One of the earlier personalities to break the norm over male surnames was Peter Kĩgia, a Kenyan musician who chose his mother’s name as his stage name.
Kĩgia wa Esther (son of Esther), now in his 60s, is known for playing benga – fast, rhythmic guitar folk music with lyrics in Kikuyu.
“When you take your mother’s name, it means you love and respect her,” he told the BBC, saying he had even registered his record company as Wa Esther Productions.
It now comes with a certain cachet in the music industry, with other younger male musicians following in his footsteps. Posters advertising performers with their mother’s surname, such as Waithaka wa Jane and 90K Ka Msoh, are often plastered to hoardings in the capital, Nairobi.
Though in these cases the formal names of these artistes remain male.
Journalist Simon Macharia Wangũi told the BBC he decided to deliberately choose his mother’s name as his official surname.
“Why give somebody credit where it does not exist?” he says of his father, who was absent for most of his life and about whom he has “only heard rumours of his existence”.
Mostly raised by his grandmother, he was 12 when his mother died in 2003. He had no surname until his final year of high school, when he applied for a birth certificate.
Some Kenyans still think that a child raised by a single parent “lacks certain morals”, explains Evans Kibe Waceke, a broadcaster who bears a female surname.
“People perceive you as undisciplined, especially when you are raised by a single mother,” he tells the BBC.
A heated debate over the pros and cons of having a female surname began two years ago when prominent motivational speaker Robert Burale said it undermined men’s masculinity.
This prompted TV personality Fred Mũitĩrĩri to go public about the difficulties of having a female surname – and how he ended up dropping his mother’s name, deciding to use his English and Kikuyu first names only.
“Do you know how embarrassing it is for a boy to be called out, in a room full of kids, [with] a girl’s name?” he wrote on Facebook – talking about his low self-esteem.
“From some of those experiences, I developed depression at the age of 23,” he said.
