BoyNames.net

African boy names

There is no such thing as an African name in the way there is such a thing as an Italian one. A continent of some two thousand languages has dozens of unrelated naming systems, so this page is organised the way the names actually are — by region and language family, starting with the Akan calendar of Ghana and ending with pointers to the four traditions large enough to have pages of their own.

Akan day-names from Ghana

This is the most complete naming system on the site. Every child born into an Akan family — Ashanti, Fante, Akuapem, Bono — receives a name for the weekday of the birth, automatically, before any other choice is made. There are seven for boys and a parallel seven for girls. In Akan thought the soul, the kra, arrives on a particular day and carries that day's temperament with it, which is why the day-name is the kradin, the soul name. A second personal name follows it.

Traditional southern African names

Zulu and Xhosa are Nguni languages and share most of this stock; Sesotho and Setswana sit on a different branch. The pattern is the same in both: an ordinary noun loses its class prefix and becomes a name, so isipho, a gift, gives Sipho. Written ph, th and kh are aspirated p, t and k — Sipho is SEE-poh and never has an f in it.

The Horn of Africa and the Sahel

Somalia and the Hausa-speaking north of Nigeria are both overwhelmingly Muslim, and most men in both places carry an Arabic name. What is worth collecting is the layer underneath: Somali names built from Somali words, and Hausa names that record the circumstances of a birth rather than a hope for the child.

Four traditions with pages of their own

Swahili, Yoruba, Igbo and Ethiopian naming are each big enough to need their own treatment, and each works on a different principle: an Arabic loan layer on the coast, full sentences in the Nigerian southwest and southeast, and a Semitic language in its own script in the highlands. Three names from each, with the full lists a click away.

How African naming works

The one habit that runs across almost all of these languages is transparency. An African name usually means something its bearer's neighbours can hear without opening a dictionary: Sipho is the everyday Zulu word for a gift, Thabo is the Sesotho word for joy, Tumaini is Swahili for hope, and Chidi is a complete Igbo sentence. European names mostly stopped meaning anything centuries ago — nobody hears "laurel" in Laura or "farmer" in George. Here the meaning is still live, which is why the glosses on this page read like statements rather than like etymology, and why a mistranslation is a real error rather than a harmless one. Browse the rest of the origins index and the contrast is immediate.

The second habit is that the circumstances of the birth often decide the name outright. The Akan calendar is the fullest version of this, but it is far from alone: Hausa gives Gambo to whichever child follows twins and Tanko to a boy who follows a run of daughters, Swahili has its own weekday set, and Yoruba assigns Taiwo and Kehinde to twins before anyone has an opinion. The Akan system also has the longest reach. Gold Coast day-names appear throughout the records of Atlantic slavery in English spellings — Cuffee and Cuffe from Kofi, Quashee from Kwasi, Cudjoe from Kwadwo, Quaco from Kwaku — and they stuck. Cuffy, remembered in Guyana as Kofi, led the Berbice rebellion of 1763 and is a national hero there; the Massachusetts shipowner and abolitionist Paul Cuffe was the son of an Ashanti man recorded as Kofi Slocum and made his father's day-name the family surname. The names were never lost. They were written down in English.

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