Your Name is Your Label

(Unbridled Thoughts of a Pan-Africanist)

 If you cannot define or know the meaning of your name, then you do not know your identity. Give me a reason for not having an African name! I feel happy and proud when an African gives his/her child an African name, because our African names have a meaning that connects us to our African identity. Our names are our identity, our LOGO. As Africans, our names are a reflection of something. A name without a meaning that connects you to your roots is a license to have a lost identity. The name is the first thing that we use to define a human being, the first gate to your identity.

When we despise our identity, the signs come in the form of naming (our children or ourselves in foreign languages, or pronouncing our African names with a foreign accent that deforms the real name, calling ourselves with nicknames to conceal our real names), dress (reject our traditional dress), language (do not want to speak your mother tongue, or speak it with a foreign accent to fit in), community (you reject the community or tribe you are from normally by associating more with people of other tribes or cultures), food we eat, the music we listen to (becomes music from other cultures), reject our religion in the name of moving with civilization.(we think ours is pagan or backward).

All these are a result of rejecting who you are. It becomes a self-inflicted annihilation that tries to deform (not transform) one into something he/she has been made to believe that it is more enhanced than who you are. All this comes from our orientation which has touched our core values as Africans and wants us to become ore European or Caucasian; a task we shall never achieve. We will only achieve destroying our being, because we will end up not where we wish to go, and not where we come from.

I am I allowed to boldly state that we have killed our Africanness by adopting meaningless foreign names and cultures without understanding them or adopting them to our systems? Is it a rejection of ourselves when we adopt what is foreign without enhancing what we had?

Mind your thoughts and Motives……