-Nimi Wariboko

On April 19, 2025, a cousin in the United States asked me for the Kalabari word for romantic lover. She believed there was no equivalent in the language. Below are the words I shared with her.

Olosikiya: A Kalabari word for darling, lover, or beloved. Literally, it means the person who does not reject love or romantic relationship. The lover is saying to his or her beloved, you are the one who has embraced my love and not rejected my romantic feelings toward you. The word olosikiya is also the name for dove.

Tari: Another Kalabari word for lover is Tari—my desire, my longing, or my first. It says, “I long for you; you are the number one thing I desire on Earth.” A derivative of this word is Taitai.

Olobo: Among other meanings, Olobo carries the connotation of longing. Time with olobo is borrowed— it is the pleasant, yet, unsatisfactory time spent outside the homestead. The love shared with a partner not yet married and taken home is sweet, transient, incomplete. Stolen moments with such a lover only awaken more longing, more desire.

Olobo seems to denote love at the boundary, at the margins (Olo sin is a boundary tree). Olobiri is a pool of water in which fish gather at low tide. It is a place in a shallow creek (okolo), a marginal site (biri, area) that is a little deeper than the surrounding areas, such that in an ebbing tide fish gather in it. There is a freshwater fish, the Niger Barb, Barbus Occidentalis, whose name is olo in Kalabari.

Cream, grease, or pomade is known as olo. The word olo also means “to borrow”; so Olobo means the borrowed one.[i] The sexual organ needed for pleasure is borrowed, insofar as there has not been a performance of traditional rites of public recognition to claim the organ as one’s “property.” The penis or vagina in such a relationship represents usufruct. The partners are enjoying the usufruct of the other’s sexual (erogenous) sites or estates. Marriage consists of usufruct and ownership.

Olobo can also mean the person I (am) hold (ing) now (of course, this author is aware that Kalabari is a tonal language; hence, there are variations in the pronunciations of the various iterations of “olo.”)

Let us pick up the thread of olo as pomade or body cream. Since olo is a substance a person rubs on their body, then oloso connotes closeness or intimacy. From another perspective, it refers to the body cream, a common gift item among lovers, especially from male lovers to their female beloved. Female lovers put on special cream (ibila kpoli olo, scented body cream) before they climb into the bed with their lovers. A male lover is expected to buy his female lover special scented cream to smear on her body before their sexual engagement.

Olobo is olo+bo. Bo means person. Oloso is Olo +so.  So in Kalabari means cooking, tending, nurturing, becoming/become, -ship (the suffix “so” indicates a state, condition, or position); ikiaso (friendship; another word for friend is ákió); minaso (relationship), and alaso (becoming chief). Olosi: weakling. We can break this word as olo + si; olo plus bad, sima, spoilt, deformation, or distortion. What is the meaning of “olo” that is being defaced or spoilt because of lack of courage or strength?

We need to define the “olo” in olobo. How do we reach down to its original meaning? How did the word come about on its own before it was applied or metaphorized as love? Is there a chance that it is related to a lost word referring to the genitalia? A rare, ancient word for penis is opulo, and in certain songs, the vulva is known as peke olololo, referring to the pudenda’s abundant lubrication.[ii] Olobo is a very interesting and complicated word. We will come back to it to properly decipher it, to examine its etymological roots.

The words olosikiya, tari, and olobo are unisex.

The next two relate to special words of love husbands used to address their wives in the past. Both words are hardly used today.

Sanbi-olobo: The keeper (holder) of the key to my treasury. This is how very rich merchants described their beloved wives in the past. It meant she was his most trusted wife who controlled, preserved, and protected his wealth.

Opulo-yanabo: The woman who owns the phallus. This is a word of endearment husbands used to describe their most sexually attractive wives: the one they are most romantically attached to and like to sleep with often. She might not be the keeper of his treasures. Occasionally, a woman could be both opuloyanabo and sanbiolobo.

What are the three major words for love (olosikiya, tari, and olobo) in Kalabari telling us? Love is a bird (olosikiya/olosikia), a dove that flies to you from the outside and that you embrace. Tari, as desire, is outside of you. A person desires what he or she lacks. Olobo means the one who longs. The sum of the ideas in these words for love is this: love is an outside. This is in two senses: first, to love is to be ex-posed. The partners are ex-posed to each other; each one turns toward the other in common attunement such that the possibility of the genuine future permanent relationship or habitation opens up. Love—or, more precisely, oloso—is a space (commons) in which lover and beloved are not just juxtaposed but are actually ex-posed to each other. In the language of Jean-Luc Nancy, the common is an exteriority, “the spacing of the experience of [activities], of the outside, the outside-of-self.”[iii] The common is the basis of interactions, inseparable from human beings, to be sure, but nevertheless distinguishable from them. Participants in oloso are always ex-posed in the commons. To be in the commons is to be posed in exteriority, to be ex-posed to another being in their singularity and in the sharing; it is the sharing of each other’s presence that necessarily characterizes the being-in-common of the partners, the lovers (see Jean-Luc Nancy, Inoperative Community).

Now, the second point: To be ex-posed means the bond or the ring of sharing is composed of its own boundaries. Love is a community of two persons whose innermost core coincides with its own exterior. This brings us to what French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy says about the woman’s breach, “an outside in the very intimacy of an inside.” Properly speaking, the breach is not a cut, a laceration of flesh. There is no cut in which the insides of flesh “would get lost in the outside (which would presuppose an initial ‘inside,’ an interiority). The laceration that … is exemplary, the woman’s ‘breach,’ is ultimately not a laceration. It remains, obstinately and, in its most intimate folds, the surface exposed to the outside…. [Similarly], the open mouth is not a laceration either. It exposes to the ‘outside’ an ‘inside’ that, without this exposition, would not exist.”[iv]

In this sense of the intimate relation of the inside and the outside, the overall typology of love conjured in my mind reminds me of the Möbius strip. “The Möbius Strip is a topological puzzle, flat ribbon, twisted once and attached end to end, to form a circular twisted surface. One can trace the surface, for example, by imagining an ant walking along it. At the beginning of the circular journey, the ant is clearly on the outside. But as it traverses the twisted ribbon, without ever lifting its legs from the plane, it ends up on the inside surface.[v]  If this mode of viewing is adopted, romantic love becomes an ant-like walk on the surface of reality whose inside and outside are always believed to be twisted; one side becomes the other. In Kalabari philosophy, the lover and the beloved are not viewed as a dichotomy but as an intertwined whole.

“The Möbius strip is named after the German mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius who came up with [the] model. The twisting of inside and outside provides “a way of problematizing and rethinking the relation between inside and outside of [love].”[vi]

Let me now turn to olobo. What does the word really mean, if we go to its etymological roots? Yes, it is translated as lover, but what kind of experience, dimension of relationship, or reality is the word capturing or reflecting? Permit me to take philosophical speculative license here in my interpretation of olobo. The word may be interpreted as a person on loan to you to satisfy desire. Tabo, the wife (who now lives with the man), satisfies him completely—or should do so. (Ta in Kalabari means satisfaction, completion, or end). Tabo is the woman that satisfies a man’s desire. The full name for a wife is ama ta. Ama is the Kalabari word for husband. Ama ta means satisfaction or satisfier of husband. She brings his desire or longing to a completion. Of course, we know that this concept of a wife is only an ideal. We know that men are not satisfied by their wives, and it was common in the past for Kalabari men to have multiple wives. (Does a phase of completion initiated by the first wife provoke a subsequent phase of incompletion, a fresh longing for objet petit a, the Lacanian unattainable object of desire?)

What does the demand for multiple wives—the stepping outside of the limits of satisfied desire—represent in the context of olobo as a signifier for longing or desire and the wife as a signifier for satisfaction of desire? What does the demand for multiple wives mean in light of the notion of “love is outside”? The demand implies a hidden reference to desire’s structural dissatisfaction.[vii] There is, indeed, something about love that the various Kalabari words we have examined are unable to symbolize. There is an excess in love as desire that escapes language. The real of love escapes naming.

ENDNOTES

[i] This was my very first understanding of olobo, but I was not sure whether I was right. On June 27, 2025, I sent a WhatsApp message to Primate Nimi Fyneface of Saint Paul’s Nyemoni Lutheran Cathedral, Abonnema. He replied to me on July 4, 2025: “Olobo means A borrowed person for the purpose of romantic relationship. Olo means to “borrow” in Kalabari language. It’s not a marriage process. People borrow evil power, masquerade etc. Òkò is to hire.”

[i] This was my very first understanding of olobo, but I was not sure whether I was right. On June 27, 2025, I sent a WhatsApp message to Primate Nimi Fyneface of Saint Paul’s Nyemoni Lutheran Cathedral, Abonnema. He replied to me on July 4, 2025: “Olobo means A borrowed person for the purpose of romantic relationship. Olo means to “borrow” in Kalabari language. It’s not a marriage process. People borrow evil power, masquerade etc. Òkò is to hire.”

[ii] Thanks to Dr. (Mrs.) Ibifiri Pollyn of Tombia for sharing this interpretation with me (telephone conversation, June 30, 2025).

[iii] Jean-Luc Nancy, Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 19.

[iv] Nancy, Inoperative Community, 30.

[v] Diane Elshout, “Researching Bodies: A Research about the Implicit and Explicit Ideas, Assumptions and Presuppositions of the Body in Contemporary Choreographic Research” (Master’s thesis, University of Utrecht, Netherlands, August 10, 2009), 19.

[vi] Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), xii.

[vii] Slavoj Žižek, Surplus Enjoyment: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 132.