By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter: @farooqkperogi In last week’s column , I promised to share with the reader some of the noticeab...
By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
In last week’s column, I promised to share with the reader some of the noticeable
African influences in the Gullah language. These influences are so vast, varied,
and deep that I cannot do justice to them in a single newspaper column. So I
decided to write it in two installments.
In
his groundbreaking book titled Africanismsin the Gullah Dialect, which I made reference to in last week’s column,
the late African-American linguist Dr. Lorenzo D. Turner identified more than
4,000 words in the Gullah English dialect that trace lexical descent from
several languages in west and central Africa. He found these African influences
in Gullah people’s personal names, in their quotidian conversational
vocabularies, and in their folk songs, stories, hymns, and invocations. I will
explore Gullah personal names this week and conclude with the African lexical
influences in the everyday speech and songs of the Gullah people next week.
In
what follows, I identify the African origins of many Gullah personal names.
Given that the research for the book from which material for this column was
drawn was done in the 1930s, I have updated several of the author’s data and
extended and enriched his conclusions based on my own experiential and
epistemological location in relation to his data.
Thousands
of personal names the Gullah people bear are similar to many names people in
west and central Africa still bear. It is impossible to mention all of them in
this piece; Turner identified more than 4,000 personal names among the Gullah
in Georgia and South Carolina. So I am only going to isolate a few, mostly
Nigerian, names that stood out for me.
I am
particularly surprised by the large number of Yoruba names the Gullah people
bear. As Turner pointed out, the Gullah people had not the slightest awareness
of the Yoruba origin and meaning of their names. Among the hundreds of Yoruba names
Turner recorded among the Gullah people in the 1930s are names like Ade,
Adebisi, Adebiyi, Adekule [Adekunle], Adeniyi, Adewale, Adu, Adosu, Aganju, Akaraje
[i.e., eat bean cake], Akawo [Akanwo], Alafia [ “Alafia” is an Arabic-derived
word; see Arabized African names below], Alabo, Alade, Alawo, Baba, Bankole,
Erelu, Idowu, Iyaoba, Kehinde, Oduduwa, Otunla, Ogboni, Oluwa, Okuta, Ola, Oriki,
Olubiyi, Olugbodi, Oyebisi, Sango, Yeye.
There
are hundreds more in the book, but I was struck, just like Turner was, that the
Gullah people have retained the difficult “gb” sound in their names. Most
people, including Africans who don’t speak a Niger-Congo language, usually have
a hard time articulating the “gb” sound, which Turner called “the voiced
labio-velar plosive,” including the “kp” sound that begins my last name, which
Turner characterized as the “gb” sound’s “voiced counterpart” (p. 25). This,
for me, is nothing short of extraordinary. Even my first daughter, to whom my
native Baatonu language isn’t a mother tongue, has a hard time pronouncing her
last name and has pleaded with me to dispense with the “K” in our last name. I
told her that would be a mutilation of the name because “kp” is an independent
sound unit like “ch” is in “chair” in English.
Well,
the Gullah people also bear many Africanized Muslim names they obviously
inherited from their Fulani, Mandingo, Yoruba, Hausa, Bambara, Wolof, and Mende
Muslim ancestors. As Ipointed out last week, the extensive second-hand Arabic influence Turner
found in many African-derived Gullah words, which he discovered after speaking
with West Africans in London and Paris in the 1930s, caused him to learn Arabic
so that he could make sense of his data.
Turner
recorded names like Aburika, which is probably a corruption of Abubakar; Adamu,
incidentally my father’s first name, which is the West African Muslim rendering
of Adam; Aduwa, an Africanization of du’a, the Arabic word for prayer; Ayisa
and Ayisata, Mandingo and Bambara Muslim approximations of Aisha, the name of
one of the wives of the Prophet of Islam; Ayuba, the Muslim version of Job,
which is rendered as Ayub in Arabic; Baraka, which is Arabic for blessing that
shares etymological and semantic affinities with Barack, the first name of
President Obama; Dirisu, which is how the Mandingo and Bambara people call the
Muslim name Idris—Yoruba Muslims call it Disu; Fatuma, Fatu, Fatimata (all Mandingo,
Wolof, and Bamabara versions of “Fatima,” the name of the daughter of the
Prophet of Islam); Fitina (derived from the Arabic word for trouble); Ibrahima,
the West African Muslim rendering of Ibrahim, which Christians and Jews call
Abraham.
He
also recorded names like Jumare, now regarded as a Fulani name but which is
actually derived from (al)jumea, the Arabic name for Friday— Yoruba, Ebira, Baatonu Muslims, etc. bear the name as Jimoh; Gibril (which Nigerian Muslims bear as Jibril or Jibrin
or Jibo and which Christians and Jews know as Gabriel; Imale (the Yoruba word
for Muslim, presumably because Islam came to Yoruba land from Mali); Haruna,
which is the West African version of Harun, which Christians and Jews know as Aaron;
Lafiya ( derived from the Arabic word for good health, which is borne as a
royal name among the Borgu people in Nigeria and Benin Republic, and as an
everyday personal name in Senegambia and other historically Muslim polities in
West Africa; Madina, the name of the second holiest city in Islam known to
Westerners as Medina, which West African Muslims bear as a female personal
name; Laila; Laraba, a Hausa name given to a girl born on Wednesday, derived
from al-arbi'aa', the Arabic word for Wednesday; Woli, (the Yoruba Muslim
domestication of the Arabic wali, which means patron saint); Salihu; Salamu; etc.
The
Gullah even bear puzzling names like Kafiri (a derogatory name for a
non-Muslim, which Yoruba Muslims call keferi, which is an African
approximation of the Arabic kafir) and Saitan, which is the Muslim rendering of
Satan!
They
also bear the names of West African ethnic groups as personal names, perhaps indicating
the ethnic origins of some of the Gullah people. They bear names like Fulani,
Fulbe, Fula (which refer to the same people), Ibibio, Ijesa, Ogbomosho, according
to Turner’s records. The name Yoruba didn’t exist as a collective name for
people in what is now southwest Nigeria. “Yoruba” in its current form is a 19th-century
creation by Samuel Ajayi Crowther—following a 16th century Songhai Islamic scholar by the name of Ahmed Baba who first used the name to refer to people in the old Oyo Empire. That is why
only names like Ijesa (a Yoruba sub-group found in present-day Osun State) and
Ogbomosho, rather than “Yoruba,” appear in the records of people enslaved in
the West from West Africa.
The
Gullah people also bear Kwora, the name for River Niger in many West African
languages, including Hausa, Baatonu, and Fulani from where it was probably
passed down to the Gullah. Interestingly, among the Baatonu people, Kwora is a
name reserved exclusively for members of royal families in both Nigeria and
Benin Republic.
While the gendering of many Gullah names
corresponds with their gendering in West African names (for instance, many of
the Yoruba names among the Gullah are unisex, like they are among the Yoruba), there is a discordance in others. For example, a name like Aba, which is a male
name in Gullah, is the name of a girl born on Thursday among the Fante people
of present-day Ghana.
Turner
found out that most of the personal names that the Gullah bear can be traced to
Arabic (by way of members of several Islamized West African ethnic groups who
were enslaved to rice plantations in Georgia and South Carolina); Bambara ( who
are now found primarily in Mali, but also in Guinea, Burkina Faso, and Senegal);
Bini in southern Nigeria; Bobangi in the Congo; Zarma who now live mainly in
what is now Niger Republic; Ewe who can be found in Togo and Benin Republic;
Efik in southern Nigeria; Fante in Ghana; Fon in Benin Republic; Fulani; Hausa;
Igbo; Ibibio in southern Nigeria; Kongo in Angola; Kikongo in the Congo;
Kimbundu in Angola; Kpelle in Liberia; Mende in Sierra Leone; Malinke,
Mandinka, and Mandingo in Senegambia, Mali, Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone,
etc., Nupe and Gwari in central Nigeria; Susu in Guinea; Songhai in present-day
Niger, Mali, Benin Republic; Twi in Ghana; Temne in Sierra Leone; Tshiluba in
the Congo; Umbundu in Angola; Vai in Liberia and Sierra Leone; Wolof in
Senegambia; and Yoruba in southwestern Nigeria.
Keep
a date next week for an analysis of African words in the Gullah English
dialect.
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