Akan day names: what Kwame, Ama and Yaa tell you about an ancestor
· 5 min read
An Akan child receives a kradin, a soul name, determined by the day of the week on which they were born. It is given at the naming ceremony and carried for life, often alongside other names given later.
For anyone reconstructing a family from incomplete records, this is unusually valuable. Most names tell you about the people who chose them. An Akan day name tells you a verifiable fact about the person who carries it.
The names
| Day of birth | Male | Female |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday | Kwasi | Akosua |
| Monday | Kwadwo | Adwoa |
| Tuesday | Kwabena | Abenaa |
| Wednesday | Kwaku | Akua |
| Thursday | Yaw | Yaa |
| Friday | Kofi | Afua |
| Saturday | Kwame | Ama |
Spellings shift between Akan dialects and across a century of colonial record-keeping. Kwadwo appears as Kojo, Kwasi as Kwesi, Afua as Efua, Akua as Ekua. Treat these as the same name rather than as different people, a distinction that matters when you are matching records.
Using a day name as evidence
Because the name encodes the weekday, it can be checked against any recorded date. If a register gives a birth date, the weekday of that date should match the name. When it does not, one of the two is wrong, and you have found something worth chasing.
Where no date survives at all, the name still narrows the possibilities. If family memory places a birth in a particular month and the person was Kwame, only the Saturdays in that month are candidates.
Neighbouring systems
Day naming is not unique to the Akan. Ewe speakers use a parallel set, in which a Thursday-born man is Yao or Yawo, closely echoing the Akan Yaw. Ga naming works differently again, encoding birth order within the father's line rather than the day.
For a family whose branches cross these groups, and many Ghanaian families do, the naming system in use is itself a clue about which community a branch married into.
What to record
- Record the day name separately from other given names, so it stays searchable and does not get lost inside a long string of names.
- Record every spelling variant you encounter in a record, rather than silently normalising to one.
- Where a day name and a recorded date disagree, keep both and note the conflict instead of resolving it by guesswork.