tell extraordinary stories.
That thought struck me only recently.
Like millions of Nigerians, I had always assumed that Dundee was one of our indigenous expressions. It sounded too familiar, too deeply rooted in everyday speech to have come from anywhere else. Growing up, teachers called unserious pupils Dundee. Friends teased one another with it. In many schools, it functioned almost as a synonym for the Yoruba olódò someone considered dull or academically slow. Comedians employed it effortlessly. It found its way into street conversations, television skits and everyday banter. Even the celebrated singer Simi immortalised it in one of her songs with the memorable line: “I no be Dundee, I no be fool.”
Never, for once, did I imagine that the word had travelled thousands of kilometres before settling permanently in Nigerian English. Then history intervened.
The year was 1972.
Dundee United Football Club of Scotland embarked on a tour of Nigeria. At the time, European football carried an aura of invincibility. Professional clubs from Europe were widely perceived as operating on a level far above their African counterparts. It was therefore unsurprising that excitement greeted the arrival of the Scottish side. Many football enthusiasts reportedly looked forward to witnessing a footballing exhibition. Some expected the visitors to stroll past Nigerian clubs with ease, offering a masterclass in what many then regarded as “real football.”
Football, however, has always possessed a delightful habit of embarrassing human certainty.
Instead of humiliating Nigerian clubs, Dundee United found themselves struggling against them. Match after match, the visitors failed to justify their lofty reputation. They managed only one victory from five games, drawing two and losing two, including memorable defeats to Rangers International of Enugu and Stationery Stores of Lagos. The expected conquerors had themselves been conquered.
For Nigerians, whose sense of humour has always transformed public events into enduring folklore, the irony was irresistible.
The club’s name escaped the sports pages and entered everyday speech. Before long, calling someone Dundee no longer referred to a Scottish football club. It became shorthand for someone acting foolishly, displaying poor judgement, making embarrassingly avoidable mistakes or simply proving incapable of living up to expectations.
More than half a century later, very few Nigerians who use the expression know anything about Dundee United or their ill-fated Nigerian tour. The football matches have long disappeared into the archives. The players have retired. The scorelines have faded from public memory. Yet the word lives on, passed from one generation to another with remarkable resilience.
That discovery made me curious. If one football tour could permanently alter Nigerian vocabulary, perhaps Dundee was not alone.
It wasn’t.
Take the word Okada.
Today, virtually every Nigerian understands Okada to mean a commercial motorcycle. Yet the motorcycle has absolutely nothing to do with the original meaning of the word. The expression derives from the now-defunct Okada Air, one of Nigeria’s domestic airlines during the 1980s and early 1990s. The airline became famous for speed and quick connections. Commercial motorcyclists, eager to advertise the swiftness with which they could beat traffic and deliver passengers to their destinations, gradually adopted the airline’s name. Before long, people no longer associated Okada with aircraft. The motorcycle had inherited the identity of an airline that no longer flies.
Then there is Tokunbo.
Unlike Dundee, Tokunbo began as a proper Yoruba name, literally referring to a child born abroad or one who returned from overseas. Over time, Nigerians creatively extended the expression beyond human beings. Imported fairly used vehicles, electronics, clothing and household items gradually became known as Tokunbo. Today, it would surprise many young Nigerians to discover that what has become a commercial adjective was first a beautiful personal name carrying entirely different cultural significance.
Consider also Mammy Market.
Across military formations in Nigeria, every soldier knows the expression. These markets developed within or around military barracks, traditionally operated by women who provided food, groceries and essential services for military personnel and their families. The name eventually transcended military life and entered broader Nigerian vocabulary. Today, one can hear references to a Mammy Market even outside military communities, with many speakers having little idea of the expression’s military ancestry.
Language performs similar miracles elsewhere.
The expression Area Boy, now widely understood as describing street toughs or neighbourhood gangs, originally possessed a far less sinister meaning. In Lagos, it simply referred to young men identified with a particular locality or “area.” As urban crime and street extortion became more pronounced, the expression gradually absorbed those social realities until its meaning changed almost completely. What began as a geographical description evolved into a sociological label.
Even the popular expression K-leg tells a story of cultural creativity. Borrowing imagery from a leg that appears bent or malformed, Nigerians transformed a physical metaphor into one of the country’s most expressive descriptions of anything abnormal, suspicious or not quite right. Elections can have K-leg. Contracts can have K-leg. Relationships can have K-leg. Policies can have K-leg. It is one of those uniquely Nigerian expressions that compresses an entire paragraph into two syllables.
These stories reveal something profound about the Nigerian imagination.
Our people rarely allow history to remain imprisoned inside textbooks. We domesticate it. We laugh with it. We reshape it. We convert it into idioms, metaphors and slang until the original event quietly disappears while the language survives.
That is why words deserve to be studied with the same seriousness as historical documents.
Every time a schoolchild calls a classmate Dundee, every time a commuter hails an Okada, every time a trader advertises Tokunbo goods, every time someone says a proposal has K-leg, they are unknowingly preserving fragments of history. They are participating in acts of cultural remembrance without even realising it.
History, after all, does not survive only in museums.Sometimes it survives in the market. Sometimes in the classroom.Sometimes in music.Sometimes in jokes. And sometimes, quite unexpectedly, in a single word spoken a thousand times a day.
Perhaps that is the greatest irony of all.Dundee United came to Nigeria hoping to win football matches. Instead, they won something far more enduring. They earned an unlikely place in the Nigerian dictionary.
Thanks for reading.
Fr. Dr. Okhueleigbe Osemhantie Ãmos is a priest of the Catholic Diocese of Uromi and a Lecturer at CIWA, Port Harcourt
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