Tony, Maya and the Crooked Rib of Respect

There are some social-media controversies that deserve to die within the lifespan of a WhatsApp status. Then there are those little incidents that arrive dressed as gossip but leave behind a serious question about who we are.

The Tony Elumelu episode is one of them. A young woman stood before the Chairman of UBA at the graduation ceremony of the bank’s Graduate Management Accelerated Programme in Lagos and began her intervention with a simple greeting:

“Good morning, Tony.” Elumelu appeared to have heard “Toyin” at first.“Toyin? Toyin?” he asked.

She clarified: “Tony.”

That was when the Chairman stopped the proceedings long enough to draw the line.

“No, you won’t call me Tony. You’ll call me Mr Elumelu or TOE. You won’t call me Tony, or Chairman. I don’t subscribe to that kind of Oyinbo life, okay?”

The young woman immediately adjusted.

“Good morning, Mr Elumelu,” she said, and continued with her question.

The young woman has not, from the credible reports I have found, been publicly identified by name. That is worth saying because the internet has been remarkably eager to turn her into a character when, in reality, she was a young professional who made an address that her senior interlocutor did not accept.

And then the internet did what it does best.

One camp shouted, “Respect!”

Another shouted, “But this is corporate culture!” Some asked why Elumelu could be “Tony” in one country and “Mr Elumelu” in another room.

Others went looking for evidence. They found it. And that is where this story becomes considerably more interesting.

The Other Tony

An older video from Stanford Graduate School of Business resurfaced after the Nigerian incident.

In that interaction, a young person addressed Elumelu as “Hi, Tony.”

He did not interrupt the speaker. He did not say, “I am not Tony.”

He did not summon the spirit of Mr Elumelu. The interaction continued comfortably.

So which Tony is the real Tony? Both. And therein lies the problem with our argument.

The mistake is to treat a person’s preferred form of address as if it were a permanent constitutional provision. It is not. Names live inside relationships.

A professor may be Professor Adeyemi in the lecture hall, Adeyemi among his university friends and “Dad” at home.

A judge is “My Lord” in court, perhaps “Aunty” to a niece and simply “Ngozi” to a childhood friend.

The same person has not become three different people. The relationship has changed. The room has changed. The rules have changed.

And sometimes the person himself has invited the change. This is why the sensible rule in professional life is not “Never call anyone by their first name.”

It is simpler: Do not assume familiarity. Wait for it to be offered. If the chairman says, “Call me Tony,” call him Tony.

If the professor says, “Please, call me James,” James he becomes. Until then, begin with the title.

That is not servility. It is social intelligence.

And frankly, when you are unsure, being slightly too formal is usually a much cheaper mistake than being too familiar.

But Was the Young Woman Actually Wrong?

Here is where I refuse to join the mob. There is evidence that the young woman may have been operating within a corporate culture that encourages first-name interactions.

A former UBA employee who said he had passed through the same graduate programme argued publicly that participants were taught to address colleagues by their first names, regardless of rank.

Other former banking employees have similarly described workplaces where first-name address was encouraged. If that is the environment in which this young woman had just been trained, then her greeting becomes less outrageous.

She may not have been saying, “I am Tony Elumelu’s equal.” She may simply have been saying, “This is how we were taught to address people here.”That distinction matters.

And it is why I was uncomfortable with the social-media execution of the young woman after the video became viral.

A correction can educate. A mob can traumatise.There is a difference.

The purpose of workplace etiquette should be to teach people how to navigate professional spaces, not to publicly teach them that one wrong word can make thousands of strangers question their upbringing.

Elumelu corrected her. She corrected herself. The matter could have ended there.

Fortunately, it apparently did not remain a matter of public embarrassment.

Reports on Saturday indicate that Elumelu subsequently met the young woman and reconciled with her. Silverbird described the encounter as an amicable resolution after the controversy and criticism directed at the graduate.

That second encounter is, to my mind, more important than the first. Because leadership is not merely the ability to correct. It is also the ability to repair.

Then Maya Angelou Walked Into the Argument

Almost immediately after the Elumelu video went viral, another old video surfaced. This time the person at the centre of the conversation was Maya Angelou.

A young woman addressed the celebrated American poet and author by her first name.“Maya.”

Angelou stopped her. She explained that she was not simply “Maya” to a young woman who had not earned that familiarity.

“I’m not Maya. I’m 62 years old. I’ve lived so long and tried so hard…” she said, explaining why she expected to be addressed differently.

At first glance, Angelou and Elumelu appear to be reading from the same book.

An older, accomplished person. A younger person. A first name. A correction. Respect.

But there is a second chapter to the Angelou story that makes it more human.

Angelou later reflected on the encounter and apologised for the manner in which she handled the correction.

Reports on the video note that she explained her reasoning and acknowledged that she could have dealt with the young woman differently.

That is where the story stops being about etiquette and becomes about humanity.

Because human beings are strange creatures.

We can be right about the substance and wrong about the delivery. We can defend our dignity and accidentally damage somebody else’s. We can correct a person while forgetting that the person is learning.

And then, if we possess enough humility, we can look backwards and say:“I could have done that better.”

That sentence may be one of the most difficult sentences for a powerful person to utter.

I Met Dr Pangloss in My Father’s Cabinet

I have been thinking about Voltaire.

There was a period in my childhood when I had read almost all the books that had been bought or loaned for/to me. I was bored.

So I sneaked into my father’s cabinet and borrowed a book. “Borrowed” is the respectable version of the story. Let us leave it there.

The book was Candide.

And suddenly I entered the strange, comic and sometimes brutal world of Candide, Cunégonde and Dr Pangloss.

Dr Pangloss is Candide’s tutor and the great philosopher of optimism. He believes that everything happens for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Candide, his innocent student, initially absorbs this philosophy. Then life begins. Candide is expelled from the Baron’s castle after falling in love with Cunégonde. He is dragged through war, violence, betrayal, disaster, slavery, poverty and absurdity.

Cunégonde herself passes through terrible circumstances.

Pangloss, despite encountering calamity after calamity, stubbornly continues to defend his philosophy. Even after suffering, he insists on his intellectual system.

Voltaire is not merely telling an adventure story. He is mocking human beings who become so attached to an explanation of the world that reality itself cannot persuade them otherwise.

And that is where Pangloss enters our “Tony” argument.

We too have become Panglossian. One person says, “This is disrespect.”

Another says, “This is Western corporate culture.”

A third says, “African culture is dying.”

A fourth says, “The West does not even behave like that.”

Everybody arrives with a theory.

Nobody wants to read the room.

But the Stanford video comes and complicates the theory.

The UBA graduate programme’s apparent first-name culture complicates it again.

The formal graduation ceremony complicates it further.

Elumelu’s personal preference complicates it some more.

Then the reconciliation arrives and ruins everybody’s favourite villain story.

Perhaps that is why Voltaire eventually gives Candide his famous practical conclusion:

“We must cultivate our garden.”

In other words, after all the philosophical noise, all the grand theories and all the suffering, do the practical work in front of you.

For us, the work is simple. Learn etiquette. Learn context. Learn humility. Learn how to correct. Learn how to apologise.

And learn that no single rule explains every human interaction.

Samba Diallo and the Problem of Becoming Somebody Else

Then I remembered Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure. Samba Diallo begins life in the Diallobé community under the spiritual guidance of Thierno, learning the Qur’an and inhabiting a world with its own moral and intellectual order.

Then comes Western education. The Diallobé community must decide whether to embrace the new education that colonial power brings or protect the intellectual and spiritual world they already possess.

Samba eventually travels to the city and then to Paris. He acquires another way of seeing.

But the deeper he travels into the Western intellectual world, the more complicated his relationship with the world from which he came becomes.

The novel’s power lies in its ambiguity. Kane does not give us a cheap answer saying Africa is good and Europe is bad. He gives us a young African caught between worlds.

And that is exactly where many of us live today. We have LinkedIn etiquette in the morning and African family etiquette by evening. We call the CEO by his first name because the handbook says hierarchy should not obstruct communication.

Then we return home and cannot imagine calling our father’s friend by his first name without somebody shouting from the kitchen:

“Who raised you?” We are global. We are African. We are sometimes confused.

And perhaps we are supposed to be.

The challenge is not to choose between Africa and the West as if identity were a football match.

The challenge is to learn what to carry and what to question.

Ebla and the Danger of Tradition Without Reflection

Nuruddin Farah’s From a Crooked Rib takes us somewhere else.

The central character, Ebla, is a young Somali woman who runs away after learning that her grandfather intends to marry her to an older man. She moves through different relationships and environments, discovering that the structures she has been told will protect her can also constrain and exploit her.

Farah’s novel is not an argument against African tradition. It is more uncomfortable than that. It asks what happens when tradition becomes so powerful that the individual inside it disappears.

That is another lesson for our discussion.

We should not defend every African custom simply because it is African. Respect must not become servility.

Age must not become an unlimited licence to humiliate the young. Titles must not become instruments for oppression.

But the opposite is equally true. Modernity must not become an excuse for rudeness. First-name culture must not become an assumption of intimacy.

Equality of human worth does not mean equality of every social relationship. The cleaner is not less human than the chairman.

But the chairman and the cleaner do not necessarily occupy the same institutional role. That is not oppression. That is organisation.

And Here Is the Part America Does Not Tell You

There is a lazy argument that goes: “But in America, everybody calls everybody by their first name.”

No.

America is not one giant office where everybody walks around saying “Hey, John.”

The American South, in particular, retains strong traditions of formal address, including “sir,” “ma’am,” “Mr.” and “Mrs.”

Forms of address have also carried deep historical significance in African American communities because the deliberate denial of respectful titles during segregation was itself a tool of racial humiliation.

Britain has its own mixture of class, hierarchy, informality and etiquette.

Even in societies where first-name culture is common, context still matters. You do not walk into an unfamiliar institution and decide that everybody’s first name belongs to you.

You listen.You observe. You wait for an invitation. And that is the principle we should teach young professionals.

Start formally. Let familiarity be granted, not assumed.If the person says, “Please, call me Tony,” then Tony it is.If the person says, “Mr Elumelu,” then Mr Elumelu.Simple.

What Elumelu Has Actually Taught Us

The most fascinating thing about this controversy is that Elumelu himself has now become the perfect illustration of the principle.

He has demonstrated that “Tony” is not a forbidden word. He has demonstrated that context matters. He has demonstrated that he can participate in an informal first-name interaction abroad. He has also demonstrated that he may prefer formal address in a Nigerian corporate setting, particularly when he is being addressed by young professionals at a formal event.

And now, reportedly, he has demonstrated something else; that after a public correction, the relationship can still be repaired.

That is far richer than the original viral clip. Perhaps the young woman now has learnt to pause before using first names.

Perhaps Elumelu was reminded that a person can make an honest mistake without intending disrespect.

Perhaps Maya Angelou’s later reflection teaches the older generation something too.

And perhaps all of us need to stop behaving like Pangloss, desperately trying to force every social encounter into one neat philosophy.

There is no single formula..There is only judgment.

The African Never Quite Leaves Africa

I have spent enough time around Westernised language and institutions to know the temptation. We change our accents. We change our vocabulary.

We learn to say “Hey” instead of “Good afternoon, sir.”

We learn to challenge authority. We learn to sit at tables where people twice our age are called by their first names.

All of that can be good.

But something remains. The African in us remembers the elder. The African in us remembers that when someone older enters the room, you greet.

The African in us remembers that familiarity is earned. The African in us understands that you can disagree with a person without stripping them of courtesy.

And no matter how sophisticated we become, somewhere inside us is that old voice asking: “Have you greeted?”

Maybe that voice should not be silenced. Maybe it should simply be educated.

Let it learn that respect can exist without fear.

Let it learn that hierarchy can exist without humiliation.

Let it learn that first names can exist without disrespect.

Let it learn that cultures can meet without one swallowing the other.

That is the real lesson from Tony Elumelu, Maya Angelou, Samba Diallo, Ebla, Candide and even Dr Pangloss.

We are all negotiating between worlds. We are all carrying inherited rules into modern rooms. We will sometimes get it wrong.

The measure of our character is not whether we never make the mistake.

It is what we do after the mistake. The young woman corrected herself.

Elumelu, according to reports, later reached out and reconciled with her.

Maya Angelou eventually reflected on her own response.

Candide eventually stopped trusting Pangloss’s explanations and learned to cultivate his garden.

Samba Diallo travelled across worlds and discovered that education can enlarge a person while also making the question of identity more painful.

Ebla fled structures that claimed to define her and learned that survival sometimes requires questioning the rules handed down to you.

Perhaps that is where our own garden begins. Not with “Call me Tony.”Not with “Call me Mr Elumelu.”

But with a more difficult instruction: Know the person. Read the room. Understand the culture. Wait for the invitation.

And when the invitation comes, accept it.

When the correction comes, learn from it.

When you have corrected someone, do not destroy them.

And when you discover that you could have handled something better, possess enough humility to say so.

Because respect is not merely what we call people. It is what we allow them to remain after an uncomfortable encounter; human.

Happy Sunday, I wish you a fruitful week ahead