Why are so many women in Sierra Leone named Fatmata Jalloh?

December 17, 2015 9:23 AM

I'll need someone familiar with Sierra Leonean culture to answer this one. My job deals with people from lots of different countries, and it seems like almost every woman from Sierra Leone has exactly the same name: personal name Fatmata, surname Jalloh. It's not uncommon for a man to have a mother named Fatmata Jalloh, a sister named Fatmata Jalloh, and a wife named Fatmata Jalloh. How did this situation come about, what is the significance of the name, how is confusion avoided, and what is a culturally sensitive way for us to keep better track of our files?
posted by anonymous to Society & Culture (13 answers total)

A paper in African Economic History by Alusine Jalloh (which may be paywalled) reveals that Jalloh is a major clan among Fula (or Fulani) speaking peoples who settled in Sierra Leone some time in the last 50 years, and that the clan name has been retained as a family name by many Sierra Leoneans (although surely not all).

Fulani-speaking people are almost all Muslim, apparently, and Fatmata looks like a variant of Fatima, the name of one of Muhammad's daughters. So my guess is that this is something akin to large numbers of women in traditionally Catholic countries being called Mary/Marie/Maria. And combined with Jalloh as common clan (now family) name, this suggests that Fatmata Jalloh in Sierra Leone might be something like "Mary O'Neill" in Ireland. Perhaps, as in Catholic countries, the different Fatmatas are distinguished by middle, nick-, or other secondary names.

I'm afraid I don't have a suggestion on how to handle your files better. Maybe you can ask a partner organization in Sierra Leone (or another company/organization with a significant presence in the country) how they deal with it?
posted by col_pogo at 10:28 AM on December 17, 2015 [10 favorites]

Yup, a little googling shows that Fatmata is indeed a variant of Fatima.
posted by languagehat at 10:44 AM on December 17, 2015

From a database perspective, you've got to find a third datapoint that you can use to distinguish identity. Hospitals and pharmacies often use date of birth. I work at a veterinary hospital, and internally we use a patient number to determine which Bella Smith we are talking about, and if we are talking to an external source (the pet's owner or referring veterinarian, say) we use species, breed, and/or color. If this is strictly for keeping things straight within your organization you can assign File Numbers (or whatever) to each file to tell them apart, but if you coordinate with other organizations you need to find a datapoint that both you and the other org will have easy access to. It really depends what you are doing with your files.
posted by Rock Steady at 11:04 AM on December 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

For file name purposes, can you make each person's last name include her date of birth? E.g.,
Jalloh-010159, Fatmata
Jalloh-031672, Fatmata
posted by Beti at 11:04 AM on December 17, 2015

From a database perspective, you've got to find a third datapoint that you can use to distinguish identity.

FWIW, you need to do this anyway, even if you never talk to anybody from Sierra Leone again: You don't want your database breaking when the second John Smith comes along.
posted by Dr Dracator at 11:08 AM on December 17, 2015 [12 favorites]

Every person with a file needs a distinct ID number. Trying to cross-reference name and birthdate will get confusing eventually. The first rule of databases is that each record needs a completely unique identifier.
posted by nakedmolerats at 11:14 AM on December 17, 2015 [14 favorites]

(that is, one of the confusing parts is that if there are so many Fatmata Jallohs, eventually you'll get 2 with the same birthdate, then what?)
posted by nakedmolerats at 11:15 AM on December 17, 2015 [7 favorites]

Also, in many contexts asking for someone's birthdate is not a good way to do business. Maybe phone number (problematic too, I know), or ask her to invent a secondary nickname she likes ?
posted by amtho at 11:31 AM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

(that is, one of the confusing parts is that if there are so many Fatmata Jallohs, eventually you'll get 2 with the same birthdate, then what?)

By the by, statistically this is likely to occur at some point between 23 and 70 Fatmata Jallohs.
posted by rhizome at 11:54 AM on December 17, 2015 [20 favorites]

When I worked in insurance, which was drowning in databases, we needed three pieces of identifying information anyway to match a claim to a policy. And first and last name did not count as two identifiers. Full name was one identifier.

For our purposes, we needed at least two of the following in addition to full name: date of birth, phone number, address, policy number, social security number, name of policyholder if this was a dependent on someone else's policy.

It helps if there are redundancies.

Maybe assign a client number to all clients. Maybe also list date of enrollment in the program. Then also try to add something like date of birth, address, etc.

I would ask the clients if they already have some culturally acceptable practice for clarifying which person they are referring to. Families that use the same name frequently have nicknames or other internal practices for making the distinction, like "Big John" and "Little John" or "John Senior" and "John Junior" or elder/younger, etc. This may or may not help outsiders make the distinction, depending upon how it is handled internally.
posted by Michele in California at 12:16 PM on December 17, 2015

Birthdates are likely to be problematic because a lot of people in Sierra Leone no longer have access to papers with their date of birth on it, and it may not have been recorded at all depending on their age and family circumstances, particularly given the intended civil conflict. I would agree with giving people some sort of identification number and recording as many other data points as you can to triangulate - dob if it's known, an address or hometown, name of oldest child or spouse or sibling or something like that.
posted by ChuraChura at 2:20 PM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

(sorry, that should be intense civil conflict)
posted by ChuraChura at 3:58 PM on December 17, 2015

And, if you do use dates somewhere, please use an international standard date format like ISO 8601, rather than the US numerical format which pretty much guarantees ambiguity anywhere else in the world.
posted by mewsic at 4:01 PM on December 17, 2015 [6 favorites]