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Origins of the Name
25 May 2006 Volume 2, Issue 11 Incredible but true. There’s a world issue on which Pat Robertson and George Clooney see eye-to-eye: Irradicating hunger and poverty in Africa. And the paparazzi are learning how to spell Namibia, as they await the birth of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s child in this Southwest Africa nation. Clooney, Pitt, and Jolie know that in a media-driven society, the press will follow Hollywood’s biggest stars everywhere—and these activist-actors can use their celebrity to draw attention to desperate situations in Africa. Closer to home, we in the Berkshires participate in petition drives and local fundraisers to help end the genocide in Darfur. At a time when the eyes of the world are on Africa, this issue of World History to Go focuses on the history of this continent. Origins of the Name Africa
Great Zimbabwe
Inside the Berkshire Encyclopedia:
For more related topics, try articles like “Africa, Colonial,” “Africa, Postcolonial,” “African Religions,” “Art—Africa,” “Aparteid in South Africa,” Kenyatta, Jomo,” “Trading Patterns—Trans-Saharan,” and “Tutu, Desmond.” A New African UnionAfrican heads of state meeting in 1999 issued a declaration calling for a reconstituted continental organization modeled loosely on the European Union. One of the keys to the new African Union (AU) was a new principle written into its Constitutive Act, adopted in July 2000, which asserted “the right of the Union to intervene in a Member State pursuant to a decision of the Assembly in respect of grave circumstances, namely: war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity” while also reaffirming the “sovereign equality and interdependence” of all the member states.The AU actually came into existence the following year and was ceremonially launched at a summit in Durban, South Africa, in July 2002. The new organization has promised to focus more on economic matters, even moving toward an eventual common currency. These efforts have been widely applauded internationally, with significant commitments from the United States and the European Union for a New Partnership for African Development created by the AU member states. In addition, plans are underway for the creation of an African Peacekeeping Force and perhaps even a Pan-African Parliament, in hopes of making significant contributions to security and political independence for all of Africa’s peoples, as originally envisioned by the first pan-African theorists. [From the article, “African Union,” by Melvin E. Page, in the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History.] 
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For ways to learn (and teach) about the Darfur genocide, go to Save Darfur and Darfur: A Genocide We Can Stop. And visit ONE: The Campaign to Make Poverty History to find out more about the unique organization that has united Pat Robertson, Bono, Brad Pitt, and George Clooney on a crucial mission. With warm regards, |
The very origin of the name Africa is contentious. The most common scholarly explanation is that it comes from the Roman Africa terra, or “land of the Afri” in reference to a Berber-speaking society that once lived in what is now Tunisia. One alternate explanation is it comes from the Latin aprica (sunny) or the Phoenician term afar (dust). An Arabic term, Ifriqiya, is often assumed to come from the Roman, though some argue that the Latin term came from the Arabic. There is also an Afrocentric argument that the term is actually ancient Egyptian in origin, from Af-Rui-Ka meaning “place of beginnings.” Whatever the origins of the term, by the fifteenth century Africa was winning out against competing terms such as Ethiopia and Libya to become the common identifier for the continent. If one looks at maps of Africa produced during the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, one can see Africa increasingly come to dominate as the name of the continent. The controversy over the landmass’s name serves as foreshadowing for the deeper conflicts over its meaning and relevance in world history. [From the article, “Africa,” by Jonathan T. Reynolds, in the 
Visitors to the ruins of the former capital of Great Zimbabwe, a state that flourished in southern Africa from approximately 1290 to 1450, may be struck by two observations. First, the impressive stone structures emerging from the savanna still convey the former wealth and importance of the site. In the local language, Shona, zimbabwe means “houses built of stone,” and there are many zimbabwe in the region, in particular in the area bounded by the Limpopo River in the south and the Zambezi River in the north. Great Zimbabwe thus represents a prominent example of political power and architecture; in fact it was the largest stone structure in Africa south of the Sahara built before European colonization in the late nineteenth century. While having only extended across a fraction of what today is the national territory, its legacy is so important that in 1980 the newly independent country was named Zimbabwe, and the image of an artifact, the stone-carved Zimbabwe bird, of which eight were found at the site, became part of the national flag. [From the article “Zimbabwe, Great” by Heike I. Schmidt, in the
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