upepo
Elder Lister
Chief Wambugu with his 42 wives.
When shots are exchanged around in social media, it is not uncommon to see Kikuyu males being derided for carrying female second names. I have been trying to speculate about how this practice came about, and I have come up with several hypotheses, some which could be more relevant than others.
To begin with, the naming convention among the kikuyu, where a child would be named after the grandparents, could partly explain this phenomenon. For instance, in a homestead comprising a man with several wives, the first male or female child from each wife would be named after the man’s parents. That means there would be several children sharing the same exact names. The only way to differentiate such children within the immediate locality would be to affix the mother’s name to the child’s name. This became the child’s unofficial name e.g. Kamau wa Wangari vs Kamau wa Njoki, which simply Kamau son of Wangari and Kamau son of Njoki. I do not think one could come up with a better naming convention in such a scenario.
Consider also the scenario of an extended family comprising an old man living with several married sons. Here too, the children to the sons would bear similar names since they would be named after the grandfather and grandmother. These would often be differentiated using the mother’s names as opposed to the father’s. These names stuck hard with some people, especially those who never left their villages. That is why in yesteryears, it was common, and even fashionable, for people, including musicians, to identify themselves as their mother’s son even when the father was alive and around.
Now, the above scenarios gave children unofficial monikers, some of which would be cemented by events surrounding colonialism. These include death of fathers, jailing of fathers, and migration of fathers to urban areas for work purposes. Similarly, many families would be displaced into concentration villages minus menfolk. In all these cases, the children would reference themselves using the mother’s name, including in official documents, since there would be no uncles or grandfathers they could borrow names from. So, this became a common practice.
One notable change that makes such naming sound awkward, even to Kikuyus, is the elimination of the joiner “wa,” Eliminating this joiner changes the meaning completely, as it often denotes the absence of a father or male relatives who could lend a name to the boy child. Otherwise, a man calling himself Kimani wa Njeri is simply informing that she is born of Njeri, while expressing the same as Kimani Njeri suggests an interesting family setup. Lastly, it cannot be denied that the single motherhood scourge facing the Kikuyu in recent decades has made the latter naming convention quite common.