The name NIGERIA was coined by Miss Flora Shaw who was at the time a mistress to Nigeria’s administrator Lord Lugard. Ostensibly, the name was coined from the name of the river NIGER, a prominent river around the area. I say ostensibly because other sources, Wikipedia included, credit the source of NIGER as the generic word for black people: NIGGER/NEGROES. Thus, the area called NIGERIA was in actual fact “an area of negroes around a famous river also similarly named.” Miss Shaw named us along the same principles as produced NIGER as well in the French Protectorate neighbouring Nigeria to the north. In truth, the French word for black people is also NEGER. Here’s an article that disagrees, citing other sources of the word NIGER and NIGERIA.

The rambling thoughts that produced the above results from my frantic search stemmed from two incidents from last week. One was my pondering on the absence of large and individual language groups in West Africa that could be recognized as individual entities each with a distinct flag. The French language can effectively be represented by France’s flag, and its variant with the Canadian one. English can be Britain’s flag, or the Stars and Stripes of America if we mean the American type. German language takes the German flag while Japanese takes the Japanese flag etc. While looking at a multilingual website last week, I found out that if we were to represent standard Hausa today with a singular flag, we would run into a big trouble of many borders. The language has, with colonialism, been split along borders of Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Benin, Togo etc., and none of these countries can effectively claim to be the true hometown of the standard form without encountering opposition from the other.

This problem is not peculiar to Hausa alone. Yoruba, spoken by over 20 million people (Microsoft Encarta) is also split along so called national borders and can now not even be said to remain in its pure, undiluted form only in one of those states where its speakers reside. I cannot say for sure that the Yoruba of Dahomey is inferior to that of Oyo. I am not aware of adequate research into the difference in standard, but even if such exists, it would still be a tad awkward if the language could only be represented by the flag of a state artificially foisted on as many different nationalities as it contains.

The name NIGERIA embodies its many contradictions, and woes perhaps. Last week, a caustic article by a respected social commentator on the state of the Nigerian youth scene as being representative of a nation’s identity crises has received a few more caustic rejoinders that expound the manifesto of Nigerian youth’s rebellion as stemming from a youth re-awakening away from the country’s inglorious naming which has been shown to have come by only from similar condescending circumstances that brought our failing state into being in the first place.

Do youths have a right to rename and thus reclaim their country from Ms Shaw’s christening? Like we did with the flag, the national anthem, the driving system and the currency, I believe that not only are we right in taking liberties to change the country’s name in all our social activities of today, it may as well be our most important mission.

What are your views about the name NIGERIA and other colonial christenings all around Africa?