What’s in a name?
Published:Tuesday | December 23, 2025 | 12:05 AM
THE EDITOR, Madam:
Alex Haley’s TV series Roots casts his slavery re-enactment story around the renaming of an enslaved young man through cruel flogging. Kunta Kinte – called ‘Kunta’ by his parents before his kidnapping and capture by white slave traders – was whipped until he surrendered to answer to the white man’s asking, ‘What is your name?’ with ‘Tobi’. The name Kinte has its roots in the Mandinka culture of West Africa to mean ‘respect’ or ‘to be humble’.
The adoption of the language of our enslavers to include the forced conversion to their religion, is manifested in the concept of a ‘Christian’ name being our first names. The demonisation of our original tongue has led to us agreeing to replace our given names with English names. The idea is that we should sanitize our African identity and be known by a Christian name.
My daughter, Zinzi, named after Mandela’s oldest daughter, took offence to being asked to place her ‘Christian’ name on a medical form. She struck out the word ‘Christian’, leaving the word ‘Name’, where she proudly wrote Zinzi.
Africans are the only ethnic group forced to adopt the name of other arrivals here. What is even more torturous is that we carried the name of our European owners to whom we belonged. For the enslaver, his last name was his family name. For us, it was forced branding for life of our Massa’s name. For Africans, names carry deep meanings. They relate to the circumstances of a child’s birth – the day of the week he is born, the hopes and aspiration of the family, or a significant event which surround the birth of the child.
To Kunta Kinte, Tobi has no meaning or relevance to his life, save and except that it belonged to his capturers. This was part of his torture, to be forced to live with an alien identity which haunted him for the rest of his life. The Eurocentric idea of a Christian name collides with the Bible’s locating the Garden of Eden in Africa (Genesis 2: 10-14). The first human is called Adam. Adam is not an African name, King James! The Christian creation story is cradled in Ethiopia so why not say that African names are the true and original Christian names? And don’t respond by asking – what’s in a name?
BERT SAMUELS
Attorney-at-Law