CANDID TALK: Your names bespeaks you in Uswaz

Today’s parents are a very creative lot going by the names they give their children at birth. I have often wondered why for God’s sake we should hanker on foreign names with meanings we don’t know, or ‘native’ names with negative connotations. What puzzles me most is the adaption of names I am not sure meant anything at all – like Peter. Those crazy names were inventions of the colonizers who deemed that such names as Rugerebamu Rwezaura or Saiddimu Ole Malampu are reserves for botanical and zoological textbooks.

The funny bit is that in our innovation, we have even gone further than colonizers in ‘decorating’ the names they gave us. One hard and fast nomenclature rule is that we must add silent ‘h’ to all female names ending with letter‘t’. For example, the names Harriet (h), Margaret (h), Janet (h) and so forth, as a sign of sophistication above the ‘inventors’.

Dr Winchinslauss Rwegoshora (PhD, MA, BA, Dip) philosophizes that we give awkward foreign names because we are afraid of our keratin in our skins. We, therefore, shun all African names as one would do rat poison, save for folks from the shores of Lake Victoria – the Rwechunguras and Rugerebamus.

To be even more sophisticated we have people with foreign baptismal and ‘surname’ - like John Paul, Margaret (h) Patrick, Rubuinnus, Salvatore Mackintosh and so forth. But there pitiful lots transfer their wishes in their children. That is why we have people bearing connotations such as Godlisten, Goodluck, Goodomen, Goodness, Lightness, Heaviness, Maliciousness and other ridiculous names from the outer space.

Worst still, my late father named me Peter at birth. He had just converted to Christianity and wanted to express his faith thus. I have consequently done my research and found out that ‘Peter’ in Jewish means the ‘rock’. Dad should have simply named me a rock in Haya other than in a language that I am not comfortable with. Kiswahili names are even worse – some carry very noxious connotations. We have Sikujua, meaning ‘I didn’t know’. I would suspect that the mother of such a child probably conceived under dubious situation. I also know a guy named Maskini (pauper) and for god’s sake this man is indeed a very, very poor man – he has a reputation of floating like an ominous ghost from one table to another at Mzee Shrima’s Bar begging for beer from the patrons.

The gist of the naming story is that people tend to live their names. For example, colleague named Mashaka Kiroboto, which means misery in Kiswahili, lives just that – miserably. He is so unfortunate that he has been considering replacing his names with something like “Fortune,”. He cannot because all his documents – certificates and ID cards bear the names. Mashaka is a man laden with all tribes of miseries. Even with his kind of education (he holds a master’s degree) he carries he wears misery like a medal.