FEATURE: 'Changing my slave name allowed me to find myself' by LeahMahon_
WHEN MILLIONS of the black diaspora were forced to start a new life from the shores of Africa and under the hands of slave owners, it left behind a diaspora of people centuries later that are still in search of the heritage andIn the Caribbean, enslaved black people worked across plantations in British colonies and built the homes of slaves owners on the grounds that many of them would live and die upon.
“So, I grew up on a diet of music that was telling me about myself, telling me about my ancestry, my homeland.” As she discovered her blackness, she says it went hand-in-hand with what it meant to be white, which only pushed her further to follow her ancestors and find a new name. There, she says she embarked upon a traditional naming ceremony and was bestowed her new first name officially by one of the local chiefs – Jendayi meaning “give thanks” in the Zimbabwean language, Shona. What followed was her surname, Serwah, with roots stemming back to Ghana.
For those that want their new name to be officially recognised on public records, applicants will have to go through the Royal Courts of Justice with an “enrolled” deed poll application for a £42.22 sum. In Septmeber 2021, the city of Utretcht in the Netherlands gave the descendants of the slave owners to change their names without having to foot the bill or undergo physiological evaluation.
Kweisi grew up as Anthony Gatlin, and it was on a trip to an old home in Gatesville in North Carolina with his great-grandfather and great-grandmother that he first encountered the bloody legacy of the slave trade. His great-grandfather worked as a sharecropper at the house and his grandfather was held as a slave.
“A white woman came out and she came out and she looked into the mailbox and I asked, ‘Who is that?’ And my great grandfather then began to explain the history of our name, how he worked as a child on this plantation, how he ran away at an early age and came up more for a better life.” “I do know that the name Gatling came from a slave owner, and I don’t need to know about a slave owner – I have no interest in that,” he says.
The journey to finding an identity is a search that has eluded Kweisi all his life, he says, and for him he found a deeper meaning in the new name he has been living with since 2020. “It confirmed what it was, but it wasn’t a big deal in a way. If anything, it confirmed that that’s not my name and I shouldn’t have it and I don’t want to be associated with something which is about subjugation, torture, genocide, a heinous history and for me to carry it around psychologically…I know I didn’t want to do that.”
For many of them, the journey begins in their search to find out what their actual names were before they were taken from them. However, Paul Crooks – a genealogist who has traced his own slave name back six generations – says that although removing slave names could become a “trend,” much of the diaspora would never find a real answer.
In the 1817 slave register, he also discovered his fourth great-grandmother – Ami Djaba – who resisted the naming practises of her capturers. From the mid to the late 18th century, many slaves were first given one name, forenames as they were stripped of their indentity. In the British-Caribbean, enslaved people were often named after places like ‘London’ or ‘Cambridge’; often they also took on names of English origin like ‘Tom’ or ‘Bess’.
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