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SPARE US THE DOUBLE-BARRELLED SURNAME

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My brother Sdumo thinks I’m a raging mad feminist whose academic education has gone to her head for this one but I still stand by it.


I feel it’s time to spare the double barrelled surname; for the sake of our children. I get where my brother’s coming from though – the mad black feminist is how the African woman was described when the double barrelled surnames, which started trending globally in the 1960s, started staying with us in the southern parts of Africa around the 1990s.


After all, the practice was increasingly common mostly among high-powered, ‘educated’ and opinionated females. Names like anti-Apartheid struggle shero Winnie-Madikizela Mandela; popular TV talk show host Felicia Mabuza-Suttle and African Union chairperson Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma come to mind – where these women opted to combine their maiden and husband’s surname with a hyphen.
Some went even further to accuse such women of being prisoners of colonialism. I really don’t care what people choose to label it but I want it. Not for me but for my child.


For the record, if I had to marry the leadership via the establishment, I would use just his surname because either way it’s really not up to me now is it? In this country and many other African countries, as soon as a woman records her matrimony, ‘the system’ automatically changes her surname to that of her husband. So no choice really, the colonialist man’s grip is real.

What’s in a name?

But when it comes to my child, I wish I could have thought about this double barrel naming sooner. I could have given my son the Masango surname as his middle name at least completed with his father’s surname; without the hyphen off course.
Why you may ask? What’s in a name as Shakespeare asks? Well, a whole history and some. In this day an age where, I, like most mothers, am raising my child without his father for whatever reason, with great help of my maiden family; I really wish this could reflect in all of my son’s identity – documented on paper and not just orally.

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