If the personal is political, is this also true of the names we have? My name is Robert Beckford - may not sound like much at a first glance, but for those ‘in the know’ my surname is prevalent in the Jamaican and British telephone directories. All of which suggests I could be Jamaican, British or both. Well, as part of the African Caribbean diasporan in Britain, I occupy the ‘or both’ category. This is not an easy space to occupy because, like many other African Caribbean British, my name symbolises a historical and ideological battleground. Let me explain.

My name is a slave name, a physical, material and psychological ‘brand’ given to my slave ancestors by their owners. The white Beckford family was a major slaveholding family. At their height they owned 22 plantations and some 1600 African slaves in Jamaica. As J.Lees-Milne points out in his publication William Beckford, the first Beckford began slave trading and planting as early as the later part of the 1660s. For almost 200 years as a result of the huge profits from their plantations in Jamaica, a plethora of Beckford descendants lived lives of luxury and influence in Jamaica and England. Their annual income was between £30,000 – £150,000 per annum back in the 19th century! Even at the end of Slavery in 1834, the white family, like other slave owners, received a lump sum for their losses - over £200,000 in compensation. In contrast the black Beckfords, as in the case of other slaves received nothing. There are descendants of both the slave owning and enslaved Beckfords living in Britain today of which I am one.

As is the case with my name, surnames and forenames are important in African diasporan communities. They tell our history and as a dimension of culture represent a cultural journey from Africa to post-colonial Britain. This kind of cultural journeying is expressed in Stuart Hall’s analysis of cultural identities in his book Cultural Identity and Diaspora:

“Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories ....identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past.”

In Black British communities the relationship between historical journey and social positioning are central to the process of naming. For instance, many of my parents’ generation were named after famous English people. Hence names such as Winston, Leonard, Mary, Elizabeth all featured in some way in the naming process. (You can find out more about such names in D.Hiro’s book Black, British, White British: A Story of Race Relations in Britain). This Windrush generation were also named after biblical characters such as Naomi, Samson or Joseph due to the influence of English Christianity on Caribbean societies. However, a radical shift took place amongst second and third generation African Caribbean British. Faced with a “two souls” consciousness, a sense of African history and also the persistent forces of oppression in the domestic locale, they choose to name their children in more creative ways.

Some went back to Africa to find forenames from African places, tribes and names in order to reconnect their offspring to their African past. For example, I have friends who named their child ‘Ashanti,’ and another family with a child called ‘Kush’ to name but a few. Other friends changed their English forenames for African ones. I know of people, who were named by their Jamaican parents with banal names like 'Jennifer', 'Mary ' and 'Sam' but opted to change these names to the likes of 'Assata', 'Kembe' and 'Kwame'. Intriguingly, the present third and fourth generations ‘create’ names through a creative play on orality. One only needs to look at the register from any school in the black community to see a plethora of creative, and beautiful sounding names designating African Caribbean children. ‘Kai, ’ ‘Ashay’ and ‘Tinay’ are a few of the names of children in my local primary school. However, despite our willingness to find new ‘Christian names’ we have generally been unwilling to investigate the legacy of our surnames, namely the ‘brand’ that we carry as a reminder of our slave past. African Caribbean surname investigation is of great importance because how we describe ourselves, and our ‘names’ have power in defining who we are and how we understand ourselves.