What's in a name?

Being someone who by nature likes to keep a low profile, I thought about writing this blog under a pseudonym. Teaspoon Decosta is the name of my SecondLife avatar; hence the URL of this blog. I decided against this, but... it started me thinking about names. This is my first post, written proudly under my own name.

When I lived in Africa I was, initially, quite amused by the sometimes bizarre names of the Africans I worked with. For example, I remember meeting a man called Sixpence Banda. Then I found out the origin of these names. The following quotation is taken from Missionaries by Julian Pettifer and Richard Bradley:

As another missionary from Umtali wrote in a letter to the US in 1916: "Heathen mothers do not know much, but many boys and girls go to our schools now and are begging to read God's word and write and to take care of their bodies and be clean and dress like the people of America." These "heathen" boys and girls were also given "Christian" names like Kitchen, Tobacco, Sixpence or Bottle.

Given the tragedies that continue to befall their continent, I don't suppose these given names are a primary concern to many Africans these days. But Thabo Mbeki, the South African President, did say recently:

We have inherited an unbecoming legacy of racial and gender divisions and antagonisms. The majority of our people were victims of a colonial history that obliterated the Xam* and sought to deny the humanity of the rest. That history sought to deny that these masses had any history, culture, belief or value system of their own. It said the African people are but barbarians and savages with no names of their own except those that the civilised masters gave them, proclaiming them to be Christian names and therefore holy. Thus did Sipho become Jim, Nomsa, Mary and Kealeboga, Sixpence. These names were given to deny the very being of the African, to tell them that they had no identity except such an identity as they were given by the civilised master.
*Xam is an extinct African language, and the name of the people who spoke it. The word is correctly written with a preceding vertical bar, but for some reason the bar doesn't render properly in this editor. The bar indicates a clicking sound. With or without the bar, the pronunciation should only be attempted with great caution by non-Africans.