Naming Africans

“Naming Africans: On the Epistemic Value of Names is a timely and ground-breaking collection of cutting-edge perspectives on epistemic affirmation across Global Africa. The interdisciplinary meeting of the humanities and social sciences provokes an intellectual curiosity that should take readers to a deeper questioning of the origins and values of the naming in their evolving social contexts.”

-N'Dri Therese Assie-Lumumba, Professor of Africana Studies and and Director of the Institute for African Development (IAD) at Cornell University

“a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how Africans document, archive, preserve, and update their knowledge.”

-Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

Focusing on the epistemic value of African names, this edited collection is based on the premise that personal names constitute valuable sources of historical and ethnographicinformation and help to unveil endogenous forms of knowledge.  The chapters assembled here document and analyze personal names and naming practices in a slew of African societies on the geographically vast and ethnically diverse continent,  including contributions on the naming practices in Angola, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda. The contributors to this anthology are scholars from different African language communities who investigate names and naming practices diachronically. Taken together, their work offers a comparative focus that juxtaposes different African cultures and reveals the historical and epistemic significance of given names.

Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí is Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University, New York and Professor Extraordinarius in the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of South Africa (UNISA).

Hewan Girma is Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies Program at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.