WHEN MILLIONS of the black diaspora were forced to start a new life from the shores of Africa and under the hands of slave owners, it left behind a diaspora of people centuries later that are still in search of the heritage and names that were taken from them.

In the Caribbean, enslaved black people worked across plantations in British colonies and built the homes of slaves owners on the grounds that many of them would live and die upon. As they were separated from family, and divided by the hue of their skin, their often given “slave names” are the only reminisce of their existence.

Jendayi Serwah, Co-chair of the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee, is a descendant of those very people who still hold connections to the names forced upon them by slave masters. 

She tells The Voice that her old slave name was “Allison,” but that she herself didn’t decide to change her name, but was instead a calling from her ancestors who have “always guided” her. 

“I know my ancestors worked with me. My journey into knowledge of self started before I reached double figures in age. So, it was part of a process of awareness,” says the Bristol native.

“I always say to people I’m thankful that I wasn’t brought up in a Christian home, because it allowed me to explore my culture, my identity and the right music was in the house. 

“I wasn’t under those kinds of restrictions that some of my peers were under because they couldn’t play reggae music in the house, you couldn’t go certain places or mix with certain people because those people were deemed to be inappropriate. 

“So, I grew up on a diet of music that was telling me about myself, telling me about my ancestry, my homeland.”

While growing up in the 70s, Jendayi recalls how the Rastafari movement was becoming prominent throughout some of the UK’s cities.

It was a religion born from the early teachings of Marcus Garvey, who denounced the rhetoric of black inferiority and preached about a return to Africa; it sounded strong Pan-African messages that resonated with her.

Though she never stayed in the movement, she says that those early years of Rastafari’s emergence in Britain and the journey to growing out her locs was a “rite of passage” for her.

As she discovered her blackness, she says it went hand-in-hand with what it meant to be white, which only pushed her further to follow her ancestors and find a new name. 

“I was about seven or eight and there were certain questions about my identity my father would ask me. And I knew from that point that there was an advantage in being white,” she says.

“I remember getting my lowest grade in school in my English studies when I wrote an essay in Patois as opposed to standard English, and I remember that and I’m fifty-seven now – it stayed with me.”

Jendayi had told herself that she wanted to take her family – at the time she just had her only son – on a trip to the motherland, to Africa. In 1994, she made the journey to Ghana because it connected her the most to her Jamaican culture. 

There, she says she embarked upon a traditional naming ceremony and was bestowed her new first name officially by one of the local chiefs – Jendayi meaning “give thanks” in the Zimbabwean language, Shona. What followed was her surname, Serwah, with roots stemming back to Ghana.

The mother-of-three says she has always been known as Jendayi since choosing to go by that name in the late 80s, but that an official naming ceremony had to be part of her process to finding herself.

Once back in the UK, she made her new name official a year later through deed poll. It cost her just £15.00.

A record 85,000 people changed their names by deed poll in 2015, according to the UK Deed Poll Service. 

For those that want their new name to be officially recognised on public records, applicants will have to go through the Royal Courts of Justice with an “enrolled” deed poll application for just over £40.00.

In September 2021, the city of Utretcht in the Netherlands gave the descendants of slave owners a chance to change their names without having to foot the bill or undergo psychological evaluation.

For Kweisi Ausar, an Associate Professor at the University of Las Vegas, he embarked upon a slightly different journey to ridding himself of his former slave name while living in the US, but says his path was very similar.

“For me, I had to dig deeper and I had to connect on a much deeper level. And when I say a much deeper level, I’m talking about a spiritual level. 

“It’s not about what my DNA says or what my family name is. It’s much more about what it is that I am here to embody. What is my nature and what is it I am supposed to be and do and all of that is couched on purpose,” he explains.

Kweisi grew up as Anthony Gatlin, and it was on a trip to an old home in Gatesville in North Carolina with his great-grandfather and great-grandmother that he first encountered the bloody legacy of the slave trade. His great-grandfather worked as a sharecropper at the house and his grandfather was held as a slave.

“When we drove up to the house in Gainesville, Carolina, the first thing I remember seeing was the mailbox with the name ‘Gatlin’ displayed,” he recalls, speaking publicly about his experience.

“I was excited at that moment to witness this generation of history, quite naive and unaware of the trauma that I was about to experience.

“So after sitting in the car for a few minutes and wondering, why are we going up and knocking on the door?” 

“A white woman came out and she looked into the mailbox and I asked, ‘Who is that?’ And my great grandfather then began to explain the history of our name, how he worked as a child on this plantation, how he ran away at an early age and came up north for a better life.”

During the Antebellum South, enslaved African-Americans made up about one-third of the population that saw them forcibly given the surnames of their slave owners, whilst working on plantations before slavery’s abolition in the US by 1865.

By the era of Jim Crow, stringent new laws that legalised racial segregation in Southern states, millions of “free” black people bore the names of slave owners that freed their ancestors just decades earlier. 

Kweisi says that the history of the Gatlin name, despite it being passed down by his non paternal great-grandfather when he took him in, is never one he’s wanted to discover after that day in Gainesville.

“Who I am is not associated with a name. I have 23% European in me… who I am is not associated with a European name, my identity is not tied to Europe.

“I do know that the name Gatlin came from a slave owner, and I don’t need to know about a slave owner – I have no interest in that,” he says. 

“I try not to live much at all in the past. I try to live in the present and with a forward leaning view. 

“So, it’s not about what was, but it’s about what is to be, what is becoming. Maybe there is something to learn or to be gained from that for some people, but for me there’s nothing good in that history. 

“There’s nothing that is life-giving in that history. If anything it is depleting to go back and look at the atrocities that have been committed and all the dysfunction that has occurred in my family and to try to draw connections. I don’t have any desire to do that.”

The journey to finding an identity is a search that has eluded Kweisi all his life, he says, and for him he found a deeper meaning in the new name he has been living with since 2020.

Derived from African origins and black ancient Egyptian spirituality, Kwesis means “conquering sons of Gods” and followed by his surname Ausar, which he believes is the “is the unifier and harmoniser of the inner shaping forces, both on Earth and in heaven.”

In search of her own identity and meaning, Jendayi says that she did go as far to trace where she came from which led her to the Kikuyu tribe in Kenya and to her old slave name.

“I was able to establish the name of a white man called Edward Allison. He was a planter. Allison was the surname my father had. There were a whole bunch of Allisons in Clarendon, in Jamaica. It’s a Scottish name and I think they traced him back to Scotland as well,” she says.

“It confirmed what it was, but it wasn’t a big deal in a way. If anything, it confirmed that that’s not my name and I shouldn’t have it and I don’t want to be associated with something which is about subjugation, torture, genocide, a heinous history and for me to carry it around psychologically…I know I didn’t want to do that.”

She adds: “I knew my ancestors populated the world way before Europeans came along, but I know that my parents came to Jamaica, because we were kidnapped. So, my DNA is predominantly African.”

In the UK, the amount of people of Caribbean descent who’ve embarked upon ridding themselves of the names of their families’ former slave owners remains unknown, because they are not required to give their ethnicity or reasons for the name change.

For many of them, the journey begins in their search to find out what their actual names were before they were taken from them. However, Paul Crooks – a genealogist who has traced his own slave name back six generations – says that although removing slave names could become a “trend,” much of the diaspora would never find a real answer.

“I think that there is a desire for people to find out their African name and change it. It often depends on where you are politically in that journey.

“The research that I’ve done suggests that my ancestor took on his Christian name, it was part of a sort of a kind of resistance that was building on the island at the time.

“John Alexander Crooks, that’s my ancestor’s slave name, the name that the slave master gave to him was August. Probably because he arrived on the island [of Jamaica] in that time.

“However, when he became baptised in 1813, he would have cast off that name took on the name John Alexander Crooks. I tracked down the 1817 slave register and it was revealed he was captured off the west-coast of Africa,” he explains.

In the 1817 slave register, he also discovered his fourth great-grandmother – Ami Djaba – who resisted the naming practises of her capturers.

“They tried to force the name Brown on her but she was having none of that, and it was only when she died in 1825 that her name was changed to Judy Brown to register her death.

“Not everybody can trace back, because slave registers do not include the African names of everybody registered, it is only the Africans that resisted the process of a culturalisation that managed to retain the name related to their culture at least for a generation.”

Professor Trevor Burnard, Director of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull, tells The Voice that only about a dozen families could trace their names back to the shores of Africa today. The naming practises throughout slavery was a deliberate move to ensure this happened as anti-black narratives took hold.

Despite commonly thought, Prof. Bernard says that only about 19% of surnames today from those that are descendant from enslaved people were actually slave names passed onto them.

From the mid to the late 18th century, many slaves were first given one name, forenames as they were stripped of their identity. In the British-Caribbean, enslaved people were often named after places like “London” or “Cambridge”; often they also took on names of English origin like “Tom” or “Bess”.

Other names like “Hercules” and “Dido” were also common to maybe amuse slave owners at the time, says Prof. Burnard, with a name like “Venus” reflecting the hyper-sexualisation that black women endured during slavery. 

In the 19th century, as many enslaved people became baptised and on the dawn of emancipation, they began to take on “Christian” forenames and surnames themselves, and in some cases were directly named after their slave owners like in the case of John Alexander Crooks.

However, Prof. Burnard warns that in the turn of descendants of slaves discovering themselves, we risk an already hazy history being re-written in the years to come.

“When enslaved people took their names in the early 19th century, it was such a profound moment, because in many ways it was cutting yourself loose from slavery but it also means in some ways you’re disconnected from your ancestors,” he says.

For Jendayi and Kweisi, although they believe that changing their former slave names won’t move the black diaspora forward, it was a personal decision that brought them closer to a home once forgotten. 

“I agree that it doesn’t move us forward collectively as a people, because people change their names for all kinds of reasons. However, it’s not rewriting history. You can’t change history, but you can change the future and I’m not suggesting that this is significant in changing the future, but it does in relation to my children’s names, who all have African names.”

“I was told by somebody your name is like your SatNav; you tell people your name, they can tell you who your family are. If I tell people my [sur]name is Serwah, they will tell me where I come from.”