By David Maillu
Published May 14, 2023

In traditional Africa, which is still fashionable in many places, when the family gets a child, like in all families of the world, that child has to be given a name. Child-naming has religious significance.

Many communities have different ways of naming the child, either the name has to be obtained from the list of names of members of the family tree, or the child has to be given a name to mark the occasion or event during which he is born. However, beyond that general naming, there is a common awareness out of historical reality that, if you give the child a wrong name, there are bad consequences. There are millions of cases in Africa known that, in some instances, the child responds to the wrong name
immediately. This is commonly expressed relentless crying and other actions of the child to show that the child is deeply disturbed. Any treatment with medicine to silence the child doesn’t work.

That forces the family to reevaluate the name by seeking a diviner who may easily tell what the spirit behind the child is saying. Even before the child is born within the family there may be a prediction of someone through dreams or otherwise relating to what name the child should be given.

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One of the methods of finding the name for the crying child is to put a long list of the names of the departed members of the family. During the renaming of the child, someone reads out the names on the list to the child, one by one. In so many occasions, once the reader reads out the right name, the child stops crying suddenly; hence a signature of accepting that should be the right name.

Go and narrate that information to white people and they will trash it as superstition. You would be listened carefully in Africa. That says, in one way or the other, we must accept that we are ruled by many forces. The basic story is, be careful about the name you give your new child. That name will be the child’s frequency code to his cosmos. If it is a wrong frequency it, in one way or the other, may create a damage to the personality of that life. Do not give a child a name whose meaning and foundation you don’t  know.

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