We don’t need new names

We don’t need new names

My wife Lebogang has a niece called Keatlaretswe. It took me a while to be able to say this name. Ke-atla-re-tswe. Breaking the name down into syllables helped. The psychologists will tell you we can remember up to seven chunks of meaningful information at a time. This depends on the ‘we’, the meaning and the information: white South Africans struggle to remember certain single pieces of information and sometimes more pieces, ie syllables, makes it easier, because one chunk of “unmeaningful information”- Keatlaretswe- is too difficult.

It was for me. At first. But I worked at it. With some practice and the threat of familial chastisement, I managed to get Ke-atla-re-tswe into my psyche. For her school mates and teachers at her first primary school this was a bridge too far. After a few days of playground bewilderment and confusion, Keatle (Key-ut-lee) decided that she should be called by her second name at school, Bontle, an easier but by no means simple task for the white folks who frequent that institution. At home she is simply called “Mompatie”, a nickname given to her by her cousin Thatho. “Mompatie” has no literal meaning, but is filled with emotional meaning for those who know this youtube and sushi addicted six year old expression of life.

One of the tragedies of this story is that an opportunity to learn something beautiful was lost. Literally, Keatlaretswe means Ke (I), atla (hands) re (we), tswe (the action of something being done to me). Together the name means something like the English equivalent of “hands are holding me”, or “I am held by those around me”. It succinctly captures the false dichotomy between the individual and the group, the one embedded in the other, as the new being is nurtured through hands, extensions of bodies, that are entangled from the start and which continue to be so as they grow. “I am held by hands” indicates that who I am, this body, extends to other bodies, both physically and emotionally, wrapped up in a tangle of limbs that support my development and define my identity. It is a great shame that, rather than members of the school community trying to make sense of this name so that its ‘learners’ could learn something about each other and this country, an alternative plan was made. An easier name was chosen to help those who were unwilling to take the time to learn.

I mention this because I have some empathy, due to my own struggles to say and remember the name Kealtlaretswe, with those around me who now struggle to say and remember my son’s name: Amogelang. Coca-cola have gone some way to doing their philanthropic duty by printing his name, along with numerous others, on coke cans, broken down into syllables.

Amogelang has three syllables: Amo-ge lang, but it seems as if saying these three correctly and in the right order is extremely difficult. We chose this name because I fell in love with the first Amo I met, a two year old firecracker of a toddler who accompanied her grandmother, mama Shirley, to clean our flat in Killarney. Amo- which we always pronounced with the Ngunified “Ammu” rather than the Sotho-fied “Amore” insisted that I produce a packet of Mazimba (the generic Kasi name for chips) on a daily basis after I had made the fatal error of buying her a packet of niknaks one morning. Her sense of entitlement that this umlungu should pay his dues in Mazimba currency struck me as utterly wonderful and I am thrilled that we chose this name for our son.

I had always imagined that people would call him “Ammu”, like the little Ammu we had known in Cranwell Hall court. But names for children seem to take on a life of their own, the result of a number of inter-locking familial, political and linguistic processes. Amongst my own family, the name ‘Moegie’ seems to have stuck from quite early on, something which has always concerned me slightly because I fear his peers will call him “moegoe” when he starts school. My mother has called him “Moegelini” and “Moegzilla” during some of his more infamous child-care sessions. I myself have taken to calling him ‘moegel man’, causing me some concern that I have instigated a form of gender normativity that may be incongruent with his own, future, gender identifications. We live in an age when gender pronouns and assumptions are serious politics.

On numerous occasion we shorten Amogelang’s name for friends, acquaintances and strangers and emphasise something kind of like ‘A-MORE’, which has on more than one occasion produced the reaction of “like the French ‘Amour’ for love?” One woman we met at a tea party was delighted that we had named our child “Arnold”. Amongst English and Afrikaans speakers alike the name “Amogelang” seems to hover in the air like an unwanted gift at a birthday party, with the receiver unsure what they are looking at and how to engage with it.

What is more fascinating and embarrassing generally unfolds when I explain that we chose this seTswana name because my wife is Tswana- simplifying to help people understand rather than complicating the situation by correctly saying “she is a Motswana who speaks SeTswana”. It very soon becomes apparent that most Western Cape whites do not know that there is a language called Tswana that is spoken in this country. That it is one of the country’s 11 national languages and that, no, it is not Tshwane, formerly Pretoria, as one of my colleagues thought.

To put some of this into perspective, there are almost as many SeTswana mother-tongue speakers (8%) as native English(9.5%) speakers in South Africa.  More perspective: according to Statistics South Africa, in 2017 Amogelang was the most common name given to a child in three of the nine provinces of this country. It was the fifth most common name overall, with 4000 new Amogelang’s born in 2017.

I started this piece by deliberately reflecting on my own struggles with a SeTswana name. I  am too embarrassed here to recount stories of my inability to recognise black faces; anybody in need of a good cackle, or cry, can chat to my wife about this. Many people in this country would simply be angered by this state of affairs, call for those who have made little effort to integrate, to get to know the things that are meaningful for those around them to leave. While I understand this position and do not reject it, I’d like to ask a more pragmatic question, a question about how people like me can be helped. As I have done before, I think it’s important to ask some difficult questions of our supposedly “good schools”, about the kinds of knowledges they value and the institutional cultures they uphold that result in people spending twelve years in these institutions and learning so little about the country they live in. I think our schooling system is symptomatic of broader problems to do with the ways in which cultural and residential segregations have been reproduced in the post-apartheid period and how forms of social and cultural capital are distributed in our society.

The change in political dispensation has hardly disrupted these patterns. It also makes we wonder how many of these problems would be solved by bussing white kids into township schools? I ask this not to catalyse a panic stricken viral load search for flights to Perth, but as a thought experiment into the realm of how certain policies are deemed to be ‘sensible’ and others ‘utterly absurd’. And yet sensible policy choices seems often to produce so little improvement to the lives of the majority of South Africans.