For most of my life, I've lived in places where no one can pronounce my name correctly. I remember correcting my teachers in 7th grade – it's “Matthew,” not “Matt.” I gave up by 9th grade, and the latter stuck. In high school, running cross-country, I was always “Rishav.” In college, I was sometimes “Shahvee.”
Here, I go by “Mateus,” the Portuguese form of Matthew. But a lot of people insist on calling me by my real name. I hear “Mattoo” often (the sound “th” doesn't exist in Portuguese) and, more often, “Mattoos,” as if I were plural. My favorite variation, the origin of which I am still not certain, is “Mattauser.” It makes me think of a mean German dog breed.
However, relatively few people know me by these names. To everyone else, I'm “Teacha.”
Yesterday, I went to a friend's house and her daughter met me at the door.
Who is it, my friend asked from inside.
“It's senhor...umm...senhor...”
The daughter looked towards the sky, tapped her foot a couple of times on a mound of dirt.
“It's Teacha.”
Mozambican names have remained difficult for me to remember, although I teach to 300 and some different ones a few times every week. Names are often Portuguese, though many of them are Portuguese spellings of words in Chisena or Ndau, the local ethnically-derived dialects. I am particularly terrible at remembering words from the second catagory. Ana, João, Joaquim, José, Manuel, Maria, Pedro, Sara – I've gotten pretty good at remembering these. Many of them are derived from the same roots as English names, and so I can match them up - Pedro and Peter, for instance, or João and John. Chipanga, Chissiua, Ndaipa, Tingarene (“Tingareenee”), Tangane (“Tanganee”), however, seem to evade my memory more often. I have no method of attaching them to anything I already know (Although, the longer I live here, the better I get at remembering these names for themselves).
Family names of Mandau and Sena (Mandau and Sena refer to the ethnicity of people; Ndau and Chisena to the languages used by these ethnicities) are passed on by first name, from the father. If someone were named Maria José Pedro, her father would have been named José and her father's father, Pedro. If she marries a man named Manuel, their children will carry the last name Manuel. Manuel's father's and father's father's names will come after Manuel's in the children's names. Carrying on in this fashion, some Mozambicans have 5 or 6 names. However, full names are often shortened to two or three names, those of the most recent relatives. As one Mozambican friend explained to me, “You need to remember your family, where you come from. But it's just too much to write on all of those forms.”
Like on a cross-country team back home, people often get nicknamed with their last names. Manuel Chipanga, for instance, might only be known as Chipanga. People are also nicknamed by their occupations: Comissário, for instance, or Commando. These names, as opposed to their birth names, often make their way into their children's names.
And, in this manner, I am known simply as “Teacha.” Sometimes “Teacha Mateus” or the Portuguese equivalent, “Professor Mateus.” When people use my full name, I'm “Mateus Alberto.” I am, in incomplete English, “Teacha Mattoos.” And, my favorite: “Teacha Mattauser” – the educated, but mean-looking, Schnauser/Rotweiler combination.
