By Makau Kitata
I attended catechism classes in our village church as preparation for baptism. A new name was supposed to make one an authentic Christian. Like a cigarette box cellophane wrapping, it has a strong gloss and makes the print under it extremely bright and attractive.
The priest at the river was the village religious machine operator performing this transformation – reproducing little genuine-name-Christians to a fault. And they celebrated the numbers in the local church as a triumph of religious progress.
And so, my village gained Jeffs, and Dans, Steves and Cates, Custer and Mary. You heard people say:
“Danny, how is Ruth?”
“She’s well, but Jonathan here is refusing to eat arrow roots.”
“How is Jefferson?”
All of us had written our preferred names and given the papers to the pastor. I had searched for months for a name and found none suitable for me. At the final moment, I checked the names of other church-going villagers who had made something of their name, like owning a car, and chose Benjamin.
On the baptism day, older boys and girls who had earned their Christian names prepared a pool at the village river. It was the first time I was entering a changing room, crafted using banana leaves. In my river swims, I had never required a changing room. This looked like a ritual, a dip like no other. It made me apprehensive. The pastor held me as I yielded to his push. Holding the piece of paper I had given him.
“I now baptise you Benjamin in the father’s name, the son, and the holy spirit,” he said as he drowned me for a moment.
My clothes clung to me and I had no other wish but to return to the banana leaves shelter and change to dry clothes. It was so cold that I shivered uncontrollably.
My elder sister, Nzisa, named after our grandmother, and who was now a proud Jerriter, approached me:
“Last Man, you finally have a cute name, Benja. It means son of good luck.”
I instinctively recoiled at that name. I could not use it. To me it sounded sham. And I never used it in the village or school.
I was happy when I successfully registered for my primary exam without it. I thought its absence gave me a more authentic identity.
I had however not reckoned with the day of getting a national ID.
A menacing figure emerged from the balcony of Machakos County Hall with a bunch of papers on her hand. I could only see her bulging chest and a bespectacled head above. I felt smothered. She called the names of the applicants who had made the right entries to their forms. Mary Mutio Kieti, Bonface Mutiso Kikuvi, etc. Then she hurled the rest of the papers down to us. As the forms fluttered down in the wind as she shouted.
“Add a third name and stop wasting our time.”
I nervously added my shivering river name to my form and returned it. My cousin Ngandi who had not gone to the river invented his English name there and then. Dominic.
Recently, I attended a workshop in Berlin and arrived after participants had received their name tags. The lady at the secretariat saw my empty shirt pocket and quickly did a passport search. She mindfully manufactured a name tag and pinned it to my lapel. When I looked, my shivering river name was there. I felt the morning river cold again and quickly stuffed the plastic name tag in the waste bin.
As people went for a cigarette break, I stood out as the person without a name.
“Makau, what happened to your name tag?” Asked Eva, my German colleague.
“I am quite fine without a name,” I replied.
“Will you have a puff?” she asked as she politely offered her smokes.
“Thank you, I’ll have a cup of tea, instead,” I said.
As I watched her toss the wrapper from the cigarette packet to get her smokes, I thought of that name I sadly gained on a shivering morning, long ago at the village river. Like the cellophane wrapper of a cigarette packet, you peel it off and cast it away. Yet, it flies and sticks to your clothes, and reappears whenever you least expected it. And horrifyingly, it is what people see, and call you.
Next time you hear somebody call me Benjamin, or Ben or Benja, just know that they are not seeing me. They are referring to a plastic wrapper I cast off long ago. But it has stubbornly sneaked up to stick to my clothes for decades.
