Khoisan Names and Their Meanings: Nama, Khoi and San Naming Traditions

By LouisN

Last updated: October 20, 2026

Most South African parents can explain a Zulu or Xhosa given name without hesitating: what it means, who in the family carries it, which praise name it echoes. Ask the same question about a Khoikhoi or San name and the answer usually stalls. That silence is not evidence that the names are gone. It is the result of a specific history, two centuries of mission stations recording baptisms in Dutch and Afrikaans, a school system that treated click languages as unsuitable for the classroom, and a habit among outside scholars of filing everything under one word. The names survived anyway, in the Northern Cape, in Namibia, and in families who kept a grandmother’s name without ever writing down what it meant.

Two peoples, one uneasy label

The Khoikhoi were herders. They moved stock through the winter rainfall country of the Western and Northern Cape and up into Namibia, and their social world was organised around cattle, pasture and named clans under captains. The San were hunter-gatherers, living in much smaller groups spread across a far wider area, the Cape mountains, the Kalahari and the Drakensberg foothills included, with land use and kinship built around mobility rather than herds.

The two did not live in separate worlds. They traded, intermarried, worked for one another, and in the nineteenth century shared the same dispossession as colonial farms pushed north. Many families today carry both Khoikhoi and San ancestry and cannot honestly separate the strands. That lived overlap is the first thing to keep in mind whenever a name is presented as purely Khoi or purely San.

Why “Khoisan” is a convenience, not an identity

The word was made by outsiders. Khoi comes from the Khoekhoegowab word for a person; San was a term used by Khoikhoi herders for hunter-gatherers and has carried a dismissive edge that many San people still reject. The compound Khoisan was popularised as a linguistic label in the twentieth century and later taken up by the state as a demographic category.

As linguistics the grouping does not hold. What gets called Khoisan is now usually described as at least three unrelated families, Khoe-Kwadi, Tuu and Kx’a, plus several isolates. A speaker of Haiǁom and a speaker of Juǀʼhoansi cannot hold a conversation. So when you read that a name is Khoisan, treat that as a shelf label rather than a heritage. The useful question is always which language and which community, because that is the only level at which a meaning can be checked.

Clicks: four sounds that decide how a name is said

Khoekhoegowab uses four basic click types, written with four letters most South Africans have seen on road signs and have never been taught: ǀ, ǁ, ǃ and ǂ. The ǀ is the dental click, the small sound of disapproval English speakers make without noticing. The ǁ is the lateral click, the sound used to urge a horse forward. The ǃ is the sharp pop of a cork leaving a bottle, made with the tongue against the ridge behind the teeth. The ǂ is made further back on the palate and has no English equivalent at all.

Clicks carry meaning rather than decoration. In a name they can sit at the start, in the middle, or twice in one word, and swapping one for another produces a different word rather than a mispronounced version of the same name. That matters practically. A child whose name opens with a click will hear it dropped by every teacher, receptionist and call centre operator outside the family for the rest of their life. Some parents decide that is a price worth paying. Others choose a name without clicks and keep the Khoekhoegowab name for home. Both choices are common and neither is a betrayal.

How Nama-speaking families name a child

Among Nama speakers, the largest surviving Khoekhoegowab-speaking community, spread through southern Namibia and the Northern Cape, names are usually descriptive rather than dedicatory. A name records the circumstances of a birth, a quality noticed in the child, an animal, the weather, or the place the family was living at the time. A child born during good rain may carry a name that has rain in it; a child born while the family was moving may carry a name about travelling. Names also attach to things that happened to the parents rather than to the child, which is why an outsider asking what a name means can get an answer that sounds like a small story instead of a dictionary entry.

Names that are not permanent

Nothing requires a Nama name to be fixed for life. A name given at birth can be supplemented later, and adults commonly carry a name that came from an event in their twenties alongside the one their mother chose. Mission Christianity added a second, separate layer: baptismal registers produced a formal Dutch or Afrikaans name while the Khoekhoegowab name stayed in the family and among neighbours. In many Northern Cape families the pattern is still visible, an official first name on the identity document and a different name used by everyone who actually knows the person.

Surnames and clan memory

Nama surnames often carry more history than given names. The great clan names, Witbooi, Swartbooi, Beukes, Koopman, Cloete, Vries, Goliath, Titus and Afrikaner, appear as captaincy and family names throughout the nineteenth century and several remain tied to particular towns. Their literal meanings are mostly not recoverable, and a name borrowed from an Afrikaans phrase for white boy or black boy tells you more about who was doing the recording than about how the family saw itself. Read those surnames as evidence of continuity rather than as words to translate.

San names that were never fixed at birth

San naming traditions vary enormously between groups, but a recurring feature is that a name is not a permanent possession handed out once and kept. Among Juǀʼhoansi and related communities, personal names are often drawn from a small stock associated with the group, so many people share a name and the name does not identify anyone on its own. It works together with kinship terms, nicknames and a growing set of descriptive additions accumulated across a life. A name may come from an animal, from an ancestor or from a feature of the landscape, and the same name can be given to several children in one extended family without confusion, because relationships do the identifying.

There is also a strong social rule against saying certain names in certain relationships, a respect constraint on who may speak a person’s name aloud at all. Any parent drawn to a San name should understand that some of them are not free-standing words available to lift out and attach to a baby in Gauteng. They belong to a kinship system, and borrowing one badly can land as an offence rather than a compliment.

Names still in use across the Northern Cape and Namibia

The most reliable evidence for living practice is on the map. Namibian and Northern Cape place names in Khoekhoegowab survive in large numbers, and many are used as given names or as the root of one. ǁKhara Hais is the Khoekhoegowab name of Upington. ǃNamiǂNûs is the name restored to Lüderitz. Kai !Garib, the municipality covering the lower Orange, is usually rendered as great river. ǀAi-ǀAis, the hot springs on the Fish River, is generally given as scalding water. These are not antiquarian forms; they appear on municipal letterheads and road signs.

Alongside the landscape layer sits the mission layer, Afrikaans and Dutch given names that have been in Nama and coloured families for five or six generations and are now simply family names: Kaatjie, Sanna, Magrieta, Willem, Andries, Petrus. If you are researching a family from Steinkopf, Concordia, Pella or Gibeon and find only such names, the Khoisan layer was probably not lost. It usually means the older name was never written down and survives only in the memory of the oldest living relatives.

How these names differ from Zulu and Xhosa names

The contrast is sharpest in what a name is for. A Zulu or Xhosa given name is very often a sentence with a stated intention, a prayer, a statement of gratitude, an assertion about the family’s situation, and the meaning is fixed, publicly known and explainable in a line. A Khoekhoegowab name is more often a description whose meaning depends on the moment it was given. Ask a Nama elder what a name means and you may get a story with a date and a place in it instead of a gloss.

Structurally the systems also differ in what carries identity. Zulu and Xhosa naming puts great weight on the given name and on praise names that can be added later. Nama naming puts more weight on the family and clan name, and the given name may be the least stable part of a person’s identity across a lifetime. Clicks are another visible difference, though the point is often overstated: Xhosa has clicks too, borrowed from Khoisan languages centuries ago, so a Xhosa speaker is not starting from zero when they meet a Khoekhoegowab name.

What to check before you use one

Three checks will save a great deal of embarrassment.

• Ask a speaker, not a website. Most online name lists recycle the same handful of glosses and many of them are wrong. A first-language Khoekhoegowab speaker in Keetmanshoop or Springbok will settle in two minutes what a listicle cannot settle at all.
• Check what the word does, not only what it means. Some words are ordinary nouns that sit awkwardly as names, some are associated with particular clans, and some fall under naming restrictions. A word that is polite in one community can be a mild insult in another.
• Say it out loud, repeatedly, and think about the child’s whole life. School registers, bank forms and booking systems handle click characters badly and many will simply drop the ǀ or the ǁ. Decide in advance whether you will fight that or accept it.

There is also a question of respect that has nothing to do with rules. Khoisan heritage is politically live in South Africa, and families who carry it are still routinely told that their languages are extinct or their identity is a recent invention. Borrowing a name with no relationship to the community it comes from can land as another version of that dismissal. The safer path is to build the relationship first and let the name follow, or to choose a name out of your own family’s actual history.

A short list, with confidence marked

Meanings below are given as recorded or commonly reported. Where speakers differ, that is stated. None of these should be used without the checks above.

• Khoi: person, in Khoekhoegowab. High confidence, since it is the root of the collective name.
• !Garib: river, as in the Orange River and the Kai !Garib municipality. High confidence as a place name, less common as a given name.
• Kai: great or big, as in Kai !Garib. Usually reported this way, though the form varies between dialects.
• ǀAi-ǀAis: scalding water. High confidence as a place name, not normally a personal name.
• Naro: the name of a Khoe language and its speakers, now also used as a personal name. The meaning is not settled; it is an ethnonym rather than a description.
• Haiǁom: a Damara-related group name in Namibia, increasingly used as a surname. Its derivation is disputed between communities.
• ǁKhara Hais: Upington’s Khoekhoegowab name. Glosses differ, so treat any confident one-line translation with caution.

Where the meanings actually live

If you want more than this, the sources that hold up are narrow and specific. Mission registers and baptismal books for Namaland and the Northern Cape, held in Windhoek and Cape Town, record the Afrikaans layer. The University of Namibia’s Khoekhoegowab dictionary work and the older Kroenlein wordlists are the standard references for the language itself. For San languages, the Juǀʼhoansi and Khwe material produced with those communities by linguists and by the Kalahari Peoples Fund is far more dependable than anything compiled secondhand.

What none of that gives you is the answer a parent actually wants, which is whether a particular name is good. That judgement sits with the community the name comes from, and the only reliable route to it is a conversation, ideally one that starts with curiosity about the family you are borrowing from rather than with a request for a translation.