I AM NOT MY MAMA’S NAME-THE SINGLE MUM’S CHILD’S DILEMMA

Of late, so much has been written and said about single mothers, the hard life that they go through and the negative social perceptions towards them.  This has been done to the point of sounding cliche’.The reason for this raging debate is because the single mother phenomenon is relatively new in Africa. It has been occasioned by the rapid breakdown of tight traditional social fabric that would prevent or limit its occurrence. For example, in most traditional African societies, a single woman, a divorcee or a widow would be placed under the custody of a man-either a relative or close associate of their late husband to ensure that she had a father figure for their kids, a husband to warm her marital bed and a provider to bring the bacon home. However, the latter- day missionary demonized this wife custody as wife inheritance and it has been looked with disdain since then.

Needles to say, single motherhood has ever since then been viewed with contempt. Single mothers are labelled husband snatchers by their fellow women. Their morals are viewed as questionable and equated to those of an alley rat. As if that is not enough, their off springs are subjected to the same prejudices. They are crucified at the altar of prejudice because of being children of single mothers-something they had no much choice over. The overzealous Bible thumbers will even call them children of sin. Then along comes this brand of people, mostly young, proudly using their mothers’ names as surnames.

What’s in a name? The Bard of Avon may have asked. The upshot of these often quoted lines from Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet is that any name will serve for any object. There is no logical connection between the lovely pink flower that we call a rose and the four letters that denote it. It’s only by convention that we call it so. However, human language does not operate in a vacuum and thus human beings are bound to attach some value judgements to some names. For example, I am yet to meet a kid baptised Hitler several generations after his death. In the same vein, I can bet my payslip that you won’t meet a chap called Lucifer in the entire Christendom in your lifetime. And the next time you are in downtown Manhattan and loudly hail your long lost friend called Osama, you’ll be whisked to Guantanamo faster than you can say Bush. Anyway, that’s human nature.

Our naming systems are quite different from the Western ones. In most Western societies, most families adopt a family name that’s handed over from one generation to the next. In our setup, my surname is derived from my father’s name and my name becomes my kids surname ad infitum. Therein lies the problem-what about those children without fathers? Or put in another way, as there is no child without a father, what about children born of single mothers? Do they take the name of their maternal uncles or grandfathers and seem like products of incest? Will the uncles agree to have them using their names, knowing the implications in these days when every other NGO is talking about parental responsibility? And of course there is the dreaded Children’s Act 2001 which most don’t understand and think that letting their single sisters’ children use their surnames will mean that they will be entitled to their estates.

Among the Kikuyu, for instance, children born out of wedlock would be taken  like kids of their eldest maternal uncle .Their single mother, even if having a man on the side to meet some of her needs, would be under constant watch and care of his eldest brother, unless she thought of marrying. This avoided a situation whereby the kids would be without a name or a father figure. Thus the problem of children using their mothers’ names as a surname was solved and was in fact rare.

It’s interesting to note the increase in number of people using their mothers’ names as their surnames. You will also note that it’s more pronounced among the Kikuyu than in the other communities. In the classical Oedipus Complex pattern, Kikuyu men take a lot of pride in their mothers. Most prominent musicians from this community have always been known by their mothers name e.g. Kamaru wa Wanjiru, D.K. wa Maria, Rugwiti wa Njeri and so on. Old men who know each other very well will refer to each other as son of Njoki or Wambui almost reverently. And you can see the glow on the faces of these men when they are associated with their mothers’ names. Most of these men have fathers but just want to celebrate their mothers. Just tell them to flash their identification documents and you will be surprised to find none of the Wambui’s there.

However, that’s the far it goes. Growing up in the same community with your mother’s name as your surname is a different thing altogether. First, one is labelled ‘mwana wa muiritu’ which loosely translates to ‘child of a girl’. The label ‘child of a girl’ is pejorative just like, if not more than its English equivalent- bastard.It also denotes that the single mother  has never grown up since she has never been able to secure herself a husband. The upshot here is that it’s the husband who makes you a woman; you are not born one.

The label ‘child of a girl’ becomes the child’s master status. He or she is that first and anything else second. Right from childhood, the child is viewed from the narrow perspective of his or her mothers’ singlehood. His or her later success or failure is explained from this standpoint. If the kid is dressed well than the others with fathers, then there must be a rich man somewhere paying for this. If the kid excels in school, then most likely the class teacher is getting some ‘entertainment’ from the mother in order to doctor the kid’s marks upwards. And if the kid gets that plum job when his or her classmates are still tarmacking, then her mother must have warmed somebody’s bed for the sake of her child. Just like she did to get that post she’s having now. Conversely, if the child fails in life, then this is a clear indicator than a woman cannot bring up successful children singlehandedly. Either way, it’s a lose lose situation.

A child who bears his or her mother’s surname is always treated with suspicion. Most parents will warn their children against associating with such children due to their presumed low morals. The girls are said to learn the ways of the family early and grow up to be very permissive. Perhaps this is wrongly attributed to the wrong influence of her mother with her many ‘uncles’ who would visit her. The boys are stereotyped as wimpy softies who, due to lack of a fatherly wisdom to guide them, are rudderless in life and will forever be attached to their mothers apron strings.

Thus the name becomes a source of stigma for the child. It becomes a kind of a Scarlet Letter, to borrow from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous classic by the same title, to be worn around the neck for the rest of child’s life. Going by your mothers surname is like announcing to the world that you are the product of a ten-minute hanky –panky somewhere in a coffee bush or smelly urinal back in the day. It’s paradoxical that a community where men will proudly call themselves sons of Wambuis or some other women names will discreetly warn their children against relating with kids having their mothers’ names as surnames.

Malcolm X, the late radical Black Civil rights movement leader, initially used to be known as Malcolm Little. He however latter dropped the name ‘Little’ and in its place adopted the’ X ‘to imply that nobody will ever know his real surname or family name. This is because, when the slaves from Africa arrived at the slave market, they would be given a baptismal name and then adopt the surname of the slave ‘owner’. The African surnames that the slaves used to have before they crossed the Middle Passage were lost forever. The’ X ‘was symbolic of the lost roots, the lost heritage, the lost past. This is the same dilemma that children who use their mothers’ surnames have to deal with-dropping their mothers name to disassociate with their past or sticking with the names and be damned. It is a lose lose situation.

Functional sociologists posit that any social institution will exist only if it serves certain functions in the society. The ubiquitous nuclear family is an example here. In addition, new institutions emerge if hitherto existing ones cannot meet some needs. The relatively new single mother family has emerged to serve some unmet functions, one of them being providing a safety net for children born out of wedlock. The traditional husband, wife and children family has had its own inherent problems and some will even argue that it’s even more dysfunctional than the single parent one. This is because it may expose the children to violence, abuse and exploitation. The single mother family also has its own shortcomings, but the sooner society allows it to take its rightful place the better.

The emerging trend of young people proudly using their mothers’ names as surname is a counterculture. The new kids on the block are rebelling against the negative stereotypes that exist towards single mothers’ children. They have made it look vogue. And by extension, probably unknowingly, they are castigating mainstream culture for its jaundiced view of the single mother. It’s a case of making lemonade from a lemon.

‘I am not my hair’. So sang the Grammy winning American acoustic soul singer India Arie. In this song she castigates the American society for judging women by what appears on their heads and not by what is in them. It’s high time that society stopped treating children from single mothers like children of a lesser god, and let them wear their mother’s names like badges of honor. By extending the stigma already attached to single mothers to their children, society is punishing the mothers twice. The children should be viewed as individuals independent from their mothers and how the society perceives them.

So the next time a person sneers at a kid because of bearing his or her mother’s surname, then the kid should rightly tell him or her ‘I am not my mama’s name!’

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