Edited by Azizi Powell
This is Part I of a three part pancocojams series about the "most common" African surname in each African nation.
Part I of this series presents an alphabetized liist of the 54 African nations with the most common last name (surname) in each of those nations.
Information about Forbears is included in this post.
An Addendum to this post presents the differences between the Forbears website data about the most common last name in each Africa nation and a November 2020 map of Africa with drawn with what was purported to be "the most common" last name in each African nation.
That map is included in several online articles about the Net Credit sponsored reseach of the most common surname in nations in Africa and in most nations throughout the world. continent.
Part II and Part III present selected comments from a Sept. 19 and 20, 2020 discussion about the most common African surname as indicated in research commissioned by New Credit. (2020).
Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2021/08/excerpts-from-2020-african-discussion.html for Part II of this series and Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2021/08/excerpts-from-2020-african-discussion_23.html for Part III of this series.
The content of this post is presented for onomastic purposes.
All copyrights remain with their owners.
Tbanks to all those who collected this data and thanks to all those who are quoted in this post.
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INFORMATION ABOUT FORBEARS
Excerpt #1
From https://forebears.io/about
"Forebears is a genealogy portal, which includes:
The site was launched on the 20th of June 2012.”…
****
Except #2
From https://wikitia.com/wiki/Forebears.io
"Forebears is a genealogy website that catalogs online
genealogy sources by locality, but is primarily known for its surname mapping
feature. It is the 7th most visited genealogy website by visitor numbers[3] and
is based in Serbia.
[…]
Names
The main service of the website is a facility displaying the
distribution of given names and surnames, their meaning and demographic
statistics relating to their bearers.
[…]
The service contains over 172,000 descriptions of surnames,
in eight languages[13]. Most are produced from third party sources, while
others are submitted by website visitors or produced in-house.
[…]
The data is used heavily by genealogists[15][16]
(particularly genetic genealogists) and referenced by around 100 members of The
Guild of One-Name Studies[17]. Name distribution data from Forebears has been
referenced in over 70 published academic papers[18]”…
-snip-
I gathered the "most common last name in each African nation" by going to each website using a link such as https://forebears.io/cameroon/surnames. (Substitute the nation's name in the link). That page includes a statement about the total number of surnames in that nation which Forbears is aware, the list of ranked names, and each of their "incidence" and "frequency". That information isn't cited in the alphabetized list found in this pancocojams post.
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ALPHABETIZED LIST OF AFRICAN NATIONS WITH THE "MOST COMMON" LAST NAME (SURNAME) FOR EACH NATION
(retrieved August 22, 2021)
Nation & most common last name (added to that list and given in parenthesis)
1. Algeria (Saidi)
2. Angola (Manuel)
3. Benin (Bio)
4. Botswana (Molefe)
5. Burkina
Faso-(Ouedraogo)
6. Burundi –(Nkurunziza)
7. Cameroon (Hamadou)
8. Cape
Verde (Lopes)
9. Central
African Republic (Mamadou) and (Moussa) #1 tie
10. Chad (Mahamat)
11. Comoros (Mohamed)
12. Ivory
Coast [Côte d’Ivoire] (Kone)
13. Democratic
Republic of the Congo (Ilunga)
14. Djibouti (Mohamed)
15. Egypt (Mohamed)
16. Equatorial
Guinea (Nguema)
17. Eritrea (Ali)
18. Eswatini [formerly Swaziland] (Dlamini)
19. Ethiopia (Tesfaye)
20. Gabon (Ndong)
21. Gambia (Jallow)
22. Ghana (Mensah)
23. Guinea (Diallo)
24. Guinea-Bissau (Gomes)
25. Kenya (Otieno)
26. Lesotho (Mohapi)
27. Liberia (Kollie)
28. Libya (Ali)
29. Madagascar (Rakotomalala)
30. Malawi (Banda)
31. Mali (Traore)
32. Mauritania (Ba)
33. Mauritius (Beharry)
34. Morocco (Ait)
35. Mozambique (Langa)
36. Namibia (Johannes)
37. Niger (Mohammed)
38. Nigeria (Ibrahim)
39. Republic
of the Congo (Ngoma)
40. Rwanda (Uwimana)
41. Sao Tome and Principe (Fernandes)
42. Senegal (Ndiaye)
43. Seychelles (Hoareau)
44. Sierra Leone (Kamara)
45. Somalia (Ali)
46. South
Africa (Dlamini)
47. South
Sudan (Deng)
48. Sudan (Ahmed)
49. Tanzania (Juma)
50. Togo (Akakpo)
51. Tunisia (Trabelsi)
52. Uganda (Akello)
53. Zambia (Phiri)
54. Zimbabwe (Moyo)
-snip-
Source for the alphabetical list of African nations - https://www.countryaah.com/african-countries/
"Besides 54 independent nations, there are also two
dependencies in Africa.
Saint Helena (U.K.)"
-snip-
This above list of African nations also doesn't include Western Sahara.
****
ADDENDUM: NET CREDIT'S AFRICAN MAP WITH "THE MOST COMMON LAST NAME" IN EACH NATION INCLUDED ON THAT MAP
Excerpt #1:
From https://www.netcredit.com/blog/most-common-name-country/
By Barbara Davidson, November 24, 2019: The Most Common Last Name in Every Country
1. The Most Common Last Names in Africa
In Africa, most surnames are connected to geographic origin,
occupation, lineage or personal characteristics. One surname-type unique to the
continent is the praise-name, which expresses character traits or other
admirable attributes.[6] Ilunga, for example, is of Bantu origin. It roughly
translates to “a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time,
to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time.”[7] It is the most common
surname in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
[...]
Muslims constitute around 30% of the population of sub-Saharan Africa, which likely explains the Islamic root of many African surnames.[13] In Chad, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt and Sudan, the most common last name is some variation or epithet of Muhammad, the founder of Islam, which also translates to “praiseworthy.”[14]
[…]
Methodology
To determine the most common last name in every country,
NetCredit analyzed surname data from genealogy portal Forebears.io, various
country censuses and other sources. Etymological information came from the
Oxford Dictionary of American Family Names, the Oxford Dictionary of Family
Names in Britain and Ireland, and a number of other sources.”…
-snip-
As indicated by its name and its website labeling, Net Credit is a personal loan, line of credit business.
This article includes information about the Net Credit results for all of the world's continents. The map with each nation's "most common last name" is shown in this article for each of the continents.
This article transposed the Net Credit results (which are the same as the Forbears results) for the most common last name in Cape Verde and the most common last name in Sao Tome and Principe.
****
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE FORBEARS "MOST COMMON LAST NAME" (retrieved on August 22, 2021) AND THE MOST COMMON FIRST NAME FOR CERTAIN AFRICAN NATIONS IN NET CREDIT'S AFRICAN MAP
The earliest date that I came aross for this map is November 2020, in the excerpt of the article found above.)
Nation - "Most common last name" (given in parenthesis)
Cameroon (Ngo)
Central African Republic (Moussa) given alone instead of (Mamadou) and (Moussa) #1 tie in the Forbears data for Central African Republic
Kenya (Mwangi) ["Mwangi" is listed as #3 in the Forbears data, with "Otieno" as #1 and "Mohamed" as #2 in the Forbears data for Kenya.]
Morocco
(Alaoui) ["Alaoui" is given as #2 in the Forbears data for Morocco.]
Niger (Abdou) [ The "Abdou" surname doesn't appear to be listed in the Forbears ranked lists of names for Niger.]
South Africa (Nkosi); ["Nkosi is given as #2 in the Forbears dats for South Africa.]
Togo (Lawson) [This surname isn't included
in Forbears' ranked list of 45 names for Togo.]
Morocco
(Alaoui) ["Alaoui" is given as #2 in the Forbears data for Morocco.]
****
This concludes Part I of this three part pancocojams series.
Thanks for visiting pancocojams.
Visitor comments are welcome.
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