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[Mesob]

(I) The Self-Colonizing Mission: Names and Naming in Eritrea

By Yosief Ghebrehiwet

The last time I set foot in Asmara, one day as I was waiting for a bus, I struck up a conversation with this young lady with a few months old child in her bosom. After a brief exchange on the usual curiosity questions, I shifted my attention to the child and asked her what his name was. She proudly replied, with a reassuring smile to back it up, “Kevin”. Surprised (I honestly thought it could be one of those archaic Jewish names that the young generation keeps obsessively excavating from the Bible – like Levi, or its Tigrigna version, Lewie), I said, “I have never heard of this name before,” all the time thinking about Tigrigna names only. But her surprise was greater than mine. Eyes wide-open, she said, “You don’t know Kevin Costner!” And I knew where her surprise was coming from, as I could hear her thinking, “And he says he is from America! How could he possibly miss this great actor? Fara!” And she happened to be a poor lady and single mother (and with little education, if ever, from what I surmised from our brief talk) who had never ventured outside of Eritrea. Look at what surface encounter with modernity has done to her! No wonder, decades of physical and mental dislocation is leaving its alienating mark among Eritreans. In this rather innocuous looking baptismal act, we see the self-colonizing mission of the ghedli generation emulated in miniscule; it just happens to be an exotic version of that perennial search for disparate alien identities that essentially characterized the Eritrean Revolution in its totality.

I bet you Aklilu Zere’s “good Kebessa woman” in the Italian colonial Eritrea1 would never give her son such an alien name, however exotic it sounded to her ears; after all, it was in the homes of Baratollos, Mellotis, Giovannis, Marios, Molinieris, Binis, Fenilis, Denadais, Merenghis, Salinas, and Costas that Aklilu nostalgically recalls that she was working as a maid or factory hand. Remarkable enough, it never occurred to her to borrow some of those exotic Italian names she was too familiar with at her working place. She was too anchored in her habesha culture to even entertain it as an option, let alone to act on it; that is, even as the signora of the house for whom she worked might have found convenient to call her with an Italian version of her name (Fortuna, Rosa, Lucia, Anna, etc.). She instinctively understood that naming and identity were too intimately tied to one another as to be tampered with in such a frivolous way. Even though she had gradually changed in many ways as she adapted to the modern colonial world that she was forced into, it never occurred to her to tamper with the very essence of her identity. (As Aklilu rightly reminds us: “… even though the woman would not compromise on her faith and village values, she was open to modernization.”2)

Here then is a great paradox for the ghedli romantics to ponder: it is not the fathers that lived through the colonial era that abandoned their roots, but the generations born in postcolonial era. Unlike the fathers, who were at peace with modernity (adopting aspects of it gradually without letting go of their roots, as the “good Kebessa woman” did) that left their identity intact, it was the postcolonial generations’ perverse reaction to modernity that led to their identity crises. It doesn’t mean that the fathers came out of Italian colonial era totally unscathed, but that the scar on their psyche was not deep enough to make them doubt the very essence of their identity. For the confused, self-doubting postcolonial generations though, to absorb one (modernity), they had to entirely let go of the other (their roots). They didn’t realize that in between the “letting go” and the “picking up” a huge existential chasm was created that would [deleted] in a whole nation into a free fall that has so far lasted for 50 odd years. Despite an equally 50 years of Italian rule, the [deleted] of names that one finds among many colonized people never took hold in Eritrea. Our proud fathers stuck to the good old habesha names; except in extremely rare cases, you don’t hear of any Italian names adopted during this era. Ironically, this [deleted] of names has been taking place in “liberated” Eritrea among the children and grandchildren of the ghedli generation.

..... https://asmarino.com/articles/1826--i-t ... in-eritrea

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[sesame]

And the moron's name is Yosief! May be he thinks Yosief is an Agamigna name? Tell him to change his name to Welde Qirqos? I am assuming Qirqos was an Agame and not a jew!

But who is dumber Yosief or Mesob. ካብ በሃሊኡስ ደጋሚኡ።