by Were wa’Shitseswa*
Editorial: This is the fifth and last essay in Part II of the inaugural issue of The Nairobi Reader, a literary and cultural magazine. The Introduction to the special issue is available here.
This essay is in response to JM Kwanya’s wonderful rant titled ‘Let’s Erase Colonial Names from our Natural and Cultural Heritages’. Like any heart-winning argument, Kwanya’s call on the idea of names is erudite and his flow of thought requires no further elaboration. Kwanya’s argument, however, comes with fidgety twists. Is the discussion of names and naming still important in an era like ours? That discourse—and what I am doing is part of it—is as important as carrying placards to educate the masses that sunlight comes from the sun. Or that water is good for our health. We have to look at the naming ritual as one that can be broken down into parts.
There is no innate relationship between a name and its object, so why the obsession? Naming is renaming. Naming is misnaming. Naming is unnaming. Naming stems from and is part of a dictatorial culture which condones human aggression over nature. Naming is in itself cruel and savage: a tool of intolerance and violence. The ritual involves a selfish person looking at the world and deciding, in his excessive hubris, that he has power over this or that, believing that this or that needs to be named regardless of its present nominal status, knowing this or that will not and cannot fight back, and choosing a name of his liking for this or that. Apart from the namer’s reasons, nothing in the named is intrinsically the name. The simulacrum is nevertheless sung to the masses through channels of dogma for acceptance as accurate. It is carried across the world: on passport documents, on world maps, in revered books, in our hearts, in lovers’ dictionaries, in whatever document.
Take the naming of East Africa’s largest freshwater body. John Speke arrives in 1850, commits his part of misrepresentation and goes away. Fishmongers in and around the lake are working with Nyanza. Or Lolwe. As humanity hawks the inaccuracy among itself, the water body remains, needless to say, unaware of human activity. Everything around us has been subject to this flourishing culture of erasure made possible by the powerful names. This power is not just exercised in making a wrong tag, like in guesswork, but in deliberately choosing one that fronts the namer’s agenda.
When an African gives an ‘African’ name to an African object, for instance, who says that the object needs or is that name? Who says the child or hill or river needs your uncle’s name to be? Naming is a mean way of keeping our own selfish memories, ideas and biases as if we are the only ones with those. In any case, naming serves the agenda of the naming person and not necessarily those of the named thing. Naming objectifies the named and silences its narrative. The name becomes not just a label but a tool of controlling the already disenfranchised. And Kwanya’s explanation of this is on point.
But, then, why would we reject names by a colonial namer and accept those of a neo-colonial one? Why would we sanitise the heathenness of misnaming on racial lines? With westernisation, we might not see the colour of names but we can see the colour of the namer. Today, John is neither brown nor pink. Is a name righted from the skin tone or from its inherent ability to match the named? Since names are dictatorial declarations, we are in the tendency of rejecting pink dictators only to accept brown ones. Or ditching the moneyed namer for our own poverty-stricken, flea-infested and malnourished ones just because they are a higher caste of what looks like us. They are our own demons. Rejecting ‘European’ tags for ‘African’ ones is like becoming the man who felt pain in the toe and, instead of changing the shoe, cut off the toe.
Another question might be: What happens when naming is not by an external aggressor? What happens when it is the rose declaring itself a rose? The dilemma with this is that nature keeps evolving. We are in the continuum of being and becoming and being. Baby Toto evolves to Young Baha to Mr Bahati to Baba Karo to Mzee Bahati to Marehemu Mzee Bahati in a span of one lifetime! Before science classes, most of us knew butterflies and caterpillars as different species. Even in the event of self-naming, the dictatorial rules of nomenclature carry subtle impositions of fixity such that a caterpillar is not allowed to change its passport name even as it evolves. The tragedy of self-naming is best captured in Kinjeketile’s ordeal of beginning a word that grows bigger than or out of control of he who began it. If Kenya named itself so in 1890 when Nairobi was a bush and its mind virgin, it must have a contrasting view of itself today when we have a flourishing standard-gauge railway, massive corruption, and bully monopoly in the region. We are ephemeral.
There is another tragedy in naming. What if the rose declared itself a snake? You won’t run short of exploitative spiritual gangs calling themselves Mavuno, Paradiso, Hope and such lofty tags to their prey, even when antonym would never find a perfect example. Many political parties carry a D for democracy in their names even when they are empires of tyranny. How could sanitisation help in such misnaming? Even if we renamed Mt. Kenya to Mt. Ngai, the consensus would only be a work of the dominant narrative after suppressing a million more equally ‘authentic’ but weak narratives at levels of the individual, the community, civilisations, or epochs in history. Naming disenfranchises the named by hiding a part or the whole of its story. The imposition of names by power, the short-lived nature of the naming labels and the deliberately deceptive self-branding suggest to us that the naming ritual is the very renaming and misnaming we may want to run away from because of misrepresentation. A name therefore becomes a tag of deceit and naming an evil rite that must be shunned. Let be what is.
Yes, we can be without labels. We already are. Unnaming cannot take anything away from us. We can live outside our names. We are bigger than our names. In his Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad wipes out African names and gives his African characters blank labels. Nevertheless, sailing through the text we are met with a stark rhythm of Africanness that declares the African presence and being. We are in the air of their suffering, their breathing, their dances, their lives and their deaths. That simple arbitrary wind on our tongues should not be larger than the person. The inexistent thing a name is exists inside a person as a tiny, invisible, negligible and inexistent molecule of vacuum. That is why Nicodemus can become Mosese; Johnstone, Jomo; slavery, employment—all in a blink and neither entity will declare a world war. Because they don’t exist outside our imaginations! Maybe unnaming seems utopian because names are used to mark territory, to differentiate between right and wrong, to demarcate roles of individuals in the society—the list is endless. Nathaniel Hawthorne alters his name to erase from it memories of injustice. Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Malcolm X. Muhammad Ali. Milton Obote.
Think of a world where there are no names. Think of an alphabet that is not named by sounds, or of a healthcare system where we use unnamed drugs to treat unnamed patients with unnamed diseases. We need labels for our studies, for directions in the desert, for payment of dowry for the ‘right’ girl. We need these tags to run away from utopia and organise our world into order. But whose system do we use? Naming is a declaration of power. Who should blink? Who should want to be named?
* Were wa’Shitseswa is a creative writer and author of Our Beautiful Man of Khushianda (werewashitseswa@gmail.com).
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Find all the essays in the collection here or download the inaugural special issue of The Nairobi Reader.
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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