by Mohamed Bakari*
Editorial: This is the second essay in the inaugural issue of The Nairobi Reader, a literary and cultural magazine. The Introduction to the special issue is available here.
One of my biggest nemeses is the nativist intellectual. This will often be the self-appointed public intellectual who purports to speak on behalf of a whole country or people. This type of spokesman, in temperament, is very close to that kind of politician who, during election time, comes out to claim that he has been approached by ‘his people’ to stand as a parliamentary, county assembly, or even presidential candidate, except that the nativist intellectual is someone from the academia. His seasonal vocation is to preach to us to go back to our spears, to our hides, or even as far back as the fig-leaf. All indications are that we are now nearing that season. I could sense the season from some of the columns I have been reading in the local press. The other day, a distinguished professor from a pretty venerable university somewhere in the American jungle was castigating, even excoriating, Africans for assuming Judeo-Christian and Islamic names as part of their identities.
Apparently, taking European and Middle Eastern names is a crime against African humanity. There is nothing I hate like being told what to do and not to do as an African. The colonial subject was always talked down because he was treated like an overgrown boy or girl, to be shouted at, finger pointed at, and barked at for such infractions as not wearing the correct colours, smiling all the time and not doing enough work to shore up the colonial economy. It was these ‘moral failings’ that gradually built up the myth of the lazy native. Now that colonialism has gone, the finger-pointing has been inherited by the local postcolonial scholar who is hell-bent on keeping the natives in the cultural straight and proper. And he does this by lecturing to us about the glory of going back to nativist, nay, tribal naming systems. This is really the stuff of dictators, or cultural meddlers and the sanctimonious obsessives. A couple of days back we were told to discard the servile culture of assuming ‘foreign’ names while naming our children or choosing names for ourselves. Naming is so serious that even the holy scriptures have devoted a verse or two to underscore the importance of the practice. It is through naming that we create the reality around us, for without names there would not have been the reality as we know or understand it. That is why, in the Qur’an, Adam is taught the names of things and is asked by his Creator to recount them, which he promptly does.
Names and naming systems are so fascinating that anyone without an elementary knowledge of how these systems work just exposes how little read they are. Names are historical memories of cultures and entire societies and a reflection of historical trajectories those societies have travelled. One of these cultural nativists told us to completely abandon what appears to him to be an identity anomaly where Africans assume Euro-Christian and Arabic names, pleading with them to revert to the primordial nomenclatures. Kenya, as a culturally diverse society, reflects this celebration of names. Because of the lateness in the coming of Christianity to these parts of the world, those who converted to that faith betray this historical fact from the manner in which baptismal names were selected.
Reading the names of Kenyans, one is left with the impression that they take their Bible studies extremely seriously, until the odd culturally sanctimonious preacher from the academia or the law intervenes. Kenyans dig deep inside the Bible to come up with such names as Rebecca, Jezebel, Habakkuk, Jeroboam, Jeremiah, Hezekiah, Manase, in addition to the more familiar Abraham, Ishmael, Joseph. Many choose the names of the ancient Old Testament prophets just to offer themselves the opportunity to stand out. Surely, with names like Habakkuk, Zakariah, Job, Sarah, and Jemimah, one does stand out. Muslims have equivalences in such names as Ya’kub, Ishaq, Zakariyyah, Luqman, Dhulqifli, Dhunnun, Maryam, Assia. The most ubiquitous name in the world is Muhammad, which has just one spelling in Arabic, but comes in various permutations depending on which region one comes from. The same name is realised as Mehmet in Turkish-speaking countries, Mamadou in West Africa, Mhamad in North Africa. One of the most popular names in West Africa is Jibril (Gabriel). No East African Muslim bears the name of this archangel. It is too intimidating a name to bear. Latin Americans are more audacious. A sizeable number are named Jesus!
Lawyers are too busy to read anything else outside their legal bubble. No wonder very few know anything about such ‘mundane’ issues. They think their own self-inflicted ignorance, indeed very odd for those learned friends and foes, is a reflection of the general population. But that is not the case. What lawyers and dictators have in common is this proclivity towards sermonising and talking down on what they presume to be their wards. Just to cite two recent examples, both Hitler and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk traumatised their societies by enforcing legislation forcing people to assume surnames that did not previously exist in their cultures or subcultures. Hitler forced Jews to drop Christian-sounding names and adopt names of planetary objects or names of metals or of gems or of precious stones. Names such as Goldblatt, Einstein, Ariel are a reflection of the mounting pressure that was piled on them. This pressure eventually culminated in the Jewish genocide during the Third Reich. Ataturk, in fact, did this before Hitler, the latter merely imitating the former.
During my two decades of teaching in Istanbul, I was endlessly fascinated by Turkish ‘modern’ naming system. One day I went to a travel agency to get a ticket to travel back home. After the humble clerk had served me so well and courteously, I asked him his name for the possibility of dealing with him in the future, only for him to flip his business card in my direction. It turned out his surname was Cimbri ( Jimbri). By then my Turkish was already shaping up. When he saw the surprise on my face, he said Evet, cimbri! Yes, my surname is Miser! To this cimbri, the surname was a mark of honour. Many of my students had colourful or what appeared to me to be embarrassing names. One, for example, was called Kulaksiz, which translates as earless. Another’s surname was Akbaba, meaning a vulture. When I went to collect my work permit, I met a police officer named Camur, mud. When I expressed my surprise, he asked me to relax. He then went on to explain that when the great name changing exercise was taking place after 1924, public officers, or memur, as they call them there, were given absolute power, carte blanche, to terrorise the rural folk in any manner they deemed fit, just as how some of our civil servants dip into public cookie-jars to help themselves with our tax money. The Turkish civil servants just inflicted these unbearable names on unsuspecting and innocent illiterate fellow citizens without any compunction.
One of the interesting discoveries I made was the fact that the Vietnamese have only one name. Now, one of my North Vietnamese students, Hassana, had only one name in her passport, and apparently, she had no problems crossing borders because immigration officers in many parts of the world are educated about these nomenclature ‘oddities’ and do not harass those they have to inspect. They are not in any way judgmental; they are just doing their work. Now come to Kenya. Once you are not stark black and have a name like mine, then you are automatically judged an alien, and you are scrutinised, harassed and, when the opportunity presents itself, extorted by some rural hick who has just been given a big desk job by a tribal mate from the boondocks. While, I, a seeming alien, have been in this country for close to a millennium, am judged non-indigenous by some uppity clerk, who surreptitiously violates my basic rights enshrined in the Constitution. But that is how the majority discreetly oppress fellow citizens from minority backgrounds. This is no more than the tyranny of the majority.
Talking about naming systems, the Romans had a double-tier system. One for the hoi polloi, or the great unwashed, and the other for the patricians. Slaves only carried a single name, while those with two or three were in a class of their own and had a right to lord it over their inferiors. Roman Emperors carried one of those long names. The Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius Antoninus bore such aristocratic names. The Spaniards still carry such lines of names, and the French and British colonisers introduced the concept of surnames for their convenience. I have no desire whatsoever to throw out the window my Islamic, Kenyan, African, and whatever other marks of my identities just to pander to the Nyungu culture. I would strongly recommend to the Kenyan Ricardos and Innocents and Charitys, Habakkus and Shahs and Joshis to retain these keepsakes because they are part of our subjectivities; these are what make us who we are. They should treat the admonitions of the nativists with the contempt they deserve.
When Christian missionaries settled in our midst, they curved their spheres of influence in the process of winning the souls of the natives. They settled in various regions and exerted their religious and cultural influence. We know, for example, that people from Tumutumu and Mangu ended up being converted to Catholicism, whereas those areas that were settled by Protestant missions gave names of the luminaries of their sect. The practice continues to date. Pakistan and, more so, Bangladesh have some of the most peculiar names in the Islamic world, almost creating a sub-branch of Muslim onomastics. Names such as Mujibur Rahman, Mutiur Rahman and many others are sui generis in the two countries. After all, names, like everything in human society, are socially constructed, deconstructed, assembled and unpacked eternally. Just be what you want to be. On my part, I have no desire to give myself such laughable names as those of Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa za Banga, which he inflicted on himself as he busily looted the national coffers while the Zaireans were kept busy debating Mobutu’s wafer-thin philosophy of authenticity. Dictators and meddlers love these diversionary tactics just so that the citizens do not have time to address the abuses of those who forced themselves into positions of leadership. In our case, this is a form of the tyranny of nativism.
This kind of thinking was quite rampant during the early phase of nationalist fervour, when nationalist politicians threw out the window their baptismal names and dusted off their native names. I certainly have nothing against this phenomenon. What I am pleading for is a culture of tolerance. We should not resort to imposing our private worldviews on others, which will amount to a tyranny of nativism. It does not make sense to distance ourselves from our heritage—in the case of Christianity, a 2,000-year heritage; and for Muslims, a heritage of 1,442 years. For better or for worse, these heritages are part of our collective human heritage. If we distance ourselves from these heritages, we will be impoverishing our own contemporary heritage. These universal civilisations have enriched our music, art and architecture despite the occasionally brutal episodes in their history. Edward Gibbon, the deist eighteenth century British historian, noted that “behind every civilisation is a barbarism”. How so true, yet we would never have reached our level of technological, cultural and political sophistication without these hiccups. Instead of harbouring permanent resentment, we can acknowledge all these warts and at the same time enjoy our level of development. I certainly would not have wished to live during the Middle Ages when there were no eye-glasses, where dentistry was almost non-existent, among the many things that we now enjoy through cumulative scientific striving over the centuries, by people bearing names like those that appear in John Bunyan’s Pilgrims Progress. Names reflect cultural practices and changes that societies go through. As T.S. Eliot put it, without religion there would be no culture. It is all the more important that we leave behind the culture of resentment and embrace a culture of inclusivity.
African cultural nationalists were fed the diet of revolutionary engagement through the reading of the prophets of this genre, like Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Okot p’Bitek, among others. At the time they were writing, there was so much denigration of the cultures of the ‘other’ by European racial supremacists. I, too, imbibed that philosophy as an undergraduate at the University of Nairobi. What I admire is Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s unswerving and admirable position regarding the defence of our local languages as intellectual media for the promotion of our values and a means to contribute to our universal scientific and technological advancement. And he does this through personal example and not by mere empty rhetoric.
*Prof Mohamed Bakari is the Vice-Chancellor of RAF International University, Kajiado County (profmohamedsaggaf@gmail.com).
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The first essay is available here. Download the inaugural special issue of The Nairobi Reader here. Tomorrow, find out how you can change your name without necessarily offending the gods.
To join the discourse on the cultural significance of names and the politics of naming, share your comments below or write to editor@nairobibookshelf.com.
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