More Than a Sound: Why African Parents Should Make Indigenous Names a First Priority

Abstract

A name is never merely a sound; it is a deliberate inheritance through which African communities have historically preserved ancestry, transmitted values and safeguarded communal memory across generations, a reality that gives rise to this paper on "More Than a Sound: Why African Parents Should Make Indigenous Names a First Priority." The paper was guided by three objectives: to examine the cultural and historical significance of indigenous names as carriers of ancestry, values and communal memory; to investigate the factors influencing African parents' preference for foreign names over indigenous names; and to assess the implications of declining indigenous naming for identity formation and cultural continuity among African children. The paper adopted Afrocentricity as its theoretical framework, and employed a systematic literature review methodology, drawing on recent, verifiable and peer-reviewed sources across African, and particularly Nigerian, naming contexts. The paper revealed that indigenous names function as structured cultural instruments encoding ancestry and moral values, that the preference for foreign names is driven by colonial legacy, religious conversion, social prestige and migratory pressure, and that declining indigenous naming weakens intergenerational transmission of cultural knowledge and generates unresolved tension in identity formation, particularly among diasporic youth. The paper concluded that indigenous naming warrants renewed priority as a safeguard for cultural continuity and recommended the primary use of indigenous names, cultural awareness programmes and institutional documentation of indigenous naming meanings.