Name That Country!
24/03/2005

Mad and I were going through yesterday's stats for the site when we were both surprised and pleased to see that we had a visitor from Lesotho. Naturally, the award for "Most Obscure Hit of the Day" was immediately awarded to our adventurous visitor.

A funny thing happened while we were discussing this event, however. I realized that I was confusing Lesotho with Swaziland, mainly because they are both small countries in Southern Africa and Lesotho underwent a name change several years ago. It was originally known as Basutoland and is an illustration of how the first European settlers struggled to set down local names in our alphabet, lacking, as it does, some of the sounds used in African languages. Of course, the distance between "Lesotho" and "Basuto" is great enough for us to think that they didn't try all that hard, either.

Lesotho is in the Drakensburg Mountains and is completely surrounded by (but not part of) the Republic of South Africa. Swaziland is a small country squeezed between South Africa and Mozambique and it looks very similar to Zululand and Natal (which I described in my Landscape post).

All this confusion made me think about how many countries in Africa have changed their names over the last forty years or so. The Congo, for instance, became Zaire in the sixties but then went back to being the Congo in the nineties. This is further complicated by the fact that there is another Congo just to the north of it. The two countries are differentiated from each other by one being known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (this was Zaire) and the other as the Republic of the Congo. Whether this indicates that the Republic is not democratic, I really have no idea but I think you'll agree that there is much scope for confusion here.

The Congo is in Central Africa but, even if we just consider my old stamping ground, Southern Africa, much has happened in the matter of names over the years. Bechuanaland became Botswana (another clear case of poor listening by the first Europeans to get there), South West Africa changed to Namibia (named for the desert that constitutes most of its territory but not quite as descriptive of its location in the world), Northern Rhodesia opted for Zambia and Nyasaland for Malawi. Southern Rhodesia had the most name changes of all, going from that to plain Rhodesia, then to Rhodesia-Zimbabwe, and finally to Zimbabwe.

Interestingly, it seems the Portuguese were rather better than the British at interpreting local languages for their two former colonies, Angola and Mozambique, have retained their names. Mozambique, however, does try to join in the fun by having an alternative spelling to its name: Moçambique.

Notice the African love of the letter Z (something that seems to be shared with the Americans). So many African countries now use this letter in their names and even South Africa once considered changing its name to Azania. In a way, it's a pity that this never happened. Since leaving Africa I have found it necessary to explain innumerable times to bemused Europeans that "South Africa" is a country, whereas "Southern Africa" merely descibes the southernmost part of Africa wherein there are several countries, South Africa included.

I would also draw your attention to that name Nyasaland. That odd combination of N and Y is very common in Africa and it is the closest that our alphabet can get to describing the actual sound made in many African languages. Europeans will pronounce it as Nigh-assa-land or Nee-assa-land, using the Y as a vowel, but it is in fact a consonant. The correct pronunciation is (as closely as I can describe) Nnnn-yah-sah-land. This is true wherever N and Y are seen together so that the once President of Tanzania (ooh, another Z!), Mr Nyerere, is not Mr Nigh-uh-rare-eeh (as inevitably pronounced by European news broadcasters) but Nnnn-yeh-reh-ree.

A few years ago a Zimbabwean footballer came to England to play for Coventry City Football Club. His name was Peter Ndhlovu. Now, I'll give the radio commentators their due; they certainly tried to pronounce his name. But it proved impossible and they ended up in a gentlemen's agreement to call him Un-love (which I thought was a bit unfortunate as I'm sure he's a very kind and loving man). I can understand how Peter must have tired of trying to get them to say Nnnn-shhh-low-voo - it's such an unusual combination to the English tongue.

Ndhlovu is a Ndebele name (no, I'll let you attempt to pronounce that one), this being the language of the Matabele tribe of Zimbabwe. They are an offshoot of the Zulu tribe of South Africa and so share some of the worst attempts by Europeans to depict the sounds of an African language in our alphabet. Just as an instance, who could possibly have thought that "dh" was a better way of spelling the sound "sh" than straightforward old "sh"?

The Zulus and related tribes are known as the Nguni, a tribal grouping that has opted for some of the most difficult sounds for a European tongue to imitate. Even I am extremely hesitant to attempt a pronunciation of "Isandhlwana".

But the Nguni have made matters even more difficult by accepting some of the sounds from the languages of the earliest inhabitants of Southern Africa, the Bushmen (who are now known as the San, much as the Eskimo have become the Inuit) and the Hottentots (now called the Koi-Koi). There are no Koi-Koi left but a few of the San still eke out an existence in the Kalahari Desert. Their language consists of clicks made by dragging the tongue quickly away from the palate. Add a few vowels and you have a language that is probably impossible for a European to imitate.

The Nguni adopted some of these clicks into their tongue and you will have heard them if you've ever listened to the Miriam Makeba number, The Click Song. The problem for the first white settlers was how to spell a click. Someone, probably the same guy who decided on the "dh" spelling already mentioned, opted for a combination of X and H, giving us, for instance, the name of the Xhosa tribe. Most white South Africans manage the pronunciation by saying "Koza", but really it should be "click-hoza".

That great statesman, Mr Nelson Mandela, is a Xhosa and I feel sure that he was the one with the wisdom to keep the name of South Africa, rather than change it to Azania. There are many tribes in South Africa (some of them are white), after all, and not all are so keen on the letter Z. Let us be grateful, too, that he did not decide to give it a "click" name...

Clive

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