What's in a Name?

When I was a kid growing up in east Texas, I was always fascinated with the names people gave their kids. I had a middle school teacher, for instance, who was a great fan of classical music. When her daughter was born, she saddled the unfortunate child with the names Amanda Tchaikovsky. You can just imagine what that kid had to go through growing up.

Then during the "Free Love" hippie era, you had people giving their kids names like Moon Child and the like.

I thought I'd seen the last of the weird naming customs as a general practice - until I arrived in the southern African country of Zimbabwe. In the U.S. we have gone through phases of naming, but we always move on. Zimbabwe has for many decades had some of the oddest habits for giving kids names that could ever be imagined.

Apparently the people of Zimbabwe believe that by giving a child a name that commemorates some event or character trait it will ensure good fortune in that area. In some other cases, it's just some person or thing that impresses or pleases them. I first encountered this strange practice before I even arrived in Harare, the capitol. Waiting for my flight the airport in Johannesburg, South Africa, I got into a conversation with a lady on her way back to Harare from a visit to relatives in England. In the course of talking, she mentioned the strange naming practices. As an example, she mentioned that after Zimbabwean Kirsty Coventry won three Olympic medals for swimming, her gardener named three of his children Back Stroke, Breast Stroke, and Three Medals.

I thought of this as just an amusing anecdote until I arrived and began meeting people. The first person I met was a government official with the given name Lovemore (for obvious reasons I won't give his surname). This particular individual just happens to think of himself as quite the lady's man. I later met the head of a non-governmental organization that works with street kids and, yes, her name was Charity.

The name game turned surreal when I joined Royal Harare Golf Course. My main caddy became another Lovemore, a handsome young man who is in fact something of a hit with the ladies. I passed on one man who wanted to caddy for me. His name; Vitalis, but he happened to be bald. I could just see the jibes and puns that having him around for 18 holes would cause. The final one, though, that still has me laughing, was the elderly caddy, dressed much more formally than all the others; complete with tie and hat; who didn't seem to know much about golf, but was a fount of knowledge on many other subjects and regaled everyone with it throughout the round. Now, if you guessed that his name is Headmaster, you can go directly to the head of the class.