PROMINENT author and academic, George Kahari, last week launched two books at a colourful ceremony in Harare attended by fellow academics and government officials.
BY TINASHE MUCHURI
The professor emeritus at the University of Zimbabwe said it took him 64 years to produce the Standard Shona-English Dictionary of Names, while ‘The Odyssey of Shona Imaginative Narratives’ is a compilation of conference papers produced from 1964 to 2016.
The dictionary of Shona names drew much interest, as guests were keen to check the meanings of their names.
Some of the names in the dictionary are Dzamara and Mugabe. According to the dictionary, Dzamara means one who disappears suddenly, while Mugabe means “leader”.
Kahari said Shona names were always determined by circumstances and conditions in which children were born.
“Although the name might suggest criticism of a certain member of the family or clan, no malice is intended, and, if the person is criticised, there is nothing he can do except give the same child, or the next one, a name that counters the criticism,” he said.
Kahari said people often used names to convey certain messages in a subtle way.
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“The daughter-in-law can criticise the in-laws, the son-in-law his in-laws, and the man-in-the-street can criticise the chief’s actions, which, under normal circumstances, are considered taboo and punishable with severity,” he said.
Kahari said the dictionary of Shona names was inspired by his former teacher, Joseph Dambaza, father to the late nationalist, James Chikerema in 1950 when he was training as a primary teacher at Kutama College.
“I was doing Native Primary Teachers Higher Certificate at Francis Xavier College at Kutama Mission, as the first group of that kind of training, and in the early 1950s I can say I came across an inspirational article called The Meaning
and Significance of Shona Names written by Silas Mundawarara, a medical doctor in Salisbury now Harare, which I read with a lot of enthusiasm,” he said.
