meow

For the sake of parity, here's Nwabhu back when he was roughly the age the as-yet-unnamed kitten is now.

The comments to the original post have been good, please keep them coming if you can. A few things I forgot to mention initially: it's a male kitten, ideally I'd like an abstract, sounds-good-but-isn't-really-identifiable name (like Nwabhu) that works in English and French and will be accepted by IVN.

The following thoughts will probably benefit me more than anyone else...

Tim's suggestion of Mdenko is good, but maybe a bit too identifiably African. Then again, watching him prowl through our garden's yellow, dried-out grass yesterday, he did kind of look like a stripy lion in the savannah... Bootsy (as in Collins) is a cool name for a cat, but this one isn't bad-ass enough. It might have suited his brother.

Names ending in "u" are summarily rejected (sorry, G), because they rhyme with Nwabhu. Even if he were a girl, Nwabhi wouldn't work (sorry, Ethan) because it sounds like one of Nwabhu's myriad nicknames.

Musician names are difficult, because generally too identifiable and I'd feel weird regularly shouting out "Mingus, come here!" Hmmm, Shihab? Maupin? Jeff Albert?

djassmunkurinn (thanks for writing in!) suggests the Icelandic Brandur. I don't like that one too much - it's kind of harsh - but I hadn't thought of exploring Icelandic names, they should prove interesting. Kisa means cat in Icelandic and is also a pretty cool cat name. In a similar vein, Swahili offers up some interesting words for cat (topito means catapult, which would be a funny translation, but it too comical).

I kind of like Sabi (popped into my head yesterday), which is apparently both African and Japanese.