Table of Contents

Africans

The continent of Africa is called the motherland country by various Africans because of its wide variety of people and ethnic groups. The African continent comprises 54 countries with over 2000 languages.

Despite the fact that Africa is full of a diverse population, there are comparable threads that can be seen among them gradually through history and this is the issue of changes from African names and surnames to western or European names.

Africans and Surname

A surname also called a family name, or the last name is the part of a person’s name that denotes their family, tribe, or community in some cultures. It was simple to infer a person’s ethnicity from their name sound as an African proverb states that “Nothing on this earth –and in much of the heavens – exists without a name”. As African surnames are not just names or links to their ancestors but a connection to their family gods, territories and culture.

African surnames can be acknowledged as a type of spiritual cord that binds African families and tribes together becoming a guide to their physical existence. Africans believe that the surname of an individual is beyond a combination of alphabets but a spiritual connection to their ancestral lineage.

However, there is now an increase in the changes of African names and surnames in Africa and the diaspora. there are several factors responsible for these changes in surnames by Africans.

Slavery

The Slave trade is one of the significant events that led to the changes in surnames among Africans, as the majority of Africans that were sold during slavery were young people who at the end of the day lost their origin.

Walter Rodney stated that “Slave buyers preferred their victims between the ages of 15 and 35, preferably in the early twenties; the sex ratio being about two men to one woman. Europe often accepted younger African children, but rarely any older people.” This shows that slavery was able to break the African surnames because the slave masters brought young people who could have carried on with their ancestral names. however, the majority of them were renamed by their Western master and years later they all forgot their origin.

Indeed, The slave trade led to the change of so many African surnames as African prisoners were denied the right to practise any of their traditional customs, and the majority of the time were dehumanised.

Liseli A. Fitzpatrick asserts that “it is a truism that African cultures were vastly disrupted as a result of the brutal removal of Africans from Africa – transshipped, and enslaved in a new and strange land”. This disruption in culture includes the change of African names and surnames to Western names or European names.

Also, Burton stated that Africans – enslaved and free – were in their new environment, rather than retain their indigenous names, often moved towards adopting the names of their powerful masters or famous European personalities

Colonialism

Colonialism issue is another fact that contributed to the change in surnames among Africans. The partition of the continent after the Berlin conference not only led to several negative and positive factors but also change from African surnames to Western names.

Colonialism was able to affect the African surname through the spread of Western ideology and the increase of Western education, the superiority of the English language over the indigenous African languages made several Africans personally change their surnames.

The spread of Christianity during colonialism also contributed to changes in African surnames to Western names and Biblical names. McGrane explains that Europeans felt it was their divine calling to Christianize the rest of the world, and so illustrates, “What is the very first thing they did after believing they had the right to exercise the divine and the sovereign right of christening: he names him. (He changes the African name by giving him another name).

However, Christianity is still among the major factors while a lot of Africans are changing their surnames. the set of beliefs spread by the majority of the African independence church that surnames can hinder individual greatness or show one’s love for Christ has led a lot of Africans to change their surnames to Western names or biblical names.

Western Books

For several years western documentation played a big role in the injustices done to African people as it was purely Eurocentric and extremely anti-African. This for years influenced Africans in the diaspora from being able to live with their surnames thereby leading them to adopt a Western name.

In addition, Western books denied Africans born by people who were sold as slaves to not understand the importance of their African wealthy lineage as African names and continents were painted as barbaric by these books. For instance, among the book is Joseph Conard’s “Heart of Darkness”. This led various Africans who were born years in slavery to claim European surnames.

RELIGION

Some principles between Islam and African traditional religion made it easy for the religion to be accepted by Africans and this eventually led to the adoption of western Islamic names, although related to the Quran. Islamic and indigenous African beliefs produced an African-Islamic culture that also affected the surnames of the African people.

Some African people think that Islam was the religion of Africa however, this perspective is wrong as the religion spread into Africa through the Arabs. The spread of religion led Africans who accepted the religion to not only adopted Arabic names but also change their traditional surnames to Arabic names.

Although, these are the major factors other reasons might include

Adoptions
Personal reasons
Marriage
Honourary

Why African have European Surnames.