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African names were more commonly found in British colonies—where even Africans with Anglo names gave their progeny African names—more so than in Portuguese and Spanish colonies since, in the latter cases, Africans were usually baptized and given Christian names prior to their departure from Africa or upon their arrival in the Americas. Akan “day names” were a very early African naming pattern uncovered in documents related to the past few centuries of the Americas, and these names often occur in their Akan form in plantation inventories and runaway advertisements. The structure of Akan names followed the seven-day week with male and female versions: Monday (Kwadwo, Adowa), Tuesday (Kwabena, Abena), Wednesday (Kwaku, Akua), Thursday (Yaw/Kwao, Yaa/Aba), Friday (Kofi, Afia/Afua), Saturday (Kwame/Kwamena, Amma/Amba), and Sunday (Kwasi, Akosua/ Esi). Some African and Akan persons, however, carried Akan names in translation (e.g., Monday) or in Anglo form, but even among these Africans, owners had little control over what enslaved Africans called themselves and others in the slave quarters, fields, and other places out of the general purview of whites. To be sure, many owners recorded African names in general and Akan names in particular in varied types of documents. One example of an Akan name in translation is found in the case of Louisa Gause of South Carolina, one of more than two thousand formerly enslaved persons interviewed by Federal Writers’ Project workers in the 1930s. Louisa was technically not a “slave” if her father had documented her “age in de Bible” and, in doing so, noted that she was born “de first year of freedom.” Louisa’s father was named Cudjo (Pa Cudjo), and her grandfather was named Monday, an English translation of Kwadwo (“Monday-born male”).
-Kwasi Konadu, The Akan Diaspora in the Americas
