South Sudanese Intellectuals Have Fallen Short to Match the Critical Demands of Our Time (Part 5)
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Thiik Mou Giir, Melbourne, Australia
The Importance of Maintaining Your Own African Names: The intellectual courage of our most learned South Sudanese have fallen short to match the critical demands of our time
By Thiik Mou Giir, Melbourne, Australia
Friday, November 19, 2021 (PW) – If other people, from Europe and Arabia, come to your land and make you abandon the names you have had, from your ancestors, for thousands of years ago, and then you take from them the names they give you, you must know that the event is a proof of the measure of your stupidity, of your weakness, of your inferiority, and your immaturity.
Keeping those names prolong the fact that you are being looked at as such, and as such, you are in danger of being treated as tools in the hands of the same people who gave you the names. You are owned. You have lost part of your identity.
Our acceptance of the names, coined from our cultures or not, has enabled people with ill-intentions to put us in direct and indirect processes of mental enslavement. Mental enslavement is the worst kind of slavery because the slaves do not have to be with us, the enslaved physically. We do what he wants us to inflict on ourselves.
These processes keep on multiplying and multiplying for quite a long time until, perhaps, you take action to end them.
Some people in Africa whose eyes are open have taken steps to rid themselves of those enslavers’ names. The people of Zimbabwe and Burkina Faso are good examples of people who have successfully done so. The term “Burkina Faso” is my favourite.
The people of Burkina Faso got rid of the useless and meaningless French name, “Upper Volta”, and gave themselves “Burkina Faso”, which means “The Land of the Honest People”. It is a great name. It sounds excellent, and its meaning is also significant. The citizens cannot but accept being inspired by the name.
Of all the people of South Sudan, Jieng people can lead in making “Dinka” invalid and of making “Jieng” the only name for the people who know full well that they have inherited their original name from their ancestors. If they can do that, the rest of South Sudan’s population will follow suit.
The outcome of this endeavour is that South Sudanese will only have their long-standing indigenous African names. They will do this not only for their own sake but also for the sake of the entire world. Some people around the globe would like, in the future, to seek to find their African roots.
Better to find the original names rather than the fake name for Africa is the motherland of all humanity and of civilization.
Please read this article and join the campaign, a noble cause of the identity we are resolved to construct globally.
Thiik Mou Giir, Bachelor Degree in Education from the University of Alexandria, Egypt; Post Graduate Diploma, from Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He can be reached via his email contact: thiik_giir@hotmail.com
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