WE pursue our discussion on the role of colonial names as shackles of African minds.
We look at names as symbols of identity.
If you cannot name it, then you do not know it.
If you do not know what your name means then you are nobody, a body without identity.
If people call you ‘John’ and no one in your dzinza can recall a previous John among your ancestors, then you must give up the name John.
You see a white name can never confer on you white cultural characteristics, which by themselves are quite undesirable.
You cannot acquire wealth by masquerading as a white person in name.
The notion among some blacks that being white means being better is horribly misplaced.
Some blacks even form companies and give them European names!
Hanzi vanhu vagouya vachiti iyi ikambani yavarungu!
No, people should patronise your company because it provides quality goods and services at competitive prices.
How many of your companies with Europeanised names have survived on account of the name?
Chinese, American, Korean companies have indigenous names.
God created you in his image, a black image. Adopt and use your indigenous language names.
They give you identity and dignity.
What is in a name, we might ask?
The answer is: Everything!; our soul, our dignity, our hunhu/ubuntu, our character, our identity, our very being; all these are tied up in our name.
The film Roots shows the great efforts made by Kunta Kinte’s captors to force him to abandon his name and adopt a European one.
He was cut to ribbons with a sjambok to force him to accept a white name.
The film shows that the whiteman recognises the importance of a name as a symbol of identity, character and strength.
Changing a person’s name is tantamount to sucking the life out of him/her; literally wiping him/her off the face of mother earth.
We Zimbabweans must think and appreciate the value of our indigenous names.
So today we want to call on Zimbabweans to reclaim their African identity by reclaiming their African names and rejecting the false labels placed on them through baptism and other acts of naming by misguided parents and those masquerading as men and women of the cloth.
We continue to examine this issue of colonial versus indigenous names painfully aware that 36 years after attaining political independence, we still have not mastered the political will to break out of the colonial name shackles.
The shackles are so strong that some are reproducing brand new signs for their resettlement farms with the old ‘Mr Johnson Farm’ in shining new paint.
Yet others are coining new English suburb names instead of boldly asserting their African identity by choosing ‘powerful’ African symbolic names.
City fathers are guilty of accepting this English naming bias, especially in Harare.
Just because the farm had a white name does not mean you must use it for the new suburb.
Be creative; generate new African names for your residential suburbs.
Give these African places African identities.
Who wants to remain under perpetual white domination?
Surely not your born-free children.
Or do you regret that your children were born after independence and you really want them to feel the whiteness of the former colonisers through the European names?
We have argued before that names and flags are the most powerful symbols that signify conquest, occupation, ownership and independence of a people.
Names are equivalent to the branding of marketable products by companies.
Let us also brand our own African spaces and places!
One can paraphrase the Bible verse and say: ‘By their names you shall know them’!
So by your British personal, street, farm and school colonial names shall we know you Zimbabweans?
Call yourself anything, but the identity crisis tag will stick on you for a long time as the people who, upon liberation, failed to identify themselves as Africans.
Visitors still wonder what it was we Zimbabweans fought a liberation war to change when we have left all the British names and culture firmly rooted in the land of our forefathers.
Even Cecil John Rhodes has virtually displaced the Geat Spirit Murenga at Matonjeni!
If our forefathers walked into Zimbabwe today, except for our black skins, how many of their grandchildren would they identify by names?
If our ancestors walked around the urban suburbs, how many would they identify as African?
If they decided to count the number of African schools in our various cities, they would indeed be alarmed to see that there are no black schools at all in the former all-white suburbs.
The paucity of African names for people, places, schools and buildings is an enduring dark cloud on our revolutionary map given that we are an independent African country born out of a protracted anti-imperialist struggle.
In short, the foreign names foisted on Africans virtually dehumanised them.
They lost their African character.
They lost their roots as they became totally disconnected from their African roots.
An ancestor who comes looking for them would not find them.
At independence, that situation should have been rectified through wholesale name-changes to restore our African identity.
Whites renamed everything and even planted exotic trees from Europe so the air would fill with the aromas of their ancestral lands.
Then their ancestors could fly in and find them and bless them and protect them, the whites.
And so we now turn to personal names.
Parents seem to think any name is appropriate to give to a child.
Nothing can be further from the truth.
Personal names are sacred.
They embody the character and identity of the individual.
So parents must be very careful in choosing names for their children.
While it is popular among many Zimbabwean families to name children after older relatives living or departed, it is very important to find out what kind of character the owner of the name was.
Many parents ruin their children’s lives by naming them after relatives, dead or alive, with questionable behavioural traits.
Such bad characters end up conferring on the children anti-social behavioural tendencies.
In some cases, a girl given the name of a grandmother or aunt who was a witch, also takes up the same trade.
This is called ‘uroyi hwemabvumbo’.
Only the names of good characters in the family may be given to children in the hope that they will also grow up to be well-behaved.
Africans also will not bring back home (kurova guva) the spirit of a dead relative who either died tragically e.g. by suicide or who had anti-social behaviours such as witchcraft or sorcery.
No children will be named after such a character either.
This shows that African society clearly distinguishes between socially undesirable and well-behaved people.
A person’s life and character are embodied in his/her name.
We must use our names to reclaim our dignity and identity as African people.