What was the original name of Africa? Get to understand the history of the beautiful continent

Whenever the word 'Africa' is mentioned, different thoughts come racing in people's minds. For some, it is a mirage shimmering on the horizon of the arid Sahara desert. While to others, it's an ivory-tusked elephant standing before the snow-capped peaks of Mount Kilimanjaro. But have you ever stopped to ask what the original name of Africa is? Did the continent have another name in the first place? TUKO.co.ke met a seasoned African history specialist who broke down the history of Africa's name.

Africa is the second-largest and second-most-populated continent after Asia. The continent covers over 11.7 million square miles and has over 1.2 billion people. The word 'Africa' is synonymous with 'home'. It boasts of an unmatched linguistic, ethnic and cultural variety among these people.

The population accounts for about 16% of the world's populace. Despite all you may know about the continent, do you ever ask yourself questions such as what was Africa called in ancient times? Or was Africa called Asia? And many other queries of this sort? Well, the origin of the continent's identity remains a mystery.

What was Africa called before Africa?

The Kemetic or Alkebulan history of Afrika suggests that the ancient name of the continent was Alkebulan. The word 'Alkebu-Ian' is the oldest and the only word of indigenous origin. Alkebulan means 'the garden of Eden' or 'the mother of mankind'.

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The word Africa came into existence in the late 17th century. Initially, it was used to only refer to the northern part of the continent. Around that time, the continent had been colonised, and the Europeans ruled over its people as slaves. They influenced the change of identity from Alkebulan to its present name.

What is the other name of Africa?

Before the Europeans settled on the word Africa, the continent was called many other names. They include Corphye, Ortegia, Libya, and Ethiopia.

Other names such as the land of Ham (Ham means dark skin), mother of mankind, the garden of Eden, dark or black continent, Kingdom in the sky, and the land of Cush or Kesh (referring to the Cushites who were ancient Ethiopians) were used.

Why is Africa called Africa?

There exist many theories explaining the origin of the name 'Africa'. At the time of writing this piece, the source of the name is uncertain. However, the theories below shed some light on how this second-largest continent with the second-largest population acquired its befitting name.

1. Roman theory

Some scholars believe that the word originated from the Romans. According to this school of thought, the Romans discovered a land opposite the Mediterranean and named it after the Berber tribe residing within the Carnage area, presently referred to as Tunisia. The tribe's name was Afri, and the Romans gave the name Africa, meaning the land of the Afri.

2. Weather theory

Some believe that the name was coined from the continent's climate. According to this theory, the word is a derivation of 'aphrike', a Greek word that means a land free from cold and horror.

Alternatively, it could be a variation of the Roman word 'aprica', which means 'sunny', or even the Phoenician word 'far', which means 'dust'.

3. Geographical theory

There is a suggestion that the name came far afield. It was brought by the Indian traders, who entered the continent through the Horn of Africa.

In Hindi, the word 'apara' means 'comes after'. Geographically, this can be interpreted to mean a place to the west.

4. Africus theory

Another fundamental theory claims that the continent derived its name from Africus. Africus is a Yemenite chieftain who invaded the northern part in the second millennium BC.

It is argued that he settled on his conquered land and named it Afrikyah. Because of his insatiable desire for immortality, he ordered the world continent to be named after him.

5. Phoenician Theory

Another school of thought suggests that the name is derived from two Phoenician words, 'friqi' and 'pharika'. The words mean 'corns' and 'fruits' when translated.

Hypothetically, the Phoenicians christened the continent as the land of corns and fruits.

There is little or no certainty on the source or meaning of the continent's name. Several scholars have tried to explain the origin of the word, but none is convincingly correct. However, the original name of Africa was Alkebulan.

Interview with an African history specialist

In an exclusive interview with TUKO.co.ke, Adesoji Jawad Iginla, a seasoned specialist in African history, opened up about how Africa got its name and the historical evidence that sheds light on how the continent came to be. Here's an excerpt from the interview.

Q: I believe that long before Africa appeared on modern maps as the world's second-largest continent, the land was already home to complex civilisations, kingdoms, communities and trading networks that had their own identities and ways of describing the places they inhabited. Based on your research into African history and historical narratives, how should we understand the continent before the name 'Africa' became widely used? Are there any names, geographical descriptions or identities that existed among the peoples who lived here before outsiders began describing the continent as a single entity?

We should not imagine a continent that was waiting for Europeans to name it. We should instead imagine a vast and highly differentiated set of self-contained societies that understood themselves through their own political, linguistic, religious, ecological and commercial worlds.

The important qualification is that there is no convincing evidence for one universally accepted indigenous name for the entire continent in antiquity. That matters because the modern idea of a continent is itself a particular geographical abstraction.

Ancient Egyptians had names for Egypt and neighbouring regions; Kushites had their own political and geographical vocabulary; Greek writers used Libya to refer to what could encompass much or all of Africa; later Arab geographers used terms such as Ifriqiya, Bilad al-Sudan, and Maghrib for particular regions. None of the above is equivalent in meaning to the modern political-geographical "Africa".

This is why it is better to speak of multiple African identities and historical geographies rather than searching for a single lost continental name. Modern scholarship likewise stresses the extraordinary diversity of African societies, languages and political systems. Parker and Rathbone ask precisely how we can speak of “Africa” without assuming that this enormous region possessed a single timeless identity.

The archaeological record reinforces that point. The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology treats Pharaonic Egypt, Kerma and Kush, Berber and Phoenicio-Punic North Africa, Roman Africa, the Ethiopian highlands, African urbanism and precolonial states as interconnected but distinct historical formations.

So the better formulation is: Before “Africa” became a dominant continental label, Africans did not live without geography or identity. They lived within many geographies and identities.

Q: Although a name may seem like a simple word, naming a place can be an exercise in power, as the person who records or popularises a name can influence how future generations understand that place. When we trace the history of the word "Africa", whose voices and records do we actually encounter, and who had the authority to give the continent the name by which much of the world eventually came to know it?

Primarily, we encounter the voices of Greek and Roman writers, administrators and geographers, followed later by Arabic, European Christian and early modern cartographic traditions. But that is not the same thing as saying that Africans had no names for themselves or their lands.

This is the crucial distinction: the surviving written record is not the same thing as the totality of historical experience.

Greek writers generally used Libya as the geographical designation for the African landmass, although the boundaries varied. Herodotus, for example, speaks explicitly of Libya as one of the world's major divisions.

The Romans subsequently used Africa. After Carthage's defeat in 146 BCE, Rome formally established a province called Africa, initially centred on what is now northern Tunisia. Oxford's Oxford Classical Dictionary describes the creation of the Roman province of Africa in 146 BCE and its subsequent expansion under Caesar into Africa Nova.

But we must avoid the simplistic statement that “the Romans invented Africa.” The exact origin of the word is uncertain. This is where V. Y. Mudimbe becomes important. His point is larger than etymology: names become powerful when they are embedded in systems of geography, scholarship, administration and representation.

The Idea of Africa traces the changing construction of “Africa” from Greek and Roman geographical thought through European intellectual traditions.

Q: The internet has popularised claims such as 'Alkebulan was the original name of Africa', while other explanations connect the word 'Africa' to ancient North African peoples, Roman usage, Berber terms, or Greek and Latin interpretations. As someone who works with African historical narratives, how should readers distinguish between a compelling story that has been repeated for generations and an explanation supported by historical evidence? What do we actually know with reasonable confidence about the earliest uses of the name 'Africa' and how it evolved?

This is where historical method is especially important. The internet claim that “Alkebulan was the original name of Africa” is attractive because it offers a simple story: Africa supposedly had an ancient indigenous name, “mother of mankind” or “garden of Eden", which was later replaced by a European/Roman name.

The problem is that the claim is much easier to repeat than to document. When historians test an etymological claim, they should ask the following questions:

1. What is the earliest surviving text containing the word?

2. In what language was it written?

3. Who wrote it? Where and when?

4. Does the text actually use it for the whole continent?

5. Can the linguistic derivation be demonstrated from that language?

6. Is there a manuscript tradition connecting the ancient form to the modern spelling?

By those standards, I would not present “Alkebulan was the original name of Africa” as an established historical fact.

There is an important modern bibliographical point here. Yosef Ben-Jochannan's Black Man of the Nile and His Family, first published in 1972, is a genuine, traceable work of Afrocentric historical writing, and its indexed text includes “Alkebu-lan.” That establishes that the expression circulated in modern Afrocentric literature.

But modern circulation is not proof of ancient provenance. I would be particularly cautious about the frequently repeated assertion that Cheikh Anta Diop made the famous “ancient name of Africa was Alkebu-lan” statement in a book titled Kemetic History of Afrika.

I have not found a traceable bibliographic record for such a book by Diop in the established catalogues I checked. Diop's documented major works include The African Origin of Civilisation, Precolonial Black Africa, and Civilisation or Barbarism, among others.

What I am saying is that a quotation attributed to Diop should be treated as a settled fact, without a page image or a verifiable edition of the book being presented. A more grounded position would be to trace and follow the paths created by the texts cited in answering the very first question of this piece.

Q: Although the word 'Africa' is sometimes described as a colonial name, its history appears to stretch much further back than the European colonial partition of the continent in the 19th century. Taking a wider view of history, is it accurate to call 'Africa' a colonial name, or does that description overlook the term's earlier use and evolution?

Not if we are talking about the word's origin. Calling Africa a “colonial name” is historically too compressed. The term predates the nineteenth-century European Scramble for Africa by roughly two millennia. Rome was using Africa in antiquity, and the Roman province of Africa existed from 146 BCE.

So I would phrase it this way: Africa is not a colonial name in origin; it is an ancient name whose meaning and geographical scope were progressively transformed by empires, scholars, cartographers and, much later, colonial powers.

That distinction is extremely important. Rome did not create the modern political continent of 54 states. Nor did ancient Africans collectively think of themselves as members of a modern nation called “Africa.” What happened over centuries was the progressive enlargement and reification of a geographical label.

Colonialism then gave that label a new and extraordinarily powerful political significance. European powers increasingly treated Africa as a single object of exploration, classification, conquest and economic extraction, even though African societies continued to possess their own political identities.

This is very close to the larger argument in Mudimbe: the history of “Africa” is not only the history of a place but also the history of how knowledge about the place was produced and organised.

Walter Rodney is helpful for the next stage of the argument: once European imperial power became dominant, economic and political relations profoundly altered African societies and the interpretation of African development.

So “colonial name” is too strong as an etymological description, but it can be useful as a shorthand for the modern political power attached to the name during colonialism.

Q: Perhaps the deeper question is not just what Africa was called centuries ago, but who gets to tell its story today. With oral traditions, indigenous languages, local histories and African archives still carrying memories that could easily be lost or overshadowed by externally written accounts, how can Africans preserve and document the continent's diverse histories for future generations in the face of Western cultural influence?

The answer is not simply to reject Western sources. It is to break the monopoly of any one source tradition. African history should be reconstructed from multiple kinds of evidence and, wherever possible, cross-checked against one another: oral traditions, indigenous written records, inscriptions, manuscripts, archaeology, linguistics, material culture, architecture, genealogy, environmental evidence and external archives.

This is not merely a political argument. It is a recognised historical methodology. Jan Vansina's Oral Tradition as History is foundational here. He demonstrates that oral traditions can be treated as historical evidence, provided historians understand how traditions are transmitted, transformed, performed and remembered.

UNESCO's General History of Africa, Volume I, is even more explicit. It includes chapters on African historiography, written sources, oral tradition and its methodology, living tradition, and archaeology and dating techniques.

The two authors are asking that we preserve the voice before it disappears. How do we go about this? Record elders, griots, praise poetry, dynastic traditions, family histories, women's histories, workers' histories and community memories in the original African languages, not only in English or French.

In translating, we should be aware that failing to preserve the original can result in the loss of meaning, metaphors, and concepts. This can be done through the following.

· Digitise African archives in Africa - African manuscripts, newspapers, photographs, recordings, maps, court records, missionary records, and private collections should be digitised and held in African institutions, with duplicates preserved elsewhere. The goal should not be simply “access to Western archives”; it should be strong African archival infrastructure.

· Treat African languages as historical archives - This is central to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Decolonising the Mind. Language is not merely a communication tool; it carries memory, worldview, culture and historical categories.

· Build More African-centred institutions of knowledge - Toyin Falola and Christian Jennings' Africanizing Knowledge directly addresses the imbalance in the production of knowledge about Africa and argues for bringing African modes of historical discourse more fully into scholarship.

Wrapping up - Original name of Africa

There you have it: the theories explaining the origin of the name 'Africa', along with an expert commentary on the subject from one of the finest specialists in African history. We hope this provides some insight into the continent's rich history and how it came to be.

Tuko.co.ke also recently published an article about 50+ funniest black names that will make you laugh out loud. Have a look to find out what the names are.

Source: TUKO.co.ke

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