🌹 Name Change 🌹
@lasangoma is now @autumnwildroses 🌹
Some of you may have noticed the gradual change in all my handles: Substack. Tiktok. Ko-Fi. Linktree.
And my byline: I used to write as ‘Jahia LaSangoma.’
lasangoma is no more.
Why the change?
Well, first, why I even used that name in the first place:
(I discuss it a little in the opening of this essay, I suggest you take a read)
Diary of a Hunter (2024)
Sangoma (noun) ~ highly respected healer among the Zulu people of South Africa who diagnoses, prescribes, and often performs the rituals to heal a person physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually — Britannica online.
I first heard the term ‘Sangoma’ in Vancouver, Canada in the Fall of 2021. I was studying abroad there.
In Vancouver, I was very lost.
In the months prior to my arrival in Canada in August 2021:
I’d just gotten out of an extremely dangerous and abusive relationship in February 2021
fully confessed/confronted my experience of childhood sexual abuse to my ex-mother and therapists in the spring
almost committed myself to a psychiatric institution,
and told a different stalker toxic ex to stop contacting me, that I was finished with him permanently.
I’m unsure why that’s relevant to this story, but maybe I just wanted to share it. I feel I only have enough distance now from that time of my life to even start talking about it.
Vancouver is very beautiful, but as much as I tried, I couldn’t make myself belong there.
I also was dissuaded of my previous illusion as a U.S. born person that Canada was some nice, magical, friendly place. Canada es muy fucked up.
I was lost, traumatized, insecure, and my dreadlocks were still very short. It was a very rough time, even though I had been literally saved from a horrible predicament and granted more than one of my wildest dreams. I am very grateful to have been saved. And to have believed in myself enough to leave.
Up until the very last moment, my ex-mother was following me around the apartment at 4 AM, saying, “You don’t have to go, you know you don’t have to go.”
In the end, she still helped me close my suitcase by sitting on it.
I tried to leave without saying goodbye, but she is a light sleeper.
“I feel like I’m never going to see you again,” she sobbed as we hugged goodbye.
“You will,” I said. I was, as we both knew, lying.
I was still binge-drinking and indulging in toxic behavior. I was 3 years sober from other substances, and white-knuckling it. While in Vancouver, I would attend my very first NA meeting after 3 years of doing it on my own, and ironically, I would go out with a girl I met in Whistler after the NA meeting and get so drunk that I blacked out.
She and the other girl we were with were also so wasted that we all almost died by crashing over the bridge in her SUV into the freezing ocean water circa late November/early December 2021. I was, apparently, passed out completely in the back on the girl’s mattress bed (she lived in her SUV) at that point. I would have died. Without even knowing, in the freezing midnight water. Apparently, the driver stopped the car just in time and called her boyfriend to come get us, who was driven by his friend ; he hopped out of his friend’s car in the middle of the bridge and drove us all home.
I woke up to learn this story in a random house, one hour away from my student apartment, horribly hungover on a beanbag, with these random people I didn’t even know arguing over my head and still drinking. It was insanity, but sadly, a not unfamiliar situation. In fact, it reminded me a lot of the kinds of escapades I experienced in high school between the ages of 16 -17. It was the same night/day my nose ring fell out, and I decided that meant I had to be done with these old ways entirely.
Thus, in Vancouver I committed to stop drinking alcohol, which I did until early 2025. I now feel able to drink responsibly.
So, this is all to contextualize:
I was distancing myself from as much of my past, my immediate biological relatives, my old self, as possible.
Thus, I sought a new name.
In my Difficult Knowledge class, taught by an amazing Colombian professor who I won’t name for her own privacy, one of the texts we read was ZONG! by M. NourbeSe Philip, a Black Canadian writer.
It was there that I first read the word ‘Sangoma,’ along with the definition given by Philip, and I felt an attraction it. I put it in my pocket to research later.
After reading initially that it referred to a kind of ‘healer,’ I thought it might be a good candidate for my new name.
Like many people descended from kidnapped Africans sold into the slave trade, I feel a disaffinity with (for me, one of my last names, since I have more than one) a last name which comes from a slaveowner. And of course, I wanted to cut myself off from my ex-immediate biological relatives entirely.
The prefix ‘La,’ I took from the tradition of legendary spiritual workers such as Mam’zelle Marie LaVeau (blessed be her name) and Marina de La Tour (respect), of course meaning a feminine prefix ‘the’ to the following noun.
A bit French/Spanish, then a bit Zulu. Perfect, I thought.
But I’ve realized over the course of 2025, through learning more and just implementing my common sense, that a Sangoma is a title that is earned, within a specific religion and lineage. I have not earned that title.
It began to feel a bit — perhaps ‘appropriative’ isn’t the word? But definitely wrong — off that I was using this word.
A South African person reached out to me in a Whatsapp group to ask why I was using that name as well. Although they accepted my explanation that I am a descendant of people kidnapped in the slave trade and that I know I have ancestry from what is now South Africa (also true, which I only know to due to my ex-mother and ex-sister doing 23 & Me DNA tests), it still left me with an uneasy feeling.
The word means something concrete to people from that land and region. There are other ways I can connect with my African heritage than taking up a title which I haven’t done the work to bear.
Thus, I began looking and meditating on a new name.
And, Jahia de Rose was born.
Rose has become one of my plant allies, a term I learned from Nicole Rose. And the ‘de’ still keeps it a little French.
There is a lot about roses — their properties, their physical characteristics — which I embody and identify with.
Culturally, it is relatively neutral. It feels safe. And it is earthy.
So, I’ve retired ‘lasangoma’ and regret using it at all. At least I came to my senses, and can be honest about it.
The name will still appear on old external publications, but from here on out, every place I publish and get published will be Ms. de Rose, thank you very much.
I am a wild rose…
Thank you for reading.
© Jahia de Rose 2025.
