One of the first personalities to break the norm regarding male surnames was Peter Kĩgia, a Kenyan musician who chose his mother’s name as his stage name.

Kĩgia wa Esther (Esther’s son), now aged 60, is known for playing benga, fast, rhythmic guitar folk music with lyrics in Kikuyu.

“When you take your mother’s name, it means you love and respect her,” she told the BBC, claiming she had even registered her record company as Wa Esther Productions.

He now comes with some prestige in the music industry, with other younger musicians following in his footsteps. In the capital, Nairobi, posters advertising artists with his mother’s surname, such as Waithaka wa Jane and 90K Ka Msoh, are often posted.

Although in these cases the formal names of these artists continue to be masculine.

Journalist Simon Macharia Wangũi told the BBC that he deliberately chose his mother’s name as his official surname.

“Why give credit to someone where it doesn’t exist?” He says of his father, who was absent most of his life and of whom “he has only heard rumors of his existence.”

Raised primarily by his grandmother, he was 12 when his mother died in 2003. He did not have a last name until his senior year of high school, when he applied for a birth certificate.

Some Kenyans still think that a child raised by a single parent “lacks certain morals,” explains Evans Kibe Waceke, a broadcaster with a female surname.

“People perceive you as undisciplined, especially when you are raised by a single mother,” he tells the BBC.

A heated debate over the pros and cons of having a female surname began two years ago when noted motivational speaker Robert Burale said it undermined men’s masculinity.

This led television personality Fred Mũitĩrĩri to speak publicly about the difficulties of having a female surname and how he ended up abandoning his mother’s name, deciding to only use his English and Kikuyu names.

“Do you know how embarrassing it is for a child to have attention drawn to him, in a room full of children, [with] A girl’s name?” he wrote on Facebook, talking about his low self-esteem.

“From some of those experiences, I developed depression at the age of 23,” he said.