I'm sure we all remember Rachel Dolezal, the 39-year-old American lady of Czech, German, and Swedish ancestry who identifies as black.

Ms Dolezal served as President of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington until outed as white in June 2015. She then resigned her position. News reports say she has had trouble making a living since then; but she has a book about herself coming out March 28th, so perhaps that will restore her finances.

This week's news is that as well as being transracial, Ms. Dolezal has decided to be transnominal. She has legally changed her name to Nkechi Amare. I'm sure I don't need to tell Radio Derb listeners that Nkechi is the short form of Nkechinyere, which in the West African Igbo language means "Gift of God."

I'm not sure which god is in play there. The only West African god I know is Shango, from William Boyd's fine funny novel A Good Man in Africa. Looking him up in the online gods database, I see that Shango, quote, "leads a full red-blooded life and likes to party."

Well, that sounds West African all right — more fun than those boring old white people's gods, anyway.

I wish Ms. Dolezal … I beg her pardon: Ms. Amare; I wish her good luck with the book, and offer my thanks to Shango for bestowing her upon us as a gift. That's assuming it was actually Shango — there are a lot of gods out there — and assuming also that Shango didn't go transracial at some point in there and change his name to Apollo or Wotan or something …