Friday, 1 June 2012
ROSES FROM MY GARDEN:
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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