Football pundit Chris Kamara is changing his name. Why?

It is reported this morning that Chris Kamara, best known for being a presenter and football analyst on Sky Sports, is changing his name to Chris Cabanga after he learned that the word could have a positive effect on the England players during the World Cup. 'Kamara' is a well-known name in Sierra Leone, and indeed in other West African nations, so why change it?

Well more than 22,000 people joined an internet campaign to get Kamara, a retired English footballer who ended his playing career in 1995 and last managed a club in 1998, to change his name by deed poll. Scientists said the word cabanga, derived from the Zulu word for imagine, will unite the team when it is chanted by fans.

Internet comments have not been favourable:

"biggest load of BS I've ever heard"
"I see. Nurse! Those people have got out of their jackets again!"
"What a complete plonker ! We have 'bout as much chance of winning world cup as the pope has of becoming a jew !"

In spite of this, Kamara is a well-loved commentator, even through his gaffs. Have a look at this one from April 2010.




Chris Kamara was born 25 December 1957 in Middlesbrough to a father of Sierra Leone origin. Yet another person with roots from Sierra Leone who has enriched the life of this country. Can you think of others? My friends from the Sierra Leone Association will have to be excluded from this one, there are too many of you!

One person who comes to mind is Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (15 August 1875 – 1 September 1912) who was an English composer and achieved such success that he was once called the "African Mahler". Coleridge-Taylor was born in Holborn, London, to a Sierra Leonean Creole father, Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor, and an English mother, Alice Hare Martin. Coleridge-Taylor was 37 when he died of pneumonia. His widow gave the impression that she was almost penniless but King George V granted her a pension of £100, evidence of the high regard in which the composer was held.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor in 1905

He called himself an Anglo-African and fought against race prejudice all his short life. He incorporated black traditional music with concert music, with such compositions as African Suite, African Romances and Twenty Four Negro Melodies. The first performance of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast was described by the principal of the Royal College of Music as 'one of the most remarkable events in modern English musical history', and this work was acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic.

Who elso would you like to see remembered here?