What’s in a Name, or Should I Say, Thanks for the Memolies

One of my favorite places to stop in Zambia is a gas station and fast food joint run by the Continental Oil Company. It stands at a crossroads, where the Great North Road spurs a branch to the Copperbelt. It’s nothing much really. I guess what I like about it is that it’s always buzzing with activity, regardless of when you’re there. Women prance around hawking bananas and apples from the large straw-woven saucer-like trays they balance on their heads. Smooth-talking young men try enticing motorists with bootleg CDs, the first track of which is usually the only good one. One young women toting a typically cute baby in a chitenge approached me with her boiled peanuts. I wasn’t won over by the boiled peanuts I once had at a Charleston, SC minor league baseball game, and I find the soggy legumes no more appealing here in Zam. Besides I’d just bought some raw peanuts, which I love. I greeted the boiled peanut vendor through the open truck window, then drew two shrink-wrapped packs of raw nuts from my pocket and flashed them at her. She burst into laughter. I asked the age and name of her beautiful baby. Three months she said, and her baby’s name was “Memoly”. I was stumped. Had she said Emily, or was it some adaptation thereof? I asked her to repeat it, and again. Then I remembered. There is no “R” in the Bemba alphabet, and for whatever reason Bembas frequently interchange the letters “R” and “L”. Oh, I get it, this is “Memory”! (And you thought you caught a very public I misspelling in my headline, didn’t you? Gotcha’!) Yes, Memory’s mom said as she concentrated to pronounce the “R”. I can’t remember if I asked Memory’s mom her name, but do remember telling her I wouldn’t forget to remember Memory! In former days as a marketer I remember discussing communication strategies that were “aspirational.” Isn’t that exactly what so many Zambian forenames are, aspirational? I work with a Zambian man named Knowledge and have met others named Progress, Happy, Funny, Smart, Beauty, Precious, Purity, Lazarus, and of course, Memory! Perhaps we are a bit more familiar with another one of these aspirational names: Hope. And perhaps that is what these names give the Zambians who give and receive such names. This brings to mind the name Charles Revson, founder of the Revlon cosmetics company. Revson was quoted as saying something like, “I’m not in the beauty business; I’m in the business of selling hope.” I suspect the hope wrapped up in these Zambian names is a bit less superficial than what Revson offered.