By Maidei Jenny Magirosa

NAMES define a person’s identity.
Our names are interwoven with our belief systems and cultural ritual practices.
But there are some colonial aspects of identity adopted in the naming process that cannot be changed.
This includes our Christian names on birth certificates, passports and Identification Cards.
The dates of birth, place of birth may not be true.
But they cannot be changed because they were inscribed during a certain time and place in Zimbabwe’s colonial history.
In pre colonial times, Africans did not have surnames or Identification Certificates. When an African child was born, the family chose a name for him based on events in the family.
This way they kept the memory alive.
When the colonialist and missionaries came, they introduced national identification certificates, date and year of birth.
Since there were no hospitals to register dates of births, the Africans were forced to guess such details.
Meanwhile, the missionaries introduced Christian names and discouraged the use of African names.
The process of changing names inevitably changed some perceptions about identity.
Some of the Christian names included the names we have today like: Mercy, Hope, Happy, Gladness, Clever, Evelyn, Constance, Olivia, Peter, Paul, James, Noah, Zachariah, Sydney, Charles, Elijah, Adam and others.
Ironically, some of the names were adopted from the District Commissioners of the area.
There was Paget, Anderson, Shelton, Robinson, Banderson, Brown and many other English ones.
They became first names even though in England they were second names.
At the farms, the white farmer wanted easier names to pronounce.
A name like Tinofirei, why are we dying, had no relevance at all to the white boss.
That meaning remained in the village.
Tinofireyi became Sixpence or Tickey.
An easy name like Banda became Banderson, just to make it longer.
In order to capture the meaning of an event in the family or the feelings of parents when a child was born, we had names like Tragedy or Mistake.
There were strong resemblances to the use of naming in slavery days.
An African slave was given the name of his master. His own African name and identity was forgotten forever.
At the white owned farms there were names like London, Tractor, Jupiter, Driver, Mistake, Fackson, Facewell, and Yellowson.
Names of people living on farms include Standwell, Rockery, Listing, London Phiri, Jupiter, Decision, Farmer, Saizi, Skinner, Gossip, Driver and Mechanic.
Some of the names had their origins in the white master’s kitchen utensils.
They used names like Desert, Salad, Sizasi, for scissor, Sipunu for spoon, Forogo, for fork, Laundry, Penzura for pencil, Retisi for lettuce.
When African children went to high school, they were required to have birth certificates with Christian names for the first time. This was in line with the 1956 Rhodesian Education Ministry a Five-Year Plan stipulating that the African rural child, up to the age of 14, was given only five years of education.
Every year, an increase of 60 pupils was allowed at any given primary school.
In the city, students had access to eight years of education only. They were not allowed to be over 14 by the time they reached Standard Four.
As a result, many parents forged birth certificates and altered their children’s ages and birth places so that children could gain admission into a school.
Parents ended up choosing any English name in order to add it to a child’s birth certificate.
Some names included Marvelous, Cigarette, Pernicious, Immaculate, Patience, Polite and Praise, Pride, Pissmore, Lovemore, Love God. Loveless, Try more, Tryagain, Anymore, Endless, Exceedmore, Last, Honest and many others.
On a national level, there was another naming process. Rhodesia was named after Cecil John Rhodes and the colonial settlers held that very dear to them because it was part of their identity.
After the signing of the Rhodesia Constitutional Agreement in March 1978 when Bishop Abel Muzorewa became Prime Minister in April 1979 during what they called ‘internal settlement’ the name Rhodesia was not change.
The Rhodesian Front wanted to keep Rhodes’s memory.
The interim government introduced a double barrel or joint name called Zimbabwe-Rhodesia early in 1979.
The conservative Rhodesian Front MPs strongly advocated and argued in parliament for the retention of the name Rhodesia. According to a Hansard report, one Senator Ritchie supported his views by saying the following:
“A jewel in Africa (had) developed magnificently since 1924…Let us not in any way suggest that the sacrifices by all our people to carve out this terrific country from virgin bush should be forgotten by removing the name Rhodesia. “Our creditworthiness, our products, our minerals, the courage of our young people, our honesty and integrity have won recognition throughout the world for these attributes…in the name of Rhodesia.”
During that time, the African members of parliament refused to accept the name Zimbabwe-Rhodesia.
According to Mr Bwanya:
“I, as a black man, would like myself to be identified as a Zimbabwean and there is no doubt that the whites would prefer to be identified as Rhodesians.
“For two people from one country to be identified under two different names I think is very ridiculous.”
When real independence came in 1980, our country had no room for a double barrel name.
We became Zimbabwe, meaning ‘house of stone’, linking us to the ancient heritage of the Munhumutapa Kingdom of Great Zimbabwe.
Post independence, we engaged in decolonising our names as well as the names of Zimbabwe’s national landscape and towns.
The repossession of our African identity began with the historical and geographical recovery of our country and later on our soil. We have managed to change many town names.
But there are some aspects of our history that have not been easy to change because they are so deeply inscribed in our colonial history, especially the names of our suburbs and schools.
A name can also help inspire a sense of cultural pride and identity and help the people to remember an ancestor’s history. Christianisation and colonisation took away some of that village sense of cultural pride in a name, destroying the link between personal name and cultural background when we readily easily adopted English ones.
Today, we should still recognise that names can help us remember unusual circumstances in the family or in the whole community that happened around the time a child was born.