How Did We Become Africans?

By Matengo Chwanya

It’s funny really, we all seem keenly aware of the origins of the names of all continents except Africa, where there are too many inconclusive theories as to how we came to be known as Africans.

We know a German, Martin Waldseemuller, gave the Americas its name, naming this “new world” after Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian navigator whose first name was feminized to Americus/America, and used to label the continent the Europeans were to soon thoroughly explore

We know Australia derives its name from Terra Australis Incognita, which was a Latin term for the mysterious land in the unexplored south reaches of the universe. When European settlers arrived there, Terra Australis seemed liked a perfect fit, and in 1824 the continent had been christened Australia.

Asia’s name stuck during those persistent BCE (before Common Era) fights between ancient Greece and Persians. The Greeks, living on the western side of the Aegean Sea, used to refer to all land on the east of the Aegean as Asia, a name possible derived from one of their gods, Asia (daughter of Oceanus and Tethys), or from the Phoenician term asu, east; after all, these two societies interacted so much that the Greeks adopted and remixed the Phoenician alphabet.

There is some slight contention on how Europe got its name, but general consensus is that the name was derived from Europa, a Phoenician beauty who was kidnapped by Zeus, the god of gods in Greek mythology. An alternative theory is that the Phoenician term ereb, west, was corrupted to the current name.

But when you come to deal with the etymology of Africa, there seems to be a litany of theories do more to complicate the puzzle. Apparently, the name could have been derived from sand, a cave, foam, the sun or the absence of cold, among other postulations.

The most widely known theory is that the continent was named after Leo Africanus; very plausible, but Leo Africanus was actually al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al Wazzan al Fasi, a Granada-born Berber who wrote one of the first books to describe the continent, Description of Africa. The only problem with this theory is that the ancient Romans already had a province called Africa in 146 BCE; Africanus was born in 1494, about 2 millennia later.

So we have to go back to the Phoenicians, whose hold over the Mediterranean coast ended when the Roman Empire crushed Carthage (located near modern day Tunis, Tunisia) in 146BC. The Phoenicians (now Carthagians), who pre-dated the Romans in settling on North Africa apparently called the original inhabitants Africans, derived from afar,dust, and –ica, people. So basically we were people of the dust.

An alternative theory suggests that the term was derived from the Berber term, ifri, cave, which suggests that the Carthagian settlers saw the natives as nothing more than cavemen; and the reality is that they were treated as such, sold into slavery and the like.

To confuse matters, one historian suggests that the name was derived from an ancient tongue, Ta-Kem. In this language, afros means foamy, and could have been used to describe the foamy Mediterranean Sea on the north African coast.

Af-rui-ka has also been hailed as the origin of the name. The term is apparently derived from Ancient Egypt, and supposedly means homeland. These theory was proposed by an Egyptologist.

Some are also of the opinion that it was a malapropism of the term aprica that gave the continent its current name. aprica is Latin for sunny, an apt description for much of northern Africa.

And a first century Jewish historian also floated the theory that the name comes from the Epher, Abraham’s grandson; apparently his descendants invaded Libya and settled there.

I would love to really get to the bottom of this mystery, so help me if you can in determining the true source of the term “Africa”.

Sources: To day I Found out

Africa Global News Publication