Moses, Musa or Mugo? How our names promote racial inferiority

I am sure you’ve heard the expression “what’s in a name?” Actually, plenty. A lot. Usually, the turn of the phrase is used to silence critics of naming. But it’s not that simple. The matter can’t, and won’t, go away.

For Black Africans, the question of naming is particularly very important. That’s because virtually all Black African names meant something. African names were didactic, depicted beauty, an important event, or calamity — like The Year of the Locust — or a famine.

Even children were named after fearsome predators like lions. I have not found a single case where an original African name was meaningless. Which begs the question; why do so many Black Africans carry European or Arabic first names?

TOXIC MIX

Let me start with some of the counterarguments against my line of attack. Perhaps the most important pushback is that culture, of which naming is a part, is dynamic, and not static.

As such, no culture is pure, or cordoned off from other cultures. Thus all cultures are mongrelised and are either a delicious stew or a toxic mix of inchoate parts. This is why cultures grow and rid themselves of inborn inherent myopia and inertia.

This, I am told, is a good thing. I don’t disagree. After all, only a fool refuses to mimic the best, and more superior, parts of the neighbour’s gardening techniques. Such a fool is condemned to live in the museum of antiquity.

Globalisation has flattened the earth. Anybody anywhere in the world, even in the remotest villages, can get CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and motley other dominant news and entertainment outlets. Hollywood dominates the motion picture industry. For lesser souls, there’s always Bollywood and Nollywood. It’s possible for a couch potato living in Nairobi to watch CNN’s Anderson Cooper and think he knows, or understands, America. Whether that’s fact or fiction is another matter.

But we can be sure of one thing; the couch potato’s mind is deeply colonised by CNN. This is the question: is it just the Global South that’s being flattened by the Global North, or is the flattening mutual? Is there penetration and counter-penetration?

COLONISING EVERYONE

At the advent of the Age of Europe — 500 years ago — white Europeans fanned across the globe colonising everyone. As the saying went, the sun never set on the British Empire.

Way before then, hordes of Arab Muslim zealots had conquered large swathes of the Earth, imposing Islam on their victims at the tip of the sword. That’s right, jihads and crusades.

The conqueror imposes on the vanquished his culture and religion. It’s a violent experience. The conqueror fosters a psyche of inferiority in the enslaved. He robs his victim of his culture and religion. He makes the victim intellectually submit to him.

 Often, the victim accepts his inferiority to his conqueror’s superiority.

While military in nature at first, the conquest soon assumes a cultural dimension. The victim’s culture and identity are subordinated to, or replaced by, the conqueror’s worldview. Very soon, the vanquished comes to see himself in the image of his “master,” his conqueror.

The Somali Muslim comes to see the Arab as his kin. To the Somali Muslim, Mecca is the holy site, not Garissa, Mogadishu, or Wajir. The Maasai, Mijikenda, Meru, and Kisii Catholic comes to identify with Europe.

Rome becomes the hallowed ground for the Kikuyu, Kamba, Kalenjin, and Luo Catholic, not Nzambani Rock, Mt Kenya, or the shrines of the Rift Valley and Nyanza. What’s ours has little, or no, value. What’s theirs is the standard.

CONQUEST

No other stamp of conquest speaks louder than the name. The name by which you answer is the most visible branding of mental enslavement. That’s why proud cultures have rejected the hegemony of the imperialist’s names.

The Japanese, Indians, Arabs, Chinese (except the cultural captives of Eurocentrism in Taiwan and Hong Kong), Koreans (North and South), Vietnamese, to name a few, have rejected European names. But Black Africans, who are the most despised people on Earth, dearly hold onto their imposed Arabic and European names.

Africans are walking, talking, breathing human facsimiles and toys of the European and the Arab. By their names, most Black Africans have accepted their inferiority. Let me ask: are we our own worst enemies?

You can tell who’s submitted to an inferiority complex, and who hasn’t. White Europeans, Indians, Arabs, or Chinese don’t carry Black African names. Violent at first, this cultural domination is self-perpetuated of our own volition.

Today there aren’t colonial missionaries to force us to swallow European names under the guise of Christianity. Who forced you to name your son Felix, Wellington, Wycliffe, and Dominic, or your daughter Mercy, Immaculate, or Dawn? Some of these names are ridiculous, weird, and wacky. What’s wrong with Makau, Mueni, Njuguna, Ruto, Sunkuli, Musalia, Onyango, Nyambura, Achieng, and Jerotich? A name announces to the world who you are. Let’s go native. A rose by another name isn’t sweet.

Makau Mutua is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Margaret W Wong Professor at Buffalo Law School. He’s Chair of KHRC. @makaumutua.