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YOUR AFRICAN NAME

FEMALE NAMES   The Power of Your Name    MALE NAMES

Without a name who would you be? As far as society is concern you would be a NOBODY!! Your name is what establish your presence on earth. Your name is the evidence of your existance. When a name is attached to an you, certain specific forces of conscious intelligence are stimulated. These conscious forces combined to create a complete person you can identify. That is why our names were so brutally beaten out of us during the MAAFA(African Holocaust of Slavery, Imperialism, Colonialism and Racism). Without our true names we had no connection to our true identity.

FEMALE NAMES   Why An African Name    MALE NAMES

African names are gorgeous, charming and melodic even to the English speaking ear. They also have phenomenal meanings and unique histories. In Africa the birth of a child is an event of great exultation and importance. So great significance is attached to the naming of the child. The hopes of the ancestors, the status of the family, current occurences and celestial events are use in naming the child. It is believed that the name chosen will exert an influence for better or for worse on the life of the child. Also you as an adult can choose a name that truly signifies you as a person. For example if you are a female born on Tuesday you can choose a name such as "Abena" which means, born on Tuesday.

FEMALE NAMES    Reclaim Your African Name    MALE NAMES

You can change your name in the blink of an eye. It is legal for an adult to change his/her name in most countries including the USA. The main requirement is simply consistent use of the new name without fraudulent intent. But for it to be official you would have to obtain a court order or whatever legal requirement for your community. So throw off that European label that was put on us during the MAAFA (African Holocaust of Slavery, Imperialism, Colonialism and Racism). Reach out and grasp that force that truly identifies you. Reach out and reclaim your African Name, so when someone addresses you, you know and they know that they have just identified a proud person of African descent.

Afrikan Names and The Struggle for Self-Determination and Self-Definition
FEMALE NAMES       MALE NAMES

When "Job ben Solomon" arrived in chains on the shores of early eighteenth century Maryland, kidnapped from the Senegal-Gambia region of West Afrika, he must have been appalled not only at the indignity of his new condition, but deeply insulted by the name his European Christian enslavers had assigned him.

After all, Ayuba Suleiman Ibrahima Diallo, a Muslim, was a successful Fulbe merchant who was "born into an important clerical family from Bondu, where he studied alongside the future king of his people," notes one scholar. He already had an identity and a name. He was not interested in a European or a Christian one.

So it was with our ancestors. Some, declaring their independence from European enslavement, renamed themselves. Others preserved their Afrikan names and an Afrikan tradition of naming, or translated them into the English language.

In the first category, and perhaps the first Afrikan to change his name in recorded United States history, is Paul Kofi (spelled Cuffee at the time), a wealthy nineteenth century Boston shipbuilder who discarded his enslaver's name, Slocum, in favor of his father's name. Kofi, a Ghanaian (Akan, Ewe) name, means a male born on Friday.

It was Kofi who, through his riches, financed the repatriation of US-held Afrikans to Sierra Leone. "Be not fearful to come to Africa, which is your country by right," he wrote to those he had left behind. "Africa, not America, is your country and your home."

At least 70 percent of US-held Afrikans' ancestors came from scores of Mande (West Afrikan) and Bantu (Central Afrikan) ethnic groups, who in the early years of US captivity "identified strongly with their African culture and heritage as demonstrated in the retention of African personal names and naming practices," write scholars Joseph E. Holloway and Winifred K. Vass.

Afrikan names were particularly popular in the 1700s, declining in use in the 1800s, and all but abandoned in the 1900s, the authors observe. "As a direct result of pressures from white Americans," they explain, Afrikans in the 1900s "gave up their Africanity and began to conform to the traditions and practices of Western Europe."

That notwithstanding, Afrikans of various political persuasions in the United States, such as cultural anthropologist Dr. Marimba Ani; cultural theorist Dr. Molefi Kete Asante; Kwanzaa creator and Kawaida theorist Dr. Maulana Karenga; revolutionary poet Askia Muhammad Toure; poet, writer, and publisher Haki R. Madhubuti; the late Pan Afrikanist and revolutionary Kwame Ture; Jackson, Mississippi, lawyer Chokwe Lumumba; US-held political prisoner and prisoner of war Sundiata Acoli; political author Oba T'Shaka; Howard University law professor Nkechi N. Taifa; political scientist and New Afrikan nationalist Dr. Imari Abubakari Obadele; Africentric psychologist Dr. Kobi Kazembe Kalongi Kambon; Ifa priest, publisher, and author Chief Fasina Falade; and mystic scholar Ra Un Nefer Amen I are only a few of those in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who are following the tradition of Afrikan ancestors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Even the late great civil rights leader Rev. Ralph David Abernathy -- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s best friend and his successor as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference -- remarked that while he did not feel the need to change his family name from a European to an Afrikan one, "I certainly sympathize with such feelings."

Abernathy named his youngest child Kwame Luthuli (probably after Ghana's first president Kwame Nkrumah and South Africa's Nobel Peace laureate Albert Luthuli). This was apparently informed by Abernathy's very Afrikan philosophy about names. "There is much meaning in a name," he said. "If you are given the right name, you start off with certain indefinable but very real advantages."

But Afrikans in the United States are not alone in renaming themselves. "In Africa many people and some countries have changed their names following independence," wrote Dr. Ihechukwu Madubuike, a Nigerian who in the 1970s researched the subject. One of the more notable examples is the former Zaire's (now renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo) late billionaire dictator, who at age 42 cast off the name of his Belgian colonizers, Joseph-Desire, to rename himself Mobutu Sese Seko.

This new trend of reclaiming Afrikan names went against the programming of the colonizer's assault on Afrikan culture, notes Dr. Madubuike. In colonial Afrika everything Afrikan was considered "primitive, barbarous, unholy," whereas everything European was considered "pure and proper -- civilized," he wrote. "To answer to a white man's name was seen as one of the ways of becoming civilized, that is white. Thus, today, one frequently meets an African who will not be content until you have told him what your white, Christian name is."

Omowale Malcolm X, who had a gift for making a point with compelling directness, summed up the whole matter of names in this way: "Realizing that Little is an English name, and I'm not an Englishman, I gave the Englishman back his name."
By Ahati N. N. Toure

Remember; YOU ARE AN AFRICAN, BE PROUD. IT IS A PREVILEGE NOT A BURDEN!!!!

READ THE AFRICAN PLEDGE

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