This past week, the newspapers reported with some mirthful consternation that the Registrar of Political Parties had rejected some applications by persons who sought to register political parties by names which included the words “Kieleweke” and “Tangatanga”.
This trend may have begun about a fortnight ago when social media was awash with another letter by which the said Registrar had declined to register another political grouping, which included the Kiswahili word “Mafisi” in its name.
The reasons given in all those instances was that the names were generally improper because they were either playful, deceptive or in some instances even vulgar.
As a matter of law, the registrar is permitted to decline any application for registration of a political party if the name sought is either already registered by another party, vulgar or carries an improper meaning.
On this basis one may see why the “Mafiosi” name was rejected. It comes from the Kiswahili word for a Hyena and is sued in Kenya to imply voracious sexuality.
COMPANIES ACT
But names don’t only matter in the case of political parties. The Companies Act permits the Registrar to decline to register a company if the name with which it is presented for registration is offensive or undesirable.
In fact, the regulations drawn under the Companies Act are more specific. They declare that the Registrar should decline to register a name if it could offend members of a particular community.
The Companies House in the United Kingdom is said to have rejected, among others, the applications for registration of companies with the names “Titanic Holdings” and Fanny’s Kebabs Limited.
The Trademark Act goes along to also prohibit the registration of any trademark which contains any word that is scandalous, likely to deceive confusion.
This is not limited to Kenya or even to inanimate objects. There are countries which have laws that dictate names within the private law sphere. These laws state that parents may not give their children some names.
PUBLIC POLICY
An example is the case last year which has been discussed in this column before.
Early this year, a court in France prohibited the football fan parents of child from registering the child by the names “Mbappe-Griezmann”.
The couple were adept soccer fans and they took the name from the combination of two football players who had represented France in the 2018 World Cup.
The two players, Antoine Griezmann and Kylian Mbappe, scored goals in the win by France over Croatia in the Final.
The reasoning here was that the names would be contrary to the interest of the child and ignored the rights of third parties to have their names protected.
But France is not alone on this kind of thinking, New Zealand actually has a list of officially unavailable names for children. These include names such as “4Real”; “Mafia No Fear”. They are considered as being against public policy.
But the list also prohibits names that may carry aspirations of the parents for their child such as “Duke”, Princess, King or even Bishop. Sweden is also in this league and has rejected endeavours to name a child as “Superman.”
GENDER CLARITY
I cannot imagine how this would pan out in Kenya where we have children named “Chief” and a friend’s known as “Director”!
In Germany, the legal requirement is that the first name must bear clarity as to the gender of the child in order for it to be included in the birth certificate.
Norway, too, is serious about this that a woman who refused to change the name of the child to an approved name found herself in jail for two days.
Iceland will not include names which do not exist in the Icelandic alphabet.
The control of names and identification symbols goes to vehicle registration plates as well.
The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency of Wales stated in 2017 that it would not register number plates consisting of words and figures which were configured in a manner that is deemed potentially offensive.
One of these was a number plate that reads “MUR67DER”, which could read Murder.
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
In New Hampshire, a woman is challenging a decision by the Department of Motor vehicles asking her to surrender a Number Plate she had used for over a decade.
The reason for the directive was that the abbreviated vanity number plate contained an acronym that referred to an excretory function.
The woman on her part argues that the acronym is a reminder to her children to visit the washroom before the start of every journey and cannot possibly be offensive.
But there are complaints that the prohibition against public choosing names for their children depicts a society that is given to excessive political correctness in a manner that infringes on individual freedom.
This point was made in the case of Lancu and Brunetti in the United States Supreme Court.
In that case, Mr Erik Brunetti applied to the United States Patent and Trademark office for registration of a trademark which contained some words whose abbreviation consisted of a word the Trademark Office thought was a rude swear word.
The application was therefore rejected on the ground that the mark was deemed offensive.
MORAL POLICE
The applicant’s lawyers appealed this decision at the United States Supreme Court and argued that the decision by the Trademark office was an infringement of the applicant’s freedom of speech that the First Amendment is meant to protect.
The court had pointed advise for the moral police of speech and noted that the freedom of speech is meant to protect precisely the kind of speech that people generally view as offensive and not for political correctness.
Noting that the determination as to whether specific language is offensive is a notion that shifts over time. It can depend on who is speaking and in what context.
It is not the government’s job to police speech through its intellectual property arm, the court ruled.
Justice Helena Kagan said, “There are a great many immoral and scandalous ideas in the world (even more than there are swearwords).”
The court therefore reversed the Trademark office’s decision and ruled that the mark could be registered.
FREEDOM OF SPEECH
The moral police in Kenya given to taking offence and seeking to suppress supposedly “unAfrican” and “immoral” expressions of ideas and speech may need to take heed of this legal reasoning.
But back to where this started: Juliet says in the play “Romeo and Juliet”, What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
The free speech right to name a political grouping by whatever they consider appropriate aside, one wonders whether the Registrar in Kenya would register a political party by the names “Fed-Up Political Party” in Canada and the Donald Duck Party of the United States.
But the name of names would be the “Anarchist Pogo Party of Germany”, which in 1998 promised to pay the voters with free beer.