As one grows older, you look back at some things your parents did and you thought they were embarrassing, but then you realize, you have become your parents without knowing it. I always thought my parents were embarrassing because they were semi illiterate and they lacked modern sophistication. Unlike our parents, most of my generation went to school, got well paying jobs in the cities and big towns where we used computers, fax machines, copier machines, standard dialing telephones and even had telephones in our homes. Some even drove nice cars.
We raised our children with modern amenities in our homes. Gas and electric cookers, refrigerators, microwaves, color TVs with VCR, Video Games, cell phones and much more. We gave our children “cool” names like Brian, Yvonne, Brenda, Ian, Michele, Tony, Chloe, names we picked up from novels, TV shows and movies. Our Pioneer Parents could not pronounce our children’s strange sounding first names, but us, we pronounced them with a tweng. It is hard to imagine we were the same people shrubbing our own names just a few years prior. Back then, we had introduced ourselves as “my name is Grandys …. preasure to meet you Tambitha”, and here we were now twenging our children’s fancy names.
Anyhow, our parents had followed the Kikuyu naming system strictly, giving us the full names of the relatives they named us after, regardless of how horrible their first / baptism names were. If a grandmother was named Jacobed Nyathogora, all the girls named after her were given both her names, the baptism and the middle name. You can understand the middle name being mandatory because that is the Kikuyu naming tradition, but to burden a small child with an unusual first name like Jacobed to carry into the next generation, that was a little bit much. So, for my “sophisticated” generation, we kept the tradition by giving our daughters the middle name Nyathogora, but we exercised our parental authority and replaced the Jacobed name with something more palatable like Yvonne.
With all that, I thought our children would find us “cool” and sophisticated. I thought they would want to socialize with us, because we can communicate well in English and unlike our parents, we tried to be ‘friends’ with our children. I thought they would be very proud to introduce us to their friends because we are not embarrassing or backwards like our parents.
