By Farooq A. Kperogi,
Ph.D.
Twitter:
@farooqkperogi
If you’ve never encountered the name Natasha H. Akpoti, it’s
probably because you are not active on Nigerian social media. Akpoti was a Kogi
Central senatorial candidate on the platform of the Social Democratic Party in
this year’s election who deftly deployed social media to both vigorously
campaign and to call attention to the horrors of Kogi governor Yahaya Bello’s
barbarous brutalities against political opponents.
A personal reflection she wrote recently on the history of
Nigeria, particularly how our country came to be named “Nigeria,” trended excitedly
on social media. More than 10 people forwarded it to me on Facebook and
WhatsApp in just one day. Nevertheless, several key points in the reflection
are problematic and invite a remedial response.
She started her essay by recollecting an airplane
conversation she said she had with an unnamed “American professor of African
history” who persuaded her to believe that contrary to what she had been taught,
Flora Shaw, Frederick Lugard’s girlfriend and later wife, who came up with the
name of our country, didn’t invent the name “Nigeria” from River Niger.
“Republic of Niger was named after River Niger not Nigeria,”
she quoted the unidentified American professor to have told her. “That’s what
white historians want you to believe. I don’t understand the gullibility of
blacks. You have so much information but chose not to research but dwell and
believe all the white man says. Nigeria simply means ‘The Nigger Area’ or ‘Land
of the Black slaves.’ Nigger was a
common derogatory slang used for slaves.” This claim is almost wholly
historically inaccurate. Here’s why.
Pan-Atlantic University’s The Centenary Project, which was
launched in 2014 to mark 100 years of Nigeria’s formal existence in its present
form, published a scanned newspaper clipping of a January 8, 1897 article
titled “Flora Shaw Gives the Name” in The
Times of London where Flora Shaw first suggested Nigeria’s name. Shaw’s
original article was titled “Nigeria.”
In the article, Shaw said the area she wanted to be known as
Nigeria used to be owned by the Royal Niger Company. She argued that naming the
former Royal Niger Company’s possession “Royal Niger Company Territories” is
“not only inconvenient to use but to some extent is also misleading.” So she
suggested a shorter, cuter, more memorable “title for the agglomeration of
pagan and Mohammedan states which have been brought, by the exertions of the
Royal Niger Company, within the confines of the British Protectorates, and thus
need for the first time in their history to be described as an entity by some
general name.”
She acknowledged other competing names that some geographers
had called the territories she wanted named Nigeria but dismissed them as unsuitable.
For instance, she said the name “Central Sudan,” which some historians and
cartographers had used to call much of what is now northern Nigeria, “has the
disadvantage of ignoring political frontier-lines, while the word ‘Sudan’ is
too apt to connect itself in the public mind as the French hinterland of Algeria, or the vexed questions of the Niger Basin.”
She also said the territories she wanted to be named Nigeria
had been called such names as “the Niger Empire,” “the Niger Sudan,” “the
Central Sudan,” and “the Hausa territories” by European explorers, all of which
she said would be problematic as names of a country.
What is clear from the foregoing is that Flora Shaw intended
for the name “Nigeria” to be applied only to the area that is now known as
northern Nigeria, of which her boyfriend and later husband was initially High
Commissioner. She wrote that the name “Nigeria” was important because it would
“serve to differentiate them equally from the British colonies of Lagos and the
Niger Protectorate on the coast and from the French territory of the Upper
Niger.”
In other words, she wanted the name “Nigeria” to
differentiate the territory her boyfriend ruled from Lagos (which was governed
separately from 1862 to 1906), most of what is now southern Nigeria, and what
is now the Republic of Niger. Of course, the name “Nigeria” later came to refer
to the Northern Protectorate, the Southern Protectorate, the Lagos Colony, and
Northern British Cameroon.
Flora Shaw didn’t invent the name “Niger”; when she named us
“Nigeria” in an 1897 newspaper article, the term “Niger” had already been in
existence for hundreds of years, as I’ll show shortly. She clearly coined Nigeria
from an elision of “Niger-area.” What we should question is the etymology and
semantic content of the term “Niger.” Does it share etymological affinities
with the racial slur “nigger”?
In at least three previous columns, I’ve argued that Niger
is derived from the Latin word for black. For instance, in an April 19, 2014
column titled “Republic of Songhai Formerly Known as Nigeria,” I said our
country’s name “is a product of outmoded… European obsession with race and skin
color. Nigeria is derived from ‘niger,’ the Latin word for black, which has
assumed deeply pejorative connotations in English over the years.
“River Niger, the longest and most important river in
Nigeria from which our country’s name is derived, is named after our skin
color. Why should we in the 21st century still be stuck with a name that has
fallen into disrepute and that, in the first place, invidiously and needlessly
calls attention to our skin color?”
I have since discovered that this assertion isn’t
uncontested. A school of thought disputes the notion that Niger is a Latin
derivative. It says Niger is a corruption of ger, the Berber word for river. Berbers, who are native to North
Africa, call River Niger ger-n-ger,
which translates as “river of rivers.” Interestingly, the first reference to
River Niger in Western writing is traceable to Leo Africanus, a Moroccan Berber
who wrote mostly in Italian and Latin—and occasionally in Arabic.
In his 1550 book of geography titled Della descrittione dell’Africa et delle cose notabili che iui sono (which
was translated into English in 1600 as A
Geographical Historie of Africa), Africanus, whose real name was al-Hasan
ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi, referred to West Africa’s longest river and
Africa’s third longest river as “Niger.” European cartographers and explorers
adopted the name from then on.
Nevertheless, since Africanus wrote in Latin and Italian
where “niger” means “black,” he could very well have used the word to refer to
the people who live around the river, although Berbers are not and have never
been dark-skinned. Alternatively, he might actually have used the word as an
Italian domestication of the Berber ger-n-ger,
but European explorers might have adopted the name because of its lexical and
semantic closeness to the Latin niger.
Whatever the case is, by the time Europeans adopted Niger as
the name for West Africa’s most important river, the word “nigger” was not the
pejorative name for black people that it is today. Etymologists are united in
asserting that the pejoration of Negro to nigger didn’t occur in English until
the mid-20th century. (In linguistics, pejoration is said to occur
when a word changes from a neutral or positive meaning to a negative one). So
it can’t be accurate that Nigeria means “nigger area.”
Akpoti also wondered which Nigerians countersigned the
papers that amalgamated Nigeria in 1914 since Nigeria’s nationalists were too
young at the time to sign any documents. Well, we were conquered. The British didn’t need the
imprimatur of the locals to do with their “possessions” as they wished. People
in Lagos did protest the amalgamation, though.
