Men, one way or another, have final say over what last name a child carries
If a girl uses her mother’s maiden name, even that belongs to a man – granddad
“It’s a catch-22 situation because, in some way or another, all our surnames – maiden and married – belong to men.
“Even when you choose to use your mother’s surname, it still belongs to a man: her father. This is the kind of complex, contradictory crossroads we often find ourselves at …”
The text above is an excerpt from Miss Behave, a book by Malebo Sephodi. I commissioned this book, in the way that I did because I felt that there were many conversations we are not having as women that we should have.
What I did not expect though, is for the final product to stir me in the way it has and continues to do.
My daughter’s paternal grandmother passed away just over two weeks ago, an event that necessitated my driving to Phalaborwa, Limpopo, to take her to her family as they laid her grandmother to rest.
This would be my daughter’s first visit to her grandmother’s house, a mistake on my and her father’s part. One always assumes there is time and that things can still be done.
For the first time I watched my daughter around people who look like her and whose DNA she shares and wondered if I had been unreasonable in denying her father’s request for her to carry his surname.
This was a decision informed largely by the fact that I do not want the admin of living with a child with a different surname to mine.
This is when the excerpt above came to my mind. Who does my daughter belong to?
If TV shows like Utatakho and Khumbulekhaya are anything to go by, African children belong to their fathers as well as their trigger-happy ancestors.
Even though in countries like ours the burden of raising children that belong to their fathers lies squarely on the shoulders of the mothers whose ancestors are never silly in denying someone a job opportunity because they don’t ‘know their child’. What is in a surname? This question has been raging, howling in my mind since then. Is it a question of identity, a question of belonging? When I watched my daughter walking the grounds of her grandmother’s house, it was with the same conviction that she walks with in my father’s house.
If it is a question of belonging, then surely Lesedi belongs to my family just as much as she belongs to her father’s?
If it is identity then how much of a service would it do her to have to discount half of what she is made of? Do the two families not have equal rights and stake to this child?
It feels to me much like when two entities go into a business venture, both with equal shares, there exists at any given point the possibility of one entity buying out the other.
A deal is made, money changes hands and the other loses their stake. Much like what happens when a boy’s family pays damages for a child and when a man pays lobola. With the former, the minute the transaction is complete, the bride forfeits her surname, a surname that was never her’s to begin with, but a surname she owned. With the latter, a child gets given a father’s surname, through a transaction, an expectation.
Sometimes, children get given the mother’s surname because of resentment, sometimes as punishment to a father who has chosen someone else. Sometimes, it is given the mother’s surname because there is no alternative; no one has to claim their stake and to buy anyone out of theirs.
My quest is to give my daughter the liberation I never had, in all aspects of life. And it has become clear that that could now include a new way of identifying herself, a new surname, her own.