Ga and Dangme names: what Tetteh, Dede and Nii tell you

Accra is Ga land, and a Ga name works like an address. Where an Akan name starts with the day you were born, a Ga name says which child you were and which family, quarter and town you come from - an elder can often place a stranger from the name alone. The Dangme - the Krobo, Ada, Shai and Ningo peoples to the east - name in a similar way.

The Ga names here are from a Ghana News Agency feature on Ga naming (Laudia Sawer, July 2024) and an interview with a veteran Ga teacher (March 2024); the Krobo ones from The GaDangme (Naa Adjeley Tsofanye, 2016).

The eighth day

A Ga child is named on the eighth day after birth, at the ceremony called kpodziemɔ, later only if the baby is ill. Elders often know the name before the child is born, because it follows from the child’s sex and its place among the family’s children.

— Outdooring: the naming ceremony

Birth order

• Sons: Tettey, then Tetteh, then Kwei or Mensa, and so on to the tenth, Badu.
• Daughters: Dede, Korkor, Kai or Mansa, Tsotsoo, Fofo, Ashami and Botswe, first to seventh.

The feature does not list the sons between the third and the tenth. Mensa, Mansa and Badu are the same counting names the Akan use.

Family and town names

Each family has names of its own, which trace a child’s clan, quarter and family. Some cross between clans, but many place a person at once:

Nungua’s Bor- names are the easiest of all for other Ghanaians to place.

Nii and Naa

Most Ga carry Nii (for men) or Naa (for women) before their names - Nii Odoi, Naa Korkor. The words mean king and queen. The feature links them, following the scholar A. A. Amartey, to the Ga belief that ancestors return as newborns.

Day names

Ga families also give a day name, taken from the Akan:

Twins

Two boys are Akwete and Akuete, or Oko and Akuete; two girls Akweley and Akuorkor; a boy and a girl Oko and Akweley. The children after twins are Tawiah, Agoe and Abam, for a boy or a girl. A mother who has twins twice adds Tawiah to the second pair’s names.

— Twins, and the children after them

Krobo and Dangme names

The Krobo count children too, and some of the names are the Ga ones:

In a household with several wives, each wife counted her own children, so two daughters could both be Dede. A word was added to tell them apart: Tsu, “reddish”; Yumu, “dark”; Ŋua, “tall”; Wayo, “small” - so Dede-Tsu and Dede-Yumu.

• Family names name the family house and, through it, an ancestor: Padi, Aŋmɔ, Kɔle and Dzaba, each with its own forms for the first and second son and daughter - Padite and Padinɔ, Padiki and Padikwɔ.
• After the father’s death: Doku for a boy, Dokuyo for a girl - the child is what remains of him.
• After children have died: Nibɔ, Ohipeni or Odɔkɔ, with the child’s face marked, to make it unappealing to the spirits that took the others.

Names being lost

Ga teachers and clergy worry that the system is slipping. Daniel Kabu Narteh, who has taught Ga for more than forty years, told the Ghana News Agency that families now delay the naming for months, hold it on whatever weekend suits, and choose fashionable names - Dromo for Grace, Dzormor for blessing - that say nothing about where the child is from. His advice: hold the traditional naming on the eighth day and the church baptism afterwards, because “people are born into families before joining religious organisations”.

— All Ghanaian day names — Festivals in Ghana, Homowo among them — Learning Twi and Ga