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Introduction
Cataloguing principles and the rules that evolve from them have not been devised in a cognitive vacuum. The evolution took place in a Western cultural context and inevitably presents the problem of biases. When these cataloguing rules are appUed to materials originating from non-Western cultures such biases surface and often constitute serious difficulties. This is the case with Africana materials that have caused and are still causing numerous problems to many a cataloguer. For example, many authors (Iwuji 1989, Aderibidge and Udo 1990) have pointed out the inadequacy of Library of Congress (LC) and Dewey Decimal (DD) classification schemes with regard to Africana materials claiming that they are restrictive, inhospitable, unfair, and biased. Two examples underscore the seriousness of the issue: First, the space assigned to African languages both in LC and DD schedules is not substantial enough to accommodate the large number of African languages in which library materials are available. Second, when it comes to Africana, LC does not adhere to one of its best principles of classification, that of proceeding from the general to the specific, which is applied exclusively to the languages of Europe in its subclass PB-PH. Another example of the inadequacy of cataloguing tools devised in the West are the AACR2 rules for cataloguing authors' names, which have been shown to be inadequate for the handling of many nonWestern name in general and African names in particular. It has been claimed, for instance, that some characteristics of those names make AACR2 almost irrelevant (Bertelson 1995) or at least restrictive (F. K. Exner 2007).
This paper focuses on the issue of African names from an onomastic1 standpoint. It is our hope to be able to return later to the classification issue to assess the steps that have been taken in order to address it. The first section summarises some of the difficulties of applying AACR2 rules related to names to non-Western materials in general and to Africana materials in particular. The second section looks at the cultural roots of the plurality and diversity of African names which constitute one of the difficulties mentioned above. The third section pursues this analysis but with the focus shifted to the issue of name changes. In the final section we review, and comment...