Charley, there is a particular silence that falls in a Ghanaian classroom on the first day of term. It is not the silence of fear, nor the silence of attention. It is the silence of anticipation. Thirty-five students sitting upright, exercise books open, biros at the ready — and at the front, a teacher with the class register in her hand. We are all waiting for the same thing. We are waiting for the name. Every class has one. The name that, when the teacher reaches it, shall divide the morning into Before and After.
The teacher begins gently. “Adjei.” Present. “Asante.” Present. “Boateng.” Present. The register rolls forward like a trotro on a smooth stretch of road. Then suddenly — pothole. “Esinam… Eg… Ega…” The teacher pauses. She squints. She brings the paper closer to her face. Somewhere in the third row, a small girl begins to slide quietly down in her seat, because she knows. She has known since Class One. She shall know until the day she retires. Her name is Esinam Egavakpor, and the school system is about to commit assault upon her surname for the eighteenth time this year.
Welcome to Sikaman, where the register is also a comedy show, and the comedian is the teacher, and she does not know she is the comedian.
Yours truly, Kwabena Kokote, can testify on oath. My own surname has been mispronounced by every teacher from Class One through Senior High. Manukure — four small syllables, charley, four — has been read aloud as Manu-cure, Manure (yes, manure, the very one in the farm), Manukulé, and on one terrible Monday in Form Two, Mr Manchester. I sat there as Mr Manchester for an entire period, because to correct the teacher would have been disrespect, and to accept the name would have been to surrender my ancestors to English football. So I did what we all do. I raised my hand quietly and said, “Present, madam.” The ancestors will forgive me. They have forgiven worse.
But where, my brother, do these names come from? This is the question that has occupied me since I was small. Some surnames in this country look as though they were assembled by a tired carpenter who had run out of regular planks and was nailing together whatever pieces were left over from other people’s houses. You read a name like Morkporkpor and you wonder: did somebody sit down and design this, or did it simply happen, the way a thunderstorm happens, without consultation?
The honest answer — and Kokote himself would have given this answer, because the man was a serious historian beneath the laughter — is that every one of these names means something. Egavakpor in Ewe is not nonsense. It carries a story, a lineage, a piece of weather from somebody’s grandfather’s day. Morkporkpor has a meaning that the bearer’s grandmother could recite for you, slowly, with one hand on her chest. Dzidzorli means “the heart is at peace.” Imagine carrying that on your school uniform and being laughed at. The child is walking around bearing a small prayer, and the class is treating it like a tongue-twister competition.
This is the Sikaman tragedy, my friend. We laugh at the very names that are doing the most spiritual heavy lifting in the country.
The Ewes, the Gas, and our brothers from the North have a particular generosity in this matter. Their names are not stingy. An Akan name like Kofi gives you four letters and dismisses you. But an Ewe name like Elegbadzadzi — aweeii — that name has stamina. It has elevation. It enters the room before its owner and stays in the room after its owner has left. It deserves its own chair. When you call Elegbadzadzi at attendance, you have not called a student; you have delivered a small sermon.
And let us be honest: the comedic gold is at the meeting points. Where English shakes hands with Ewe and they decide to walk down the aisle together. Henry Ganyebusu. Gloria Adzovi-Smith. Bernard Tetteh-Williams-Quartey. Names that begin in one language, hire a taxi through a second, and disembark in a third. The poor pastor at the wedding has to take a deep breath before announcing the bride.
But charley, here is the thing nobody talks about. The mockery has a cost. Every Ghanaian child with a “long surname” has at some point considered shortening it. Egavakpor becomes Ega. Manukure becomes Manu. Morkporkpor becomes — well, Morkporkpor defends itself; even abbreviation cannot find an entrance. But you see what I am saying? We are quietly trimming our grandfathers down to nicknames because the Ghanaian school system never learned to pronounce them properly. We are losing language by the syllable, charley, and we are calling it convenience.
Our cousins next door in Naija are not exempted from this matter, by the way. Oluwasegunfunmilayo. Chukwuebuka. Arogunmatidi. Those names are not jokes either; they are theology. Oluwasegunfunmilayo means “God has won victory for me with joy.” Imagine introducing yourself at a job interview and the HR woman saying, “Can you give us a shorter version?” Madam, the shorter version is the joy of the Lord. There is no further reduction available. You will have to learn to spell it.
So what is the moral of this Sikaman palava, my brother? It is small. It is this:
When the register is called tomorrow morning, and the teacher arrives at the name that breaks her teeth, let us not laugh too quickly. Let us listen instead. Inside that “difficult” name is somebody’s great-grandmother. Inside it is a Tuesday in 1947 when a child was born and the elders gathered and named her after the rains. Inside it is a piece of language that the British could not bury, the missionaries could not translate, and TikTok cannot meme away.
The funny names of Sikaman are funny only because we have forgotten what they are saying. The day we remember, eyaa, we shall laugh smaller and bow lower.
I, Kwabena Kokote-not-Cocoa-Tea, rest my case.
Yours in registered amusement, Kwabena Kokote
P.S. — Madam teacher, it is pronounced eh-gah-VAH-kpor. The “kp” is one sound, not two. Practise small. The girl in the third row has been waiting since Class One.