origin of "Al shabab"

The thing we call a rose, would smell just as sweet if we called it by any other name. Romeo would be just as perfect even if he wasn’t called Romeo."

These famous lines by English Poet and playwright, William Shakespeare have been the source of the now more endearing expression ‘what is in a name’.

The earliest anthropologists who travelled ‘far away lands’ (read America, Africa, Asia and Australia) thought that the peoples there were so primitive that they did not have names.

Today anthropologists are the first to acknowledge that names are part of every culture in the world and hold enormous importance in the society they are given in and to the people they are given to.

In most African cultures, a name is everything and it tells the story of the person who bears it and even of their community. Names are often derived from totems or the family trees of their parents.

Muthoni, for example, was given to the second-born daughter in a Kikuyu family. It was not considered polite to utter your mother-in-law’s name, so a daughter named in honour of the maternal mother-in-law would be called Muthoni (wa), meaning ‘my in-law’. That deference or fear or regard or respect to mothers-in-law is still adhered to today in many cultures.
cultureswere very creative when they encountered a name they could not pronounce. For example the Kikuyu name of the Catholic sister who is soon to be canonised, Sister Irene Stefani of the Consolata Missionaries, is directly translated from her acts of mercy and charity to the community. Nyaatha in Kikuyu would be ‘the one that shows mercy’ – a name well suited to a missionary of great charity works, just as Nyaguthii is the name of ‘the one who wanders’.

GROUP THAT MASSACRES

It comes as no surprise to an anthropologist, therefore, when the head of Somali intelligence, Mr Turyare, asks journalists not the refer to the group that has been terrorising Kenya as ‘Al-Shabaab’, which means ‘youth’ in Arabic.