Of names and why Europeans imposed their religion on us

Pope Francis blesses the crowd at St Joseph the Worker Church, Kangemi, upon his arrival on November 27, 2015. PHOTO | FILE | AFP

What you need to know:

  • The name Philip is prominent in New Testament evangelism.
  • The Luo merely borrowed “christening” from the European missionaries, who imposed it by alleging that a European first name was the only Christ-like thing for a human being.

Jowi is the Luo word for a ferocious tropical herbivore common in Kenya. Once upon a time, Joseph Odero Jowi was one of Kenya’s illustrious Cabinet members.

Jowi served as the Economics minister at independence under Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta. His name Jowi is the Luo word for an extraordinarily ferocious mammal.

This suggests that one jowi was sighted in the vicinity when Joseph Odero was born.

That alone would have been a powerful reason for Odero to be given the name Jowi. Traditionally, the “family name” system was never Nilotic.

Up to my birth, the Luo merely borrowed “christening” from the European missionaries, who imposed it by alleging that a European first name was the only Christ-like thing for a human being.

CULTURE
Indeed, by alleging that a European first name was God’s own command, the missionaries imposed family naming as the apex of culture. Under colonialism, you had to carry a European first name for even African priests to accept you into a church. That was how I became Philip.

My parents had just been converted to an extreme American sect called Seventh Day Adventists (SDA). The name Philip is prominent in New Testament evangelism.

But my parents were illiterate and had no idea what Philip meant. What mattered to a young Luo couple newly converted into an extreme Caucasian missionary sect was that the name was biblical.

Introduced by fast-talking white-skinned Americans, Seventh Day Adventism (SDA) was soon the commanding religion of South Nyanza.

WORSHIP

“Seventh Day” because the SDA leaders assumed and taught that Saturday was the seventh day of the week and that, therefore, Saturday was the special day of worship. To the “adwen” — as the Luo render the word “advent” (since the sound V does not exist in my mother tongue) — Saturday remains the sacred day.

Although I was born into it, no SDA priest has ever explained to me convincingly why God should be so partial to Saturday as his seventh day.

When leaving my South Nyanza to attend high school in Kikuyuland, I was already forming my own ideas concerning religion. Yet the intensely religious climate of Alliance simply added speed to my departure from religion.

Nevertheless, social goodness is what I still advocate. The difference is that I never preach it as a heavenly idea. My belief in human welfare has no religious basis.

It stems only from the assumption that, by nature, every human is well intentioned towards every other human.

HUMANITY

The horrible things that humans do to one another — especially what the leading Caucasian economic classes have done to Africans — do not say much about the size of humanity’s specific brain. But I say humanity, not Caucasians.

In the same general situation, the top African classes would have committed exactly the same shameful crimes that a Caucasian class continues to commit against other human beings, including to the labouring classes even in Euro-North America itself.

Philip Ochieng is a veteran journalist. [email protected]