by Odhiambo Kaumah*
Editorial: This is the third essay in the inaugural issue of The Nairobi Reader, a literary and cultural magazine. The Introduction to the special issue is available here.
I have had so many names but the one that has stuck, against my will, is Toto. Honestly, at 27, I do not believe that I am yet to outgrow my childhood face. Prickly beards and a thick moustache have now camped on my chin and captured my once smooth face. I have made many independent choices and proudly suffered the consequences of their false premises or of my indecisiveness as a man. I thought three of these choices could salvage me from that name. Firstly, born at a time the Luo nation had long abandoned the removal of six lower teeth as a rite of passage to adulthood, I was swayed, on medical grounds, to dare the knife of circumcision. I may have my doubts on its medical and cultural implications as a descendant of a culturally non-circumcising nation but that is not relevant in this context. Secondly, I have shelved the individualistic attitude of my generation, characterised by its confounded contempt for family life and the life-changing sacrifices that come with it. To prove myself a man conscious of the clamour for continuity of life and a dependable node for the generational tree that birthed me, I betrothed and brought home a woman as a wife. Lastly, I begot a son. These are vital stages in the process of crafting my socio-cultural identity as a Luo man.
Unfortunately, even with all these efforts that I thought would make me a man and old enough to outgrow the name Toto, it has stuck with me like a bad dream. It is the insistence in voices and confidence in some of my village mates’ faces when they still call me ‘a child’ that have stirred in me a rebellious and revolutionary attitude towards names and naming cultures. I hope to demonstrate that through this personal reflection. I assume a more autobiographical approach— all experiences narrated herein tend towards names and the conflict of identity. In the first part, I reflect on my childhood names, their meanings and stories that demonstrate whether I accepted or acted them as a child. The reflections in the second part are attempts to demonstrate my efforts to build or break these names as I became more independent in thought and action. Lastly, in the third part, I assess these reflections and their general implications on some of the contemporary conversations on the cultural significance of names and what the gods of our parents have to do with them.
Accepting or Acting
I was born and baptised Francis Odhiambo Auma at St. Peters Obugi Catholic Church, in a ceremony I must have attended as a months-old baby. I have not gathered much about that ceremony because doing so, in a critical and not the religious sense which my parents expect, can degenerate into an acrimonious religious war that any sensible child would not want with his parents. Toto, a child, was my mother’s domestic reference to me as a fourth child she begot after losing her third son to a long and draining childhood sickness. In that name, she found a tone for a little more special care, love and gratefulness for having another chance. It was picked up by everyone around her in the village and it has remained on the lips of many people.
My father, Alloyce Auma Onditi, chose Francis as my ‘Christian’ name. The curiosity of finding out the meaning of my ‘Christian’ name and its biblical roots began at an early age. My father’s strictness on religious discipline prompted it. Though not schooled to the highest level of formal education available in the Kenya of 1940s, he was a studious man who stocked many religious books that taught the Christian way of life. He initiated and maintained the culture of reading the Bible and praying the rosary daily. He led a family with little space for compromise. And so I discovered early enough that my Christian name ‘Francis’ is not mentioned anywhere in the Bible.
As Toto, a child, I did not hesitate to ask, in the form of a complaint, why I would be given a name that is not in the Bible. But my father had gathered enough stories about Jo-takatifu, the Christian saints. He told me the story of St. Francis of Assisi. He narrated the tale of an extraordinarily wise man who, with unparalleled conviction, preached the gospel of Jesus Christ in a language that even animals of the wild understood. He told this story several times, and each day there was always something new about St. Francis of Assisi. One such ‘something new’ that gave me pride in this name was that Francis once tried to dig a small hole by the sea and asked for wisdom on how to transfer the whole seawater into his hand-excavated hole! I was astonished and henceforth carried that name with a lot of pride.
Even after securing some comfort with my ‘Christian’ name, it was not long before my father’s name became a subject of ridicule in the grazing fields. It had not occurred to me that it was unique until one boy insulted me that my father had the name of a woman. The village I grew up in is a small island-like plain because it is surrounded by rivers. There were hardly fifteen homes then and it was easy for a child to know each home by the name of its owner. For the purpose of memorisation, there was a popular song we sang in the grazing fields to remind ourselves of the homes. The song did not only mention names but also had some coded popular phrases or virtues that were associated with the owners of those homes. Some of these phrases were derogative, which explains why the song was only sung away from home and in a sotto voce. My father’s phrase of identity was aparo ni ya, translating to ‘I think that’ because he would start almost all his conversations with that phrase. The owner of a home was not necessarily the man of the home. Names of women were also part of the song and so my father’s name, Auma, featured in it alongside an old widow called Okonjo Nya’Mireri.
The culture of naming among the Luo, as in many African nations before colonisation, is built around the evaluation of nature, expression of essence and conservation of genealogical ties that link the living and the dead. The concept of gender and gender roles feature prominently and differentiate between feminine and masculine names. Luo names derived from aspects of nature such as time of the day, seasons of harvest or historical happenstances begin with ‘O’ for males and ‘A’ for females. In the language and understanding of a child in the grazing fields, my father’s name should have been Ouma and not Auma. But calling my father a woman and smearing the contrast between his and the old widow’s masculine names on my face produced the first physical fight I had in the defence of my father’s dignity and identity. This time I did not ask my father of the technicalities around his name. Like all battles of peers in the grazing fields, the incident remained a secret. The wound was not physical to invite any inquisitiveness from adults back at home, but it remained an affliction on my esteem that would stay fresh for the longest I can remember. I would later learn, from the stories my father told, that he was named after his paternal uncle who had died around the same time he was born.
I did not have any trouble with my ethnic name Odhiambo, but it was also the least recognised. No one used it except my father who occasionally, after calling out Francis with little success, amplified his voice by calling out my second name. It is a common name for a Luo boy born at dusk. It held in it the stories of the day I was born, stories which were told variously depending on who I asked. One of the stories of that day that earned me yet another name was told to me by my stepmother, my father’s first wife. The story goes that I was born the same day her mother was buried. Actually, my mother had to be rushed to hospital when her time to deliver came while she was attending the funeral of her co-wife’s mother. My stepmother calls me ‘Mama’ or, in what is praise for her late mother, Ny’Ogam Michura. She would sing to me when I was young; and every time she broke out to sing, I received many gifts that she denied other children. Although the name felt awkward and resulted in fights whenever any of my agemates mentioned it, I have lived with it as a reminder of my stepmother’s mother.
Building or Breaking
The earliest attempt at modifying my name was in 2007 when I joined high school, several miles away from my village. Secondary school was a completely new environment and it came with obvious pressure to establish a new identity. The modification was actually an earliest attempt to protest an accidental baptism I had received from my fellow students, but it came too late. It happened that I travelled to school almost a week before admission because it was a special arrangement in many respects. Having failed to meet the financial costs of my dream school, I settled for the alternative of staying in my aunt’s house so that I could attend the school her husband taught at. Mr. David Osiyo was the boarding master and highly popular among the students for his mastery and excellent delivery of Mathematics and Physics. It was coincidental that he had ascended to the management of the school canteen when I joined and in my first week, I found meaning in helping him serve students at the canteen.
Unaware that I would soon be part of them, the students nicknamed me ‘Canteen Boy’ or ‘Doughnut Boy.’ The nicknames spread so fast and stuck with me. I was helpless in trying to contain their spread. The following week when I received my uniform, I imprinted the name Mc’Auma, son of Auma, in large fonts on every single item. It was too late. After weeks of struggling to popularise that name among the students, I only ended up with yet another name, Osiyo. The reputable name of the boarding master, a popular teacher and now my guardian and mentor, fell on me with even a greater responsibility to build or destroy it. For the next four years, in a stage of life where boys and girls define their identities, changing names along with career ambitions and other adolescent infatuations, my real names meant almost nothing. Even teachers struggled to recognise me as Francis Odhiambo Auma in my academic reports or in other instances where official records were needed.
It was in 2011, after my high school, that another defining moment of my life arrived. It was around the same time that the most popular social media platform, Facebook, was beginning to penetrate the Kenyan market. The streets of Facebook were not too crowded those days. My inspiration to open a Facebook account was a mission to retrace contacts with one lady I had encountered and loved during my high school years. A friend who was then working in a cyber café advised me that I could trace her on Facebook. I quickly bought the idea and went out for two things: a name she could recall and a picture. I had introduced myself to her as Frank, a short form of Francis. But I was quite unsure if she would remember me. There was also the pressure to make my name ‘sweet and beautiful’ in that new social space as my friend advised. I settled for the name Frank Kaumah. In coining the name Kaumah, which by its sound means ‘son of Auma’ but beautified in its spelling, I had creatively killed the femininity in my father’s name.
Life as the son of a staunch Catholic man and church leader did not stop. My baptism as an infant was only an initiation into the faith and just one of the seven sacraments. Sacraments in Roman Catholic parlance are ‘mystical channels of divine grace’ that initiate and guide one in faith. At around nine, I successfully graduated from the catechism classes and received my first sacraments of Penance and Eucharist. I was due for the fourth sacrament, Confirmation, almost immediately but high school studies away from home helped me to delay it. An opportunity occurred during a holiday and it was my mother who pushed me to it. The sacrament of Confirmation is yet another initiation ceremony which serves to confirm an already-baptised person into the Catholic faith. There is a blueprint of the ecclesiastical practices performed by the bishop and one is to assign names of saints as a patron to the candidates. I was confirmed Mathews, but the name did not live long afterwards. Right on that line where the bishop had oiled my forehead, I failed to find anything ‘Mathews’ in me. It died immediately it was said to me. I was not going to learn to be a Mathews, again.
I joined college and by the end of the second semester, I had developed a great passion for writing. After a long struggle for space in the students’ publications, I was lucky to join one of the most vibrant clubs. The Legacy Moi University Publication was a platform where students aspiring to be journalists or writers honed their skills. It published and printed between six to seven leaflets of articles thrice every week. The articles were then glued on notice boards in various settings within the university. It was one of the most competitive spaces that did not only manufacture fame for its best users but also gave me a license to critically assess issues across the board. Publishing under Frank Kaumah, my Facebook name, I identified with issues around politics, (African) culture, history, religion and (African) literature. A new form of consciousness was building up as I interacted with other students with whom we radically and critically ventured into conversations that questioned even the very foundations that had given us meaning in life.
Nothing suffered from this new self-assessment approach as Christianity and its obvious links to colonialism. The phrase ‘the gun followed the Bible’, which implies the facilitative role Christianity played in colonisation, gained a new meaning in my understanding. I developed the courage to begin seeing my own religion as a tool of oppression of African civilisation and not for its religious (and spiritual) significance. I found myself immersed in conversations that I had initially found uncomfortable as a staunch Catholic youth and a member of the church choir. I had read Frank Odoi’s animated children’s book I’ll Be Back Shortly, which portrayed Christianity as a tool of extorting cultural identity, political freedom, religious beliefs and economic stability in Africa. As a child, it did not awaken such strong feelings in me as it now did as we advanced literary conversations and debates about our identities.
While these debates were not taking place within any organised system that held anyone accountable for their stances, the social space within which we processed our individual positions on some of the issues around cultural identity, awareness and our commitment to decolonisation ideologies cared. Our takes on the names we embraced, language and views on religious faith crafted an identity that we carried on our backs. The radical ones dropped their Christian names, spoke proudly in their vernacular languages and became avid proponents of the ever-present debate on the promotion of African languages as the foremost tool in “decolonising the mind”. But faith remained the single most controversial item on the list of our resolutions on identity. It was deeper and it was left to the self.
I went for my name Francis and its short form Frank that had now become a popular by-line not only on campus papers but also on my Facebook chronicles. I had created a space with my writing and the age of social media’s referent power had arrived. I embarked on a critical reading of the biography of St. Francis of Assisi and a litany of saints whose names and stories we religiously owned. I discovered so many things that my father had not discovered about his idol, Francis of Assisi. Francis was a man like any other in 13th century Italy, whose debauched life ended in prison as a war captive. In tales bordering on psychopathology, he claimed to have received visions from Christ while in prison asking him to rebuild a church. He revolted against his father, rebelliously stole and sold his father’s wares, and escaped to a church. As in my father’s story, he did a lot of crazy things like preaching the gospel of Christ to animals. He is the only saint who claims to have received a vision that left him with “wounds of Christ”. On a fair trial, I found Francis of Assisi as a beautiful story and such a magnanimous historical figure in the advancement of Christianity in his area.
But how this story had been told to people like my father and whether they really understood the complex politics of the process that graduated that son of a merchant to a revered figure of faith baffled me. As a child, I knew of many great men and women who had done extraordinary things to facilitate the establishment of a parish in my locality. One of them was an old man called Alphonse Joseph Omer K’Ongota. He was neither a priest nor a bishop. He was not even a catechist. He was just a pioneer Christian and a soldier. But with unflinching determination and a rare sense of philanthropy, he tremendously contributed towards the construction of the first local Catholic church in my village. Moreover, when some local politics emerged that threatened the life of that church, Omer made one lasting contribution that has remained a legend. He wholeheartedly walked and offered as a gift a humongous bull to the regional Archbishop to cool the standoff. As I critically considered the stories of Omer K’Ongota of Kano and Francis of Assisi and juxtaposed their roles in advancing Christianity in their locales, it was only a difference of colour, time and how their stories are told. Clearly, Alphonse Joseph Omer K’Ongota is no less a saint because he neither spoke to birds nor claimed ‘holy wounds’.
There was no other way I was going to sell my view than by changing my by-line and writing stories about these beliefs. In my last year in college, I published under the name Odhiambo Kaumah. Around the same time, I started writing stories on names, culture, identity and critical considerations on popular religious views. One such story that I shared the day I officially changed my Facebook name from Frank Kaumah to Odhiambo Kaumah was so persuasive that many of my friends were swayed to drop their ‘Christian’ names. Here is an excerpt:
…That incident gave birth to a strong desire that Ombogo would work for the whole of his school life. He wanted to speak a foreign language. He wanted to be white. He wanted to own a white woman. And this dream presented itself with such clarity that made him understand his own name. Ombogo was actually a coined reference to a Whiteman or Jarachar. Ten years later, he was just from the university and not much had pleased him. It was a collection of evil, a big market of young men and women, few of whom knew what they were there for. The zeal of owning a white lady had suddenly disappeared. Born and baptised Joakim Ombogo Obura, he no longer liked Joakim as his name. He was satisfied as Ombogo Obura…
Conforming or Confused
The decision to drop my ‘Christian’ name looked simple until I encountered my parents, catechist teachers who considered me ‘a good example’ and extraordinarily indoctrinated and extremely opinionated peers. They have termed the decision “misguided and a disrespect to the Christian foundations which my parents staunchly believed in and initiated me into through baptism, Eucharist and Confirmation”. This description is in itself a name. I realised it took more than the social media fad or the imaginary ‘great college writer’ I thought I was to overcome the guilt of being the rabid face that condemned and executed my parents’ gods. How then could I change my name without changing or abandoning the gods of my parents? In my earliest attempt to deal with this problem, I set out to answer two fundamental questions that I believe could demonstrate that dropping my ‘Christian’ name does not make me an atheist or ‘a bad example’. The first question was whether the name Francis is Christian or English; the second question was whether Francis Odhiambo Auma is more Christian than Odhiambo Kaumah.
In answering these questions, I realised that conversations around the cultural significance of names and the politics of naming are highly convoluted. They range from disputing the push for cultural purity to the castigation of the globalisation culture. At the background of these conversations is the historicity of colonisation and how its components such as Christianity impacted the evolution of our religious culture as Africans. The infusion of what was a European expansionist invasion of Africa and the religious excursions of missionaries created confusion that will take ages to clear. We are not short of scholarly writings that have strived to theorise on some of the best approaches to retrieving our lost identities. But we are faced with the reality that this hated past that was an intrusion into our cultures, disrespect to our gods and erasure of our names became a new life that gave meaning to generations. The imposed Western culture, and specifically the establishment of Christianity, brought with it ethical and moral establishments upon which our parents brought us up. So, as we strive to understand the missing link and make simple efforts such as embracing our African names, that act has itself become a revolution against the gods of our parents. It results in a struggle that changes so many aspects as I experienced with my own father long after finding out the true answers to my two questions.
One evening in 2017, my father sat me down like he had learnt to do when he realised we had become adults old enough to be engaged and persuaded instead of being ordered around. The old man was breathing some of the very last sachets of air he had left in his long life but had not lost his grasp of things. I had been on a two-month holiday and it was already ending without me attending church. He was concerned. After the normal discussions around his physical health, he steered the conversation into a reflection of his spiritual health that had survived for over sixty years. He was approaching his eightieth birthday but could still remember his journey as a Christian. At fifteen years, he was baptised into the Catholic faith at a missionary school he had gone to seek formal education. He was given a new name. Born Auma Onditi Onam, a name that carried three generations, he was now Alloyce Auma Onditi. His grandfather’s name had been truncated. A link had been lost! My old man also recalled with pride that it was his project after baptism to convince his parents to profess his new faith. After being taught how to read and write, he managed to wow his parents into baptism. His parents, my grandparents, were given Christian names. He went ahead to reflect on his experiences as a Christian, a church leader and on his personal relationship with God. He successfully linked all his victories to his faith and, somehow, I admired his powerful reflections.
But that evening, I wanted to make a point to my old man that certain aspects of his faith were more political than they were religious. I had planned to try and reason out with him that his name, Alloyce, is not Christian but English. I wanted to explain to him why both our ‘Christian’ names were not in the Bible. I thought it better to retell him the old stories of Francis of Assisi and dangle it before his eyes that Francis was no different from him. I waited for him to grant me even a single chance to show him how the concept of Christian names was a project of pronunciational convenience and a farfetched tool of bludgeoning their pride in their own culture. I wanted my father to live his last days aware that the colonial master duped them by Christianising and attaching spiritual significance to the names that were largely local in England. I wanted to be candid with my old man and tell him that he would still have been a better Christian had he lived his long life as Auma Onditi Onam and not necessarily as Alloyce Auma Onditi. But his concluding statement after a moment of silence numbed my jaws:
Francis, I think it is important for humans to consider their personal relationship with God. It is the most important thing I see now and have lived for. I have told you that when my parents died, I was able to invite the priest himself to come and bury them. I have always been proud of that.
He died a month later and a priest presided over his burial. On his tombstone are inscribed his three names. A rosary hangs on a cross above his grave as a symbol of the faith he professed to death. I failed to give a new god to him as he had managed to give to his parents.
Years later, the village still calls me Toto. I once worked as a teacher in a school and each admission year, I experienced even stranger names. Some of my students had, I believe, more than three English names, almost six decades after colonialism. Some of them had names of famous European footballers and Spanish soap opera celebrities. Yet others I was able to verify were from Christian families had names coined from Swahili words such as Jabali. Years later, social media has become part of my life and a huge portion of my identity resides there. There, I feel I have become part of the statistics of those who have embraced their African names and it is such a fancy thing to do. Years later, people who call me on the mobile phone are bemused by Skiza tune’s misinterpretation of my father’s name, Auma, as ‘a Luo name meaning born upside down’. And years later, I have a son I named after the great King Khama of the Bamangwato people of Botswana. He may never be baptised a Catholic because the priest told me to choose for him a ‘Christian’ name, a task I am not prepared to undertake. Whether he will grow up to deny my gods as I denied my parents’ is a matter I wait to experience should I live long enough!
* Odhiambo Kaumah is a teacher and creative writer (kaumahfrancis@gmail.com).
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To read the first two essays in the collection, click here. You may download the inaugural special issue of The Nairobi Reader. Tomorrow, find out how our names and naming systems symbolise life and death.
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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