Akan Day Name

Among the Akan of Ghana and Ivory Coast every child receives a kra din, a soul name matching the weekday they were born on. There is one form for boys and one for girls across the seven days, and the name follows a person even when they go by something else day to day. One well known birth lets you audit the rule: Kofi Annan was born on 8 April 1938, a Friday, and Friday gives Kofi. Kwame is the Saturday name, with a caveat: Nkrumah said he was born on a Saturday, though the date now on record, 21 September 1909, was a Tuesday; and Kwame Ture took the name in tribute to Nkrumah, having been born on a Sunday. Enter a date and the page returns both the male and the female form.

Each of the seven days carries its own Twi name, from Kwasiada for Sunday to Memeneda for Saturday, and each carries an association: the universe on Sunday, peace on Monday, the ocean on Tuesday, the spider Ananse on Wednesday, the earth on Thursday, fertility on Friday and the supreme deity on Saturday. Spelling shifts between Akan varieties, which is why the same person can turn up written two ways. Asante Twi writes Kwasi, Kwabena and Kwaku where Fante writes Kwesi, Kobina and Kweku, and a Monday born girl is Adwoa or Adjoa. The page shows the commoner form large and the variant just under it.

The whole calculation runs in UTC so your machine timezone cannot push the answer back a day, a slip that is easy to make and hard to spot, because the wrong name still looks perfectly reasonable. Dates before 14 September 1752, when Britain and its colonies dropped the Julian calendar, come with a warning: the weekday applies to the proleptic Gregorian date, not to what people wrote at the time. And the page is explicit about its limit. It does not compute the adaduanan, the 42 day ritual cycle that pairs the seven day week with a six day one and sets festival days such as Akwasidae and Awukudae.