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Wozekhaya
Why "Wozekhaya"

Come home.

The name is an ordinary sentence, not an invention. It is something families already say to each other, and what it asks for is the thing this was built to make possible.

Three Things, Kept Apart

What the words are, how they are used, and what we meant by them.

Most brand-name stories run these together until the interpretation starts to sound like a definition. These are set side by side so you can see which is which.

  1. 01 The Phrase

    woza ekhaya

    It is two words. Woza is the imperative of ukuza, to come. Ekhaya is the locative of ikhaya, home: at home, or to home.

    Together, woza ekhaya is a sentence addressed to a person. Come home. It is shared across isiZulu and isiXhosa, and it is not a formal or ceremonial construction. It is what you say.

    Wozekhaya, closed into one word, is the brand. That closing up is ours. The language has the phrase; it does not have the name.

  2. 02 How It Is Used

    An invitation, and a summons

    It is said to someone who is away. A child out at dusk, a relative in another city, somebody who has been gone long enough that the saying of it carries weight.

    So it is warm and it is not soft. It assumes there is a home to come back to and that the person belongs in it. Both halves of that assumption are doing work in the name.

  3. 03 Our Reading, Not The Language's

    One place to come back to

    We took it because it describes what the product is for. A family's life is scattered across other people's apps, and this gathers it into one private place that belongs to the family.

    Calling that coming home is an interpretation and we say so. The phrase means come home. The step from there to an app where a family keeps its photographs, its voices and its record is ours, not the language's.

We would rather be exact about an everyday phrase than flattering about ourselves. Woza ekhaya is the sentence. Wozekhaya is the brand. The reading is the part we are responsible for.

The Record Itself

The names families carry are the point.

The reading is ours. The clan names are not. They belong to the families who carry them, and every record says where it came from.

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