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In South Africa there are so many naming traditions they can sprain the brightest brain. Our Afrikaans-speaking namers are often particularly kre8iv; read on ...

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First, a brief history lesson: whether from conviction or just feeling that my enemy's enemy is my friend, there was considerable support for Hitler's Germany from (some of) the Afrikaans community before and during WWII. In the fifties, we had a minister of foreign affairs (Eric Louw) who named his son Izan, thereby making the unfortunate child a backward Nazi (well, weren't they all ...?)

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And another: as I understand it, Americans who crossed the plains in covered wagons did it from sound capitalist motives; our equivalent was for political reasons - basically, to get as far away from the English (the new colonial power - the Dutch hadn't bothered about the place much when it was theirs). So, off they went in oxwagons. An oxwagon is an (AW-se-vah). In due course, war came with the English; for various reasons, none of 'em good, Afrikaner women and children were interned in concentration camps (they provided r and r for their soldier menfolk if left on the farms which they couldn't work properly, etc) where diseases were rife and the death rate appallingly high. OK. Such camps got surrounded archetypically with barbed wire, then a newish invention. Barbed wire is (DOO-er-ung-draht).

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So, then, the 100th anniversary of the Great Trek (the covered-wagon lads and lasses) came in 1938 - a good time for feeling sentimental, Germanic and anti-English. Centenary celebration = (EEYOU-fearss).

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With me so far, gentle reader? Then it won't surprise you that there was a bumper crop of little girls, that year, named Eeufesia, Ossewania and Doringdradina.

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Let's fast-forward to the sixties, when the black liberation movements were gaining confidence and a measure of white support. One man, white and Anglo, was tried and imprisoned for treason (= supporting the black majority) - he and a fellow prisoner managed to escape, never been clear how; anyway, this was all over the newspapers etc and we all understood that his daughter was named Amandla, with an L - it means Power and the slogan was Power to the people. , more or less. Years later she applied for a passport and it turned out that she had been boring old Amanda all the time!