Naming practices as a technique for rewriting African women into history

Abstract

Although daughterhood is a gendered identity, often invoked in nationalist discourses to further nationalist agenda, its ‘private’ status is often silenced or misrepresented in public discourses. This article, however, examines how naming practices re/signify the private selves of Wambui Waiyaki Otieno and Wangari Muta Maathai, two Kenyan women politicians, as political. This re/signification is made possible by the two memoirists advancing names in their memoirs as a discursive technique for negotiating their public and private identities. The assumption guiding the argument is that the two narrators either identify with or reject certain names related to individuals, places, political movements, or cultural aspects with whom they identify as biological or ideological daughters. The article finds that the narrators neither valorize the private nor public aspects of their daughterhood. Rather, they foreground alternate facets of their public or private daughterhood to suit a specific purpose, depending on the desired agenda they wish to foreground.