Where did my name come from? Well Legend has it …

My legal surname that I am known by and appears on my academic papers, Owaraga, is my late father’s name. Two legends about it, that I know of. The first legend. His father, my late grandfather, was a chief and who served under the Kabaka, King of Buganda, during the proxy colonisation of the Greater…

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Where did your name come from?

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My legal surname that I am known by and appears on my academic papers, Owaraga, is my late father’s name. Two legends about it, that I know of.

The first legend. His father, my late grandfather, was a chief and who served under the Kabaka, King of Buganda, during the proxy colonisation of the Greater Eastern Region, the Eastern Provinces of Uganda, our ancestral homeland, by Buganda for the British.

There was a chief of Buganda or a person of high standing within the circles of my late grandfather, whose name was Walaga.

My late father was named after that person, Walaga, and the name was domesticated into Ateso (the langauge of Iteso, our language) nomenclature. An “O” was added to the name and the “L” was converted to an “R”.

For the fun of it, just Google searched the meaning of the name “Walaga”, and I was surprised by the results. According to Forebears, approximately 478 people bear this name in the world. That it is most prevalent in Tanzania; with the highest density in Papua New Guinea. Amazing!

The second legend. In Ateso, the word for story is “awaragat”; and this is where the name is derived to denote a male story teller.

Both legends highly plausible.