This presentation demonstrates how dialog, sharing, cultivated opacity, and creative improvisation are still very much alive in the linguistic practices of West Africa, and persist even in the domain of naming practices. I trace the fascinating proliferation of travel-related names in the named language Dagaare over the past century, as Dagaaba and other people from the northern inland region of present-day Ghana have preserved, and enriched and their traditionally fluid and creative naming repertoires in the face of the contingency of being obliged to migrate to the coast as a disposable labor force by the colonial and neo-colonial authorities. As in many other parts of the Afro-Atlantic, in Dagao and its diaspora, naming is a trans-performative sovereign practice, and most Dagaaba can expect to adopt a repertoire of multiple and ever-changing names for themselves throughout their lives, which they co-create in hospitable dialog with their family, ancestors, future progeny, friends and associates.

I show how this linguistic and epistemic sovereignty is in particular evidence in travel-names where, in ingenious resistance to the reduction of their bodies and personhood to commodifiable and controllable labor-power, one of the multiple ways in which Dagaaba have defied servitude to the boss and submission to the state has been to retain control over naming themselves and one another, thus providing protection from evil spirits who find it impossible to keep up with the constant name changes of their intended targets, and from the police, courts, tax offices and other governmental authorities who find it hard to keep up with the constant name changes of their intended subjugated citizens.