Safiya Songhai - Name Change

Name Change

Safiya Songhai. Safiya means clear and pure minded woman in the Swahili language. After searching for several years to find a surname to match, she chose Songhai from the largest and most accomplished 15th and 16th century West African Empire, now present-day Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, whose leaders emphasized education and social, economic and gender equality. Her ancestry comes from the Yoruba, Kpelle, Bamileke and Mandika people of Western and Central Africa.

Read more about this topic:  Safiya Songhai

Famous quotes containing the word change:

    A life-worshipper’s philosophy is comprehensive.... He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death ... and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.
    Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)

    ... often in the heat of noonday, leaning on a hoe, looking across valleys at the mountains, so blue, so close, my only conscious thought was, “How can I ever get away from here? How can I get to where they have books, where I can be educated?” I worked hard, always waiting for something to happen to change things. There came a time when I knew I must make them happen; that no one would do anything about it for me. And I did.
    Belinda Jelliffe (1892–1979)