Changing traditions of naming

For most women changing your surname when you marry is the norm. It’s traditional, it’s expected, and it’s just the way it is.

But more and more women are questioning this notion and choosing to either keep their maiden names or opting for the double-barrel option.

Being married for nine years and having kept my maiden name throughout has become a non-issue for my husband and me. I haven’t given it much thought in years until a colleague recently asked me about it. This got me thinking about this issue once again, and this time with an added maturity.

I guess I never really understood the reason women changed their surnames. It is something that perplexed me even as a young girl. I remember being 9 years old and for the first time hearing that a woman changes her name after she gets married. I questioned my mother about this 'but why must the woman be the one to change' and she responded with a 'that’s just the way it is'. I knew I wasn’t going to get the answers from her and for the next two weeks this issue weighed heavy on my heart. I kept asking myself questions like, ‘why can’t men change their surname?’, and ‘who decided that this is how it should be?’ and even came up with the idea that it would be more fair if a married couple abandoned their own surnames and instead opted for a brand new one. Having found something that in my young mind made sense, I felt the issue was temporarily resolved and would be revisited one day when I get married.

When I did get married I was still a student and for academic purposes kept my maiden name.

But it was more than that. I didn’t feel that I had changed as a person to the extent that I needed a new name. Sure, being married was a new part of my identity; it is an added identity, not one that changed me in any significant way. I was still the person I was before getting married. All I had accomplished before marriage was still part of me. I didn’t want to let go of the person I spent all those years becoming – not even for a start afresh.

Reactions to my decision are varied. My friends thought it was a brilliant idea and whilst many of them would have liked to do the same, none of them did. Their reasons include disapproval by either their husbands or families, not wanting to offend their in-laws or for the sake of their children.

My extended family just thought that it was typical of me to try to be different and until this day some still extend invites to us using my husband’s name only.

Strangers sometimes ask weird and inappropriate questions such as do I not love my husband; is his name not good enough; if I’m modern or just a feminist.

It’s sometimes difficult to have to keep assuring people that I do love my husband and have respect for his family name but what endears him to be even more is the fact that he is fully supportive of me keeping my maiden name and, by doing so, he is telling me that he accepts me for who I am.

Our family has since started to expand and our first son was born a year ago. We knew the day would come when we would have to revisit the surname issue. I wanted to keep my maiden name and wanted my son to have his father’s surname. But I didn’t want to be the only one in our familial unit with a different surname. So we decided upon giving our son both surnames. And this works for our family.

I’m sure my boy will have questions when he is older, but I am confident that we will be able to explain it to him in a way that he understands and give him the freedom to choose his own naming tradition when the time comes.

After all, traditions are ever-evolving.

This blog was first posted on Timeslive on the 11-05-2012. To see the original article please click on the following link: http://m.timeslive.co.za/?name=timeslive&i=11270/1/0&artId=24299

Kharnita Mohamed and Mohamed Seedat reflecting on Traditions 2: Everyday Lives of African Men, held in Ethiopia on 28-30 November 2011

Here are the anthropologist Kharnita Mohamed and community psychologist Mohamed Seedat reflecting on Traditions 2: Everyday Lives of African Men, held in Ethiopia on 28-30 November 2011. Kharnita Mohamed is a researcher at and Mohamed Seedat is the director of the University of South Africa's Institute for Social and Health Sciences (ISHS). Part of the project Changing Traditions, Traditions is a travelling biennial pitso of the Programme of Traditions and Transformation (PoTT) within the ISHS. Kharnita Mohamed and Mohamed Seedat are being interviewed on their impressions of the pitso and the debates that took place by peace scholar and psychologist Shahnaaz Suffla of the University of South Africa-Medical Research Council's Safety and Peace Promotion Research Unit. Mandisa Malinga edited the pictures. 

Feminist literature scholar Pumla Dineo Gqola, after giving a talk at Traditions 2: Everyday Lives of African Men, Ethiopia 28-30 November 2011

  

Feminist literature scholar and cultural critic Pumla Dineo Gqola

Here is a short video clip of feminist literature scholar and cultural critic Pumla Dineo Gqola, after giving her keynote address at Traditions 2: Everyday Lives of African Men, held in Ethiopia on 28-30 November 2011. Her talk was titled "Feminist masculinities or suicidal men". She is being inteviewed by peace scholar and psychologist Shahnaaz Suffla of the University of South Africa-Medical Research Council's Safety and Peace Promotion Research Unit. Shahnaaz Suffla asks her to imagine a title and other aspects of a novel she would write on African men, if she were to think of writing a novel, for Pumla Dineo Gqola writes short-stories. 



Retrospective 2: Traditions II: Everyday Lives of African Men

Jimmy Manyi

One of the relatively big stories of 2011 was triggered by the comments made by Mr Jimmy Manyi, President of the Black Management Forum and Head of Government Communication and Information Services. The story went big because of the protagonists, but also for the reason that it was yet another dreadful replay of the effects of the inherited misunderstandings of the racialised past that made us into who we are.

Like other ugly stories of race, Manyi’s words and the exchanges that followed entrapped our imaginations because they played on the masochism and misrecognition that, since apartheid at least, have become an unhappy part of black traditions. I also suspect that the story was a salutary lesson on the unrealised hopes and persisting uncertainties of what it means to be us in this suspended present moment.

Occupying the position of director-general of the Department of Labour at the time, Manyi had expressed the view on KykNet's Robinson Regstreeks show in 2010 that coloured people “must stop this over-concentration situation (in the Western Cape) because they are in over-supply where they are so you must look into the country and see where you can meet the supply”.



Trevor Manuel



One of the political figures who was angered by the comments and publicly responded to Manyi was the minister in the presidency Mr Trevor Manuel. To Manuel, Manyi was “the worst-order” racist, formed “in the mould of HF Verwoerd”.



In turn legal adviser to the minister of defence, Mr Paul Ngobeni, known to have been part of the “brains trust” that helped President Jacob Zuma during his corruption case, came blazing out in support of Manyi. Ngobeni said Manuel a gangster and racist.

The tone of the whole affair was rather unsavoury, from start to end. It is sometimes inevitable that such eruptions will happen, given the continuing trauma inhering in our identities. Still, because of what this regrettable exchange says about us as black people, I found it instructive about how not to think or talk about others.

Yet even though the subject of racial feelings and thoughts is something one does not carelessly broach in polite company, we could still have taken the opportunity to learn, and teach other especially younger people, about how we got here. We could still have fruitfully used the apparent possibilities even while recognising the hurt that Manyi caused in many black or coloured-identified people.

I am also aware, as all the central actors in this story might well be, there are many older people of all hues and creeds who could use some considered lessons about what apartheid racialising and tribalising traditions we employ to identify ourselves continue to do to our language and interior lives.  

The Manyi-Manuel-Ngobeni affair came back to mind at Traditions II, the second travelling pitso held in Ethiopia on 28-30 November 2011 by the University of South Africa’s Institute Social and Health Sciences. Hosted under the theme of Changing Traditions: Everyday Lives of African Men, the biennial tradition pitso is one of the pillars of the Changing Traditions Project which emerged, among other things, from amongst others the observation that there tends to be an incapacitating conflation of tradition and traditionalism.

Delegates at Traditions II: Everyday Lives of African Men 
held in Ethiopia on 28-30 November 2011



During the discussions, when highly emotional disagreements as well as serious distortions became apparent, I was reminded of one statement by Ngobeni that should have but never got much discussion. Ngobeni said Manuel acted as though he was “the king of coloured people”.

Clearly intended to offend, the sentiment plays on the untruth that those who claim a coloured identity do not have a cultural tradition, specifically not one of kingship.

This unfortunate miseducation about tradition which parses coloureds as cultureless is one which I have encountered also in my interactions with coloured-identified students when I used to teach at the University of the Western Cape. I am afraid it is far more common than that though, widely believed among many old and young people identified as African.

The idea that a people who have roots traceable to at least more than 450 years old in South Africa can be without tradition or culture is plainly incorrect, besides being offensive.

Yet this lie that only some people – specifically those who were once referred by apartheid laws as Bantu – can claim the right to be recognised as a traditional community is the very one freighted by the South African laws on traditional leadership and governance. These laws, to be clear, have the unwitting purpose of primitivising or retribalising ethnicity on the one hand, while also denying the equal fullness of the traditions of coloured-identified people on the other.

What baffles me is how a politically black democratic government fails to realise that the groupings brought under the term traditional communities in post-apartheid South Africa are the very same abhorrent tribes Archie Mafeje showed in the early 1970s to have been the creation of colonial rulers and racist anthropologists.

Let us be clear then that identifying as Zulu or Venda does not necessarily make you a tribesman or tribeswoman, just as being identified coloured or white does not by itself make you a tradition-less post-modern subject. Surely being an indigenous native speaker of isiZulu does not mean you have more traditions than being a native English-language speaker.

Perhaps the argument the dominant discourse on black traditions wants to convince us of is that those who were once Bantu are more strongly tied to their cultural traditions than others. That also is not quite true, for Europeans and North Americans may be said to have stronger traditions precisely because these tend to go unremarked, and often do come under the rubric tradition. It is when a tradition does not call itself a tradition, such as in eating with a fork and knife or calling ourselves by our race names, that it is almost unchallenged in its power over us.

Yet it also needs stating that to be black in the way black South Africans are black is very modern political tradition, but a tradition nonetheless. Furthermore, being black, because it is political identity, does not have ready correspondence with ethnicity. Indeed all racialised identities are first and foremost political identities. 

The fact is while all rituals are part of a tradition, not all practices within a tradition are ritualised. Tradition, that is to say, is not about primitives, pure tribes, traditional communities, kingships or whatever object a person or government wishes to employ to refer to the alienating Otherness we have become used to and use on ourselves.

Tradition is the basic question that all of us try to work from the moment we become cognitively capable of recognising both our individuality within and connectedness to our families, what remains unarticulated in our interactions with each other. Whereas we tend to think of tradition as that practice, rite or custom we do once a year or in a longer while, like being initiated into manhood, celebrating Christmas or Eid, paying mahadi, or burying the dead in a particular way, at its most productive moments tradition is what goes unspoken. Like gravity, tradition is the force that holds down the responses of the insiders to the tradition to the everyday problems of being human.

Though they may be out of sight, traditions are always an underlying dynamic in any practices where one person consciously or otherwise seeks to hand down – this being the principal meaning of the term tradition – the usable parts of a culture, whether that behaviour is what to eat, how to pray, who to love and how, the best way to raise children and how to raise them, and of above all how to be a person in the world of others.

Being at the centre of these traditions lipitso I have become even more aware that there is a great deal of ignorance, confusion and distortions that exists about what traditions mean. It is especially when one tries to square up the very modern, highly improvised, daily lives of black men and women in the Africa of today with how tradition is apprehended that one comprehends the misconceptions, myths, and caricatures that dogs our lives. Black men and women are perhaps the most post-modern subjects of all, and that does not negate that they can and may need to recognise where they have been.

However, it must be said, the paradoxical pull for many to define traditions in barely concealed tribalistic or racialised terms may be due to the uncertainties first provoked by imperialism and colonialism as well as the search for an elusive search for an old wholeness that may or may not have existed before those racist ideologies gutted our cultural life supports.

The Changing Traditions Project was conceived with the aim that, if we want to contribute in building Africa one figurative kgotla at a time, we have to set time aside whenever we can to help each other to more carefully think through what tradition means. We all need to carefully figure out and where necessary rethink what our traditions are, and that done, build on our best. Careless words, lazy thought and insulting each other are not the best way to build one other and our collective black lives.

Impressions of Addis

Here are some images from our trip to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The trip's mission was to do on-site check of conference venues, hotel accommodation, restaurants (and did we eat and drink coffee!), markets and such like for a pitso we will host come November 2011.

The pitso is an event hosted every two years under the auspices of the project Changing Traditions (http://www.unisa.ac.za/Default.asp?Cmd=ViewContent&ContentID=25441). Changing Traditions is a granted flagship initiative of PoTT, a programme of the Institute for Social and Health Sciences at the University of South Africa. Changing Traditions revolves around two main drivers, namely, a pitso and an e-kgotla. Building transdisciplinary, international African-centred knowledge traditions is an important impetus for Changing Traditions.

The theme for the second pitso, Traditions 2, is Changing Traditions: Everyday Lives of African Men. The intention is to get to Ethiopia and have men and women (yes, men and women) talk about the hellishly interesting, dynamic relationships African men have with tradition, itself understood to be dynamic. The event is meant for scholars, artists, journalists, film-makers, photographers, and whatever label you use for yourself, so long as you have an interest in what African men do, and do well or could do better, to make Africa work.

This year's gathering will be organized around questions pertaining to not only the exceptional but also quotidian experiences of being a man in or from Africa. These images of the city of Addis are a taster then, aren't they. We hope you will tell others about the event (http://www.unisa.ac.za/Default.asp?Cmd=ViewContent&ContentID=25483). Or why don't you make your way to Ethiopia.

Will Smith on a shop-front in Addis Ababa 



Fruit stall





Building site




Podium for the king and queen of Ethiopia



A woman with a load on her back

Statue of man on a horse

Loving Traditions

Many years ago on Valentine’s Day, I found a huuuuge stuffed bear with an exposed red heart on our porch.  This adorable bear, beloved symbol for lovers everywhere[i], sent me into a flurry of delighted speculation. I wondered who the perfect prince of romance could be. I swooned, I dreamed, and got lost in the romance of it all. Come on, it was romantic! Who can deny the romance of a stuffed synthetic fanged animal with an exposed heart left by a stranger at your home?  Weeell, as I would eventually learn, the prince was the queen and not a stranger and the bear was regifted to me and in reality, the bear really was much smaller than my memory demands. A schoolchild on Valentine’s Day had given the bear to my mother, his teacher and she had decided to pass his innocent token of love on to me, but repackaged to fit in with the romantic traditions of Valentine’s Day.

The 14^th of February has accumulated many traditions even though it is mostly invented. Almost everyone knows[ii] that the contemporary celebration of love has a very loose historical relationship to the events that gave birth to it.  For the single on this particular day of the year we recognize that certain objects represent a token of love from an admirer who may or may not want a romantic relationship.  In the centuries of its existence the traditions and tokens of love have changed and yet a young woman meeting a bear on the porch instantly was transported to the very heart of the tradition.  The tradition of celebrating love and romantic affection as we know it today would not have been the same for me without amongst other things, the invention of romantic love, the invention of the printing press[iii], colonialism bringing us all kinds of weird traditions and on and on and on.

Perhaps someone could tell me why stuffed bears, dogs and various animals indicate romantic interest. How it is that chubby little naked boys coming at you with an arrow should gladden the heart they are aiming for? How has this wealth of symbolism come to be associated with martyred saints? We do know Cupid/ Eros/possible Biblical cherubim got a supporting role in the mysterious Valentine’s Day.  The origins of this day are shrouded in mystery, though legends as with all good traditions, abound. Wikipedia tells us there were two, possibly three martyred St Valentines connected to the day and the celebration of one or other of these saints was established in 486 A.D. Valentine 1, 2 or 3 suffered for love, was heroic or was a cover to merge Roman paganism with Catholicism. Honestly we don’t really care about the horrifically killed saints or Catholicism’s fight for believers and the sneaky stubbornness of Roman traditions. We just want to be part of what the tradition has come to represent: love, belonging, desire, excitement.

I remember the excitement of Valentine’s Day as a young schoolgirl wondering breathlessly as the cards made their rounds to our classrooms if there would be one for me. I learnt at school and in the stores along with my schoolmates what the symbolisms of love are. Representing romance with recognisable symbols of intimacy,desire and love is taken very seriously in many parts of South Africa. Schools have programmes on the day where romantic sentimentality is celebrated and young men and women, like me are trained in the art of giving and receiving red, white and pink cards with arrow shooting cherubs and various domesticated beasts on them. Flowers, roses are super romantic. We were expected to wear the colors of love, white and red clothing and listen and perform sappy songs about longing, desire and the fulfillments of love and all those other stuff. We got excited thinking about being adults exchanging roses and candy and having the super sophisticated dinners and exchanging the perfect expensive gifts. And come on, who am I kidding? Even as adults we feel a little frisson on Valentine’s Day, even if we grumble, even if we know it’s not a real historical tradition, even if we deride the sentimentality, the tradition has a hold on us and to satisfy its demands, well you know. Candy, dinner, flowers, cards, gifts and ….
 
After all, it is a tradition you are invariably part of, if only through exposure ...

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[i] Yes, we know that this may not be true for every person on the planet. But if you felt a little jolt at the adorableness of the bear or revolted by the commodification of love or appalled by the gross sentimentality then it certainly does apply to you.

[ii] Read the footnote above!

[iii] Hallmark remains grateful and so does Mills and Boon.