The Heritage Behind Your Name
Family heritage, recorded with its sources attached. What a source does not carry is left out rather than filled in.
Look for a family name
Takes you to the directory of 700 names, where you can filter by language and by naming system. Spellings vary between sources, so a short fragment finds more than a full name.
Family Is The Day; Heritage Is The Depth
Most of what a family does together is ordinary and recent. It is the photographs from Sunday, a voice note, the date everyone is flying in for. That is the everyday of Sibaya and it is most of what it holds.
Underneath it there is a longer record: where a name came from, what it means, who is greeted when it is recited, which families do not marry into which. It is held by people rather than by institutions, and it is the part that goes first when an elder does.
These pages are that layer, published on its own so it can be read by anybody, and attached inside the app to the living relatives who carry the name. A record here describes a NAME and the sources that recorded it. It says nothing about any individual person: nobody's identity, descent or belonging is inferred from a surname, a language, a place or a test.
What Is In The Collection Today
- Family and clan records
- 700
- Languages
- 12
- Naming systems
- 7
- Praise material shown
- 354
- Praise recorded and held
- 149
- Records carrying a disagreement
- 303
Counted from the pages themselves rather than stated, so a thin section is a thin section and not a rounded-up one. Coverage is uneven and these numbers are how you can tell where.
Named In Their Own Words
These are not one system in 12 vocabularies. An isiduko is not a translated isithakazelo, a Sotho seboko is a totem, a Shona clan is named by its mutupo and subdivided by chidawo. Each is carried here under its own name, and the directory explains each in full.
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izithakazelo
isiZulu, isiNdebele (Northern Ndebele), isiNdebele (Southern Ndebele)
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iziduko
isiXhosa
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diboko
Sesotho, Sesotho sa Leboa, Setswana
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tinanatelo
siSwati
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mitupo
Tshivenda, chiShona
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swivongo
Xitsonga
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clan names
iKalanga
How This Is Sourced
Every praise, name and historical claim on these pages was read from a named source, and the source is shown beside it. Nothing is composed, completed or smoothed. Where sources disagree, both readings are kept and neither is chosen.
Oral tradition is labelled as oral tradition. It is not ranked below a written record. For a history carried by recitation, it is the authentic record. It is never presented as a documented one either.
149 praises are recorded and not shown here, under a licence hold: the unresolved question is whether Sibaya may reproduce somebody's published rendering of a communal praise, not whether the praise or the clan is real. Those clans have pages that say so. A further 9 clan names have no sourced praise at all and have no page here.
In both cases the family who holds the recitation is the authority on it, and Sibaya is built to keep it with them.