Place Name or Geographical Nomenclature: Changing the Macrotoponym 'AFRICA': Revisited.

There is a retailing clothing corporation in Europe called the United Colors of Benetton operating in some 120 countries. If they are advertising their products they shock to the core their clients or would-be clients. I cannot conjecture if their sales increase in consequence. Once, they posted on bill boards in Western Europe and North America a picture of a dark skin African breastfeeding a rosy (white) child as a way of advertising their sweater. http://beibysrabbithole.blogspot.com/2010/10/united-colors-of-benetton.html

That advert invoked days of slavery where Negro (African American) wet nurses would not suckled their babies first but would those children of their ‘rose’ (white) mistresses. That was a modicum of slavery in the days of slavery in deep south USA. What do you call such happening today and being documented for you? I heard some readers talk of barefaced exploitation and provocation of dark complexioned Africans or peoples. Is it modern day slavery or are we still reminded of the exploitation of one of our kinds in the 21st century? Readers are referred to those bill board posters, the United Colors of Benetton to have the answer from the horse's mouth. 

I am not writing on geographical nomenclature of Africa to shock or provoke my readers beyond words at the United Colors of Benetton but to inform base on philosophical and scientific reasoning. I would want my readers to rationalize, ratiocinate and not to react out of sentiments as I have done so to put this in black and white before reacting. The reason is what we all articulate could be documented for posterity.

I would also appreciate it if kind readers would translate this particular treatise into French, Hausa, Russian, Portuguese, Swahili, West African English (Creole) and Spanish for all and sundry to decipher. My rationale is that I do not want us to swing to and fro as a pendulum as some interlocutors / debaters want us to do without making headway. We, [particularly from Africa] tend to insinuate from comments made that we are still thousands of years away from being made into a book learned continent. Many of you could compare our advances in literacy with those of India. I see that India is a lot developed and what is dragging it behind is lack of rigid family planning akin to their next door neighbor, China. The veracity is they have the audacity to invest in Africa and elsewhere. I do not know of any Nigerian apart from South African companies setting up substantial businesses in India and China. The least they do is to supply raw materials. Ask why not finished commodities?

Africa is last in most scientific advancement due to no fault of theirs and that is no excuse that they cannot advance and even outdistance those who had been thousands of miles before them in the trail of industrialization if at all there is anything like that. If Africans are apparently not economically and industrially advanced, it may be because they are complacent with their present status quo and their perception of advancement is completely different from those of their onlookers from other continents. What ever, we are all earthlings and there is no reason why some should advance industrially and we are left behind. To say that I love to foot it when I can fly like others to my destination is being naive.  It may be because Africans still build or aspire to build their heaven, Elysium in some extraterrestrial zone in the life after this whereas others believe that their heaven is on earth. Malcolm X in his book (1965) The Autobiography of Malcolm X with the Assistance of Alex Haley, London: Penguin Books, 512 p highlighted this point. If others are way ahead, it is because they have perfected what they took from their mother continent, Africa and not that they make different superlative commodities than Africans. I will go straight to our topic for today, a quest for the change of macrochoronym AFRICA to what some persons might like to call authentic place names.

New Terms
Before we proceed we would like to clarify certain jargon. A specialist in place name studies is a toponymist. He specializes in the scientific study of place names, choronymy or onamastics or what are known in some quarters as cartolinguistics or geolinguistics. When we are interested in nomenclature of smaller areas we call this microtoponymy as opposed to macrotoponymy that studies regionyms, names of countries, large geographical regions and continents. In our case, we are interested in the macrotoponymy of Africa. That has been covered by me in my work I am citing for the third time on this forum, Origins of African Place names: An Introduction to toponyms in Cartography and Politics in Africa, Ottawa: Biaco Publishing Inc. I wish the person who suggested the change of African place name, what may sound like an academic gymnastics or jingoism would have perused me work particularly chapters xix and xxii. It is true that if there are certain changes, as one writer pointed out, such as unification of Africa as a single country that might call for a new name. If this work have been read, plenty of hassles and perchance waste of time would have been saved. Our attention would not have been diverted from the urgent task of development we must handle if we do not want to be re-colonized for a second time by aliens.

One theme that I have treated among many others is the choice and applications of geographic place names. I have emphasized on the vital need for a name chosen to be the outcome of a common consensus. Leaders in these fields are the UNGEGN (Unesco) who attempt to ensure that geographic nomenclature are standardized, in whatever language they are rendered for easy communication. In the case of Africa in toto, it is suggested that the African Union committee of place names look into this matter if it is not to be dogmatic. If one is not been formed, it should as it is needed now and will be in the future. If changes of geographical nomenclatures are to be accepted without grudge, they have to be done by democratically elected, equally represented and level-headed members of a place name committees who are experts in the field of onamastics.

The UNGEGN organization had come across cases where majority communities tended to dominate minorities to the extent that their languages and hence their geographic place names are suppressed or completely annihilated. This happens when two nations or communities come together and their cultures are sort of clashed. The dominating one tends to suppress the minority ones without taking into consideration their feelings and historical or psychological affiliations to their names that are being wiped out or adulterated. They are part and parcel of their culture and the moment they are wiped out, they interpret that as their language and core of their culture being erased. Even when the new community that had newly joined the smaller one had got points as the names they want to get rid of being shift names or mistaken names, the minority communities still feel bitter and often interpret those actions as assimilation or blatant domination.

A bunch of politicians do not have the right to stand up and erase the names that have been in one region of the country because they feel that it is their duty to do so. This is interpreted as dictatorship and that does not augur well in a civilized and democratic world. It is for this reason that Cameroon Republic that annexed Southern Cameroons, or West Cameroon State and changed the name Victoria to Limburgh or Limbe is not taken kindly by the annexed state of Southern Cameroons, aka Ambazonia. It is barefaced assimilation that is condemned in any civilized and democratic society.[vide: http://vibanflagbooksinternatinal.blogspot.ca/2009/11/protracted-case-of-southern-cameroons.html

“The revolutionary political process in 1981 led to the historic Port Town of Victoria founded by Rev. Alfred Saker, the focus of national and international attention in 1858 on the occasion of its centenary celebrations being quietly renamed ‘Limbe’, when comparable monuments names after French colonial heroes have remained untouched. Southern (West) Cameroonians had not quiet recovered from the shock caused by this act, when by Law No. L84,001 of 14/02/84 the United Republic of Cameroon was again quietly replaced with ‘Republic of Cameroon,’ the name French Cameroon assumed at independence in 1960.”[Anthony Ndi, 2005: page 312- in his book Mill Hill Missionaries in (West) Southern Cameroons. Nairobi: Paulines Publication Africa.]

The reaction here was acrimonious as the recent change of appellation Provinces to Regions in the very country whose senior officials are considered in Ambazonia as proconsuls who are there of their accord and not as wished by Southern Cameroonians. They can afford to do what they are doing as they are considered as an invasion forces that are not democratic.

Let me reiterate, changes of names could be done by anyone but that is not allowed in a truly democratic nation state. It is because such place names have been recorded in many documents (maps, gazetteers, atlases and charts) and a mere change of them has to take into consideration several factors. They have to think of the cost of changes to the government and individuals, the map makers not only of the region concerned but in all the establishments of the world, jurisprudence and the psychological effect of the people in that locality. The mere change of Cameroon Republic’s appellation Provinces to Regions so as to hide the fact that it was an independent West Cameroon State formerly known as Southern Cameroons or British Southern Cameroons from the rest of the world and generations who were not born, made all atlases that incorporate this country obsolete. Alterations of certain names are taken by some communities as removing their ancestral homes and throwing them away. When names are changed without a common consensus, they are interpreted by the changing authorities as being arrogant, undemocratic and looking down on the communities they once designated and such do cause bitter feelings and war in some cases. There is no way you could go to change Istanbul to Constantinople and bullets will not fly. The reasons are that the Turks were defeated by the Christians before Constantinople was imposed and now that they are no longer under the Christians from Rome, they see no reason why they would have to live under imperialistic names. They have all the rights to change the names. Similarly, given opportunity, Limbe or Limburgh could revert to Victoria thereby the moment Southern Cameroons independence would be restored.

The name Victoria has historical underpinning and tells the world that historical and even present links that Southern Cameroons or the former British Cameroons at large once had or still have with Great Britain. That is a historical fact and not fiction. If Cameroon Republic that had its independence from France still maintain French names of their streets, monuments, why do they feel that they can change English names in Southern Cameroons aka Ambazonia without tangible reasons other than assimilating Ambazonians in their governance that they do not want to be a part of it. They seize upon the least opportunity to change even minor geographical names. Bridges in Southern Cameroons that has English as its official language now are being named pond de whereas in their republic they maintain French name. Court cases are now being held in French that official language of Cameroon Republic and the accused and defendants in Southern Cameroons are bungled up because they do not understand what is happening in their courts of law. The total assimilation of the Southern Cameroons is the name of the game and no free state in the world would tolerate what is happening even Quebec province in Canada. 

If there is any reason to contradict my statement, let there be a referendum now in the Southern Cameroons whether they would want to have their lost political independence they achieved on October 11, 1961. The vote for immediate independence would be overwhelming as what happened in the Southern Sudan. We are not saying that stooges are never there. There were some in Vichy France, some in South Sudan, and aye some in apartheid Rep. of South Africa and the then Rhodesia. There is no way or any wedge that could have halted the South Sudan from being with North Sudan or Sudan Republic where in the past they were being treated as second class citizens. If you doubt what I am saying since the independence of Sudan from Her Majesty’s Government of the UK, how many Southern Sudanese (Equatorians?) ever became head of State of Sudan? Not a single one of them. Similarly, there is not a single Southern Cameroonians who had ever and will ever be the president of Cameroon Republic. The reason is obvious; they are considered as moronic second class citizens with a different culture as testified by outbursts recorded in media in this country. Where the French and the English speaking Africans of this region meet there are ever clashes. Many will climb the pulpit and point fingers but what I am stating is the naked truth that is made from close observation, participation and past documentations.

Exceptional burlesque Cases and beyond names

Having brought the above illustrations, there are certain place names in Africa that are considered derogatory and anachronistic and might have lived hitherto owing to the naivety of the peoples they designate. This will lead me to draw another example from West Africa, namely IVORY COAST or COTE D’IVOIRE. Let me reiterate, I have in the past stated that its translation was and is still standing for SLAVE COAST and that is preposterous in the 21st century. Up to today, slaves are still known in some Western African communities as 'ivories.' I wonder why someone with free thinking and being level-headed would still want to bear such derogatory name, knowing its history and how humiliating it was and still is to black peoples in Africa and in the diaspora?  I am not sure why that name is still maintained. My interpretation is that since this forum is exclusively in English, citizens of that region in West Africa still called SLAVE COAST or rightly Côte d’Esclave have not been able to read debates in the forums or have been distracted by their internecine war presidential ascendancy. You, dear readers will do Africa the honor of drawing their attention to this notoriety. 

Those nomenclatures that shock are burlesques. There is no society without any of these. In the Cameroon we still have a name of a village Bangonngwana which stands for a country of slaves. In France, we have a funny name like Condom. Many abound in the Republic of USA, as Intercourse. For many of us who associate this term condom with French letters, rubber to be worn to avoid sexually transmitted diseases, we are appalled why such a name designates a town in SE of France today. We forget that such a name predated our present condom that should imperatively be the first vocabulary of` a sexually active teenager. The name of this town is therefore not anachronistic. No matter how appalling it may sound to some readers, it may be there to stay unless the denizens of this town by a common consensus decide to change it. This goes for the name Ivory Coast or Coast of Slaves I have suggested to be changed to Songhai for reasons I have advanced in my work and in forums.

Similarly 'Africa' cannot just be changed because a firebrand scholar is feeling that the continent of Africa had to be changed by Africans as others were of the opinion that the Indians of America (First Nation Peoples) ought to give the name they would want their continents to be known. Having said this, the sky could be called water so long as it is a common consensus and it would water all the deserts in the world and halt famine.  I once heard some Francophiles crying that the English language was suppressing their language. My reply to the head of Francophonie was that one does not learn a language for the sake of learning but for the remuneration such knowledge would bring one. How does the change of Africa that had been known since time immemorial ameliorate the economic state of Africans today? Will it stop armchair sensational journalists from propounding and publishing bogus theories that AIDS/HIV was in Africa in the region of Boumba and Ouesso then yet to be explored by the colonial German S.E. Concession in 1908 to befuddle gullible readers today and enrich themselves? (see the work of David Quammen (2015) The Chimp and the River and his data alleged to have been drawn form DNA of man and chimp that lived in the region cited above). The first joint French cum German surveys of this areas was in 1902. Although the German S.E. Concession were exploring this are area for ivories and wild rubber, there was no mention in their reports of AIDS/HIV related diseases analysed by Quammen. Additionally the French Equatorial Africa that shared the border here with German Kamerun would have mentioned it. There reports were mostly concentrated on sleeping sickness and malaria. Furthermore the goings here were difficult and we have to take the findings as those that used to come out of Africa before colonization with a pinch of salt (read Patrick Marnham (1980) Dispatches from Africa, Abacus page 31). 

As above stated, it could come to fruition if fragmented African states decide to amalgamate to form a single country. Albeit, with the megalomaniac attitude of Cameroon Republic (independent in 1960) colonizing the West Cameroon State (independent 1961 because of its smaller size and population) and Morocco that is sitting put on Western Sahara, the former Spanish Colony, only foolish smaller African states would agree to put their fragile eggs in any proposed United State of African Republic's basket....If that were to succeed, it might necessitate a new macrotoponym. That is the practical essence.

Many of you bear European, Judeo-Christian and Arabic names because of your religious beliefs, and the unproven belief that when you assume such names your inferiority complex would be positively changed and you would be accepted by those who once upon a time looked down upon you as inferior sub humans. Furthermore, what you believe awaits you because of such beliefs and assumption of alien names is the life after this one on earth. Have those who once upon a time downtrodden you accepted you as equals? Are you better off economically because you are called Mohammed, Isa and not Kwesi or Okonkwo or Wirba or Swane, Chimbani or Diop that was in your tribes or kingdom, millenniums before the Arabs and Europeans returned with their imperialism in your continent? Again do you see your past reasoning strong enough for you to dump your authentic, meaningful and beautiful African names? Do you know that three quarters of Africans bear foreign names? Are they aware of the fact that they are killing African languages and cultures softly but surely? When people call your Hausa name, and not the apparently enforced Arabic names some passionately defend to death, they are sidelining Hausa and promoting Arabic. Fanatics will not sympathize with this as it may is bunkum to them. Naïve persons do not think of this as they accept imposed inferiority of their languages and cultures vis-à-vis other languages and cultures that emanate outside the continent of Africa. I would not like to go into history as inciting Africans to abandon their foreign beliefs (see my reaction to President Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo in my blog) but I would like to be known as the one who told Africans that they could welcome foreign sciences and technologies as the Japanese did without necessarily abandoning their Africanness. I would like to be reiterating that you could be a Christian without necessarily dumping your Africans names, philosophies and cultures. Gentiles were accepted once baptized. If you could accept others, why do they expect you to change before they can accept you? How many White Southern Africans are known by the Zulu, Xosa , Shona and Ndebele names? How many speak those languages ever since their fore parents reached that sub continent in the 16th century?

Let me not zigzag from the mean topic in this section of burlesque names. In the USA, there are many such names. One is Intercourse found in the USA. The word has several meanings and we call this in English grammar disambiguation. It will be recalled that the French students are backward in some scientific fields because by the time they translate latest scientific papers published in America or the English-speaking worlds, they are late and by the time they have them in France they sometimes a year old. The reverse is true of getting innovation technologies published in French journals in the English speaking communities. Some French establishments are aware of these shortcomings and insist that synopses are published to in English. The Dutch Government circumvents this by ensuring that their students learn English at primary school level so that they are able to read the dominating scientific reports in English. Let us not go far. Rwandan officials were smart to adopt English. In Asia the Chinese and Vietnamese are doing this too. That is a different topic. It does not mean that French is not a beautiful language and is being learned or enforced other parts of the world. It was the first League of Nations' official language of communication and it is still employed. 

This idea of getting scientific reporting fast accounts for more Dutch and German students being more bilingual in English than their counter parts say in France and even in Quebec Province of Canada where there are stoics. Having made this point, once more I should not be misquoted by someone that the French education is mediocre. There are more French scientists in French than scientists in all of Africa combined. As small as their population is vis-à-vis the entire continent of Africa, they are far advanced in scientific research than say Nigeria that has got thrice its population. They are a nuclear power and the only country in Africa that can come near France is the Republic of South Africa. [It should be mentioned here that when it comes to nuclear technology, it is a guarded secret as it is not to the best interest of everyone if terrorists lay their hands on].

Not to digress again, in the days of slavery and slave trade, European slave traders could buy black or white slaves. The black slave was actually an African person from the Sudan, Nigritia, Guinea (Aguinaldu) or Western Africa and the white ivory was actually ivory tusk. The first black suffix designates real slave and the later tusks. Therefore we will be stupid or phlegmatic to insist in the 21st century to call ourselves SLAVE COAST REPUBLIC / REPUBLIQUE DU COTE D’IVOIRE. This is an appellation that would turn William Wilberforce, Jacob Clarkson, William Pitt and other abolitionists of slave and slave trade in their graves. I am not the one to tell Africans what would happen to them if such were to happen.

I have suggested a list of names including Songhai, Bandamia, etc, in my book that could be taken by President Alassane Ouattara and his entourage to save us from this opprobrium. They should make sure that it is debated and not a mistaken name as Abidjan the place name of their economic capital.

Agree with our previous interlocutor/contributors that Africa has more pressing needs than to be bothered with change of its regionym in macrotoponymy. Although one of our contributors has stated that Africans are more educated than the Chinese and India, they are still very poor and technologically backward. To me, Africa is the least developed continent economically irrespective of masses of natural resources and virtually free labor supply. It still has the appalling infrastructure when compared with India, Asia and South America that got independence from European power around the same time. If you want to disagree with me count how many Africans are in Diaspora and how many strive to go and work in Europe and North Africa to the extent that many lost their lives while crossing the Sahara and the Mediterranean Sea. Is it not a repeat of what happened during the trans-Atlantic and trans-Sahara slave trade? We call this brain drainage, write copious articles and books about it yet nothing has ever been done to address it. Without mincing our words 9 in 10 spinsters sounded in the Cameroun Republic dream is to go to Europe or North America so as to get married to whites. The reason is not that the White-man is good at making love; it is because he would alleviate their economic status and those of their extended families. Is that a tangible reason to get married? There is nothing in them call love even among their kinds. What does Europe offer Africans that Nigeria cannot? Why has the issue of economic migration never been seriously addressed by those erstwhile provinces of France and Britain that turned over night to pseudo nation states or banana republics? Is this not a pressing issue that should be addressed than the place name fiasco?

Economic Potentials

To get ourselves distracted from pressing economic debacles by this issue of place names and naming is not intellectually challenging and convincing enough. All we need to do is to look for ways to harness the River Congo to produce electricity that could be exported to Europe and Asia and stop bandying words on place names whose etymologies some of us dabble based on conjectures. If electricity from the River Congo cataracts alone is tapped, the D.R. Congo (Rightly should known as “Bula Mutari”, a name the Congolese gave to Henry Stanley who propagated 'black continent' for his breaking of rocks) will never go tasty and hungry for the next two hundred years unless some natural calamities were to come from no where and destroy its hydroelectric stations or divert the river to thin air. That could trigger industries that would attract investors and create jobs and take us away from the temptation of building nuclear energy plants as Mali is on the verge of doing. Imagine Somali after Said Barre having a nuclear electric plan. Not one would be safe. That attempt should be thwarted in Mali that has unruly men who attack and kidnap people for ransom moneys. It should be persuaded to desist from that suicidal action before they become like Pakistan with a nuclear capability that is the nightmare of India, Israel and America. It will be recalled that Africans are still suffering from the effect of the test of nuclear /hydrogen bomb blasts the French tasted in the 1950s and 1960s in the Sahara. Before we welcome certain industrial innovations, we have to ponder upon them and ask experts as the Germans, Japanese and the Russians.

Does it not bother us that in the 21st century if eight out of ten Africans would want to emigrate to Europe and North America to where there are favorable economic climates? It is a shame that we sit and watch our leaders fowl our economies with wanton corruptions, plow in nothing and we fervently believe that we could ameliorate ourselves and our continent by rendering our badly needed services in foreign climes? Since the 1500 AD Africans have been exporting their kinds to other parts of the world by vice or voluntary means. How has 600 years of exporting African to the Americas helped Africans and African Americans? To me, it had brought humiliation and stinking opprobrium. If Africans are not careful they could be re-enslaved by the new comers from the east who come to stay and not to return to their original homes. The terms of settlements should be clear as this broad day light and should be cast in stainless steel that should never be remolded. ‘Naturalize and plow back your profits in your new homes and not ship them to your old homes as once did the Indians in Uganda who after living in Uganda for one hundred years still called themselves Indians. Did we doubt it when Idi Amin Dada took the draconian measures of driving them out? It was because Ugandan Indians had not accepted to settle in Uganda as their homeland. To them it was a market where profit was obtained with impunity and taken to be invested home India where it was safe. Were they right? That is a different topic.

Lesson from the Japanese and secret of Industrialization

The Japanese threatened the very industrial core and power of Europeans because they learned European secret of industrialization. If we are not motivated to learn all these where do we think we are heading to and how are we to be respected by the industrially developed nations if we are not going to talk to them as equal from the position of strength? Is the right stratagem to invite foreigners to sell them chunks of our lands and they employ us to work on them instead of employing them to work for us in our lands? Is the right attitude to exploit all hard woods and export them to be stored in Europe and we are left with nothing? I learned one thing while working in Zimbabwe, that African Zimbabweans were scared of managing their affairs. They had been used to European Zimbabweans managing for them and when they were given that sanction to do things for themselves, most of them were petrified. It was for this reason, hitherto that European Zimbabweans were skeptical and often commented that they were aware of the fact that they had taken over their (African Zimbabweans’) lands but were doubting it that they could use the lands properly when they lacked capital, managerial skill, and the technical know-how that would make good farmers. I did not have to go far but to look at the swimming pools of homes Rhodesians abandoned and Africans took over. They were used as dust bins and were they were used the water was brackish, no money to buy alginates.

The Cameroon Development Corporation and no lessons for the indigenes

The Cameroon Development Corporation was and still a foreign concern in the Cameroons. It existed since the days of the Germans and changed hands with the English and now the French and a handful of adventurous locals. True it created jobs and all Africans could do in those plantations since their creation was to harvest crops with machetes and parceled them for Western European marts. Africans were and are employed as laborers and after 55 years of working hard daily they have not learned any technologies that could ameliorate their lives or help them set up their plantations. Sadly they returned and still do hitherto to their villages as they came, naked and even more moronic as they left their backward villages. They could not open farms or get pensions and there was no multiplier effect. What was the essence?

What is wrong with us that we cannot man our own lands and produce what others want? Must it be produce by those whom we are supposed to produce and sell to them? Then we will be confined to the state of slavery in our own lands for the foreseeable future. Are we not tired and do we forget that we were once used and are still used before our political independence in some quarters to buttress the Western Economies when ours were and are still in shambles. If there was forced migration during the times of slavery to produce goods for Europeans and if today we still do not reason and still feel that the best way is to still move over to Europe to work for them for stipends when we could have full pay for our productivity in our African homes, then slavery and slaver trade had never left us or taught us a single lesson. It is for this reason that when people are crying of sincere industrialization we are crying over spurious change of place names. Where therefore are our priorities? Let us in Africa invent a car that will only run on oxygen that is as common and produce all that the Asians, the Americans, Europeans and the rest of the would badly demand; we would not go about trumpeting to the world where we are and what we are but our clients would come to us with open arms asking for where we live. They would not need roads and names. Can we for one minute leave the alehouses, she-beens, chicken parlors, games and ponder upon Cheikh Anta Diop’s 1974, Black Africa: The Economic and Cultural Basis for a Federated State. West Point: Lawrence Hill and Company, 125 p? He outlines what we could do to be industrialized and be partially self sufficient and garner the respect and grandeur that was once Africa. I have mentioned one, the harnessing of the mighty River Congo to generate hydro electricity for our use and export.

You will see that before the name Africa was used to stand for the continent that is located south of Europe and to the southwest of the Middle East, various names were used to regions of Africa and they all stood for black. Starting from Western Africa are familiar with, we have Nigritia, then sometimes known as Guinea, (Aquinalda) then we had Western Sudan, Ethiopia and in the good old days we had Egypt. They all stood for black, designating the general color of the soil and sometimes that of the inhabitants as those of the Sudanese and Darfurians who had been blessed by nature with dark skin to cover them from the cancerous radiance of the sun. They never and do not suffer from cancer of the skin as do some of us who are light skinned. Therefore, the black melanin that gave some names in Africa is a blessing which when some brothers and sister want to shade them as if they were rotten sloughs because they had mistakenly taken the Caucasian fair complexioned skin as the prototype. I laugh at their deadly naivety. How does the change of complexions to mimic that of the brothers who had been made so by the temperate climes ameliorate the economic climate of Africans? How does it take away their miseries? How does it take away the pandemic HIV/AIDS related pandemic illnesses that nearly surpassed malaria in Africa? We could indulge in academia, philosophies but we have to keep on reminding ourselves of where we are going to and if what we are doing are positively changing our economies positively.

Fantastic Sounding Names

You see that some states have fantastic sounding names but their total wealth is not up the wealth of tiny Luxembourg and the municipality of Monaco in Western Europe. If Amerigo Vespucci reported the founding of America by Christopher Columbus and if a reader mistook his name Amerigo and wrote it America as the continent that were founded. What is wrong with this so long as it is not derogatory? For those of you who have done choronomy or onamastics or cartoglinguistics, America is a typical mistaken regionym or macrotoponym. The users know that it was mistaken name but dare not suggest that it be changed. Africa was not a mistaken name. It was a shift name, Whatever its etymology, it cannot be changed but those who strongly want to call it the poorest continent on earth peopled by economically less dynamic persons can call it what they like with their tribal names. It is their freedom of speech. I hope they have to seek its standardization from the United Nations Groups of Experts on Experts on Geographic Names (UNGEGN). If this has been entrenched and permeate the entire world and now the Indians who are the prima occupantis of these continents came up and exhume some names that is the authentic name of the America could it be accepted?.

The Africa you all claim is no longer peopled by the original inhabitants of Africa. They have all emigrated to Europe, Asia and the Americas. There is no place on earth that is not inhabited by Africans. The difference why they are not looking like Africans that we know of or what some of us erroneously want to insist we define as an Africa is because the climate changed them in the course of their emigration. They have to adopt and adapt or else were faced out from the face of the earth.

It was wrong in the pass to associate Africans with blackness as Africa was not and is not still peopled exclusively by black or dark-skinned complexioned peoples. There are rosy Africans or Caucasians who were in Africa before the first immigrants of Europeans left Europe after the so-called discovery of America by Christopher Columbus. The Arabs came in the 7 AD and you cannot strictly tell us that they are not Africans as the Boers or other Europeans settlers in Southern Africa. They still retain their rosy complexion what some Caucasians erroneously call white. Where do you classify the Fulani, the Chao Arabs, Arab, and Barbarians in the Atlas range, Tutsis, peoples of Chinese origins, and Indians? They are there and will be there forever. Even before the so-called categorization of man by color started by those who had put the erroneous white above the scale of human categorizations, particularly accentuated during the days of slavery and slave trade, everyone was the same. You will remember that the Popes of Rome had had four truly dark complexioned African Bishops of Rome. With the coming of color as the criterion for categorizing men on earth for their worth and even their IQ, some fair skinned Caucasians had since then and hitherto denigrated the man of African whose skin is dark or darkish to the bottom of the race scale and that is the casus belli. A time is coming, as it is now among the young Caucasians and Africans when they will totally believe that the color of the skin is another cloak men wear and that inside they are all the same. They are smarter than their predecessors and know that color had been given by climates and the nature of their landscape for what biologist term protective coloration that is also common among some creatures.

Therefore the prefix white, yellow,  black or brown to designating any person on earth is wrong. The most we can do to distinguish ourselves where it is imperative is to state that he is an Asian, She is an African. An African can be an Asian and vice versa. There are European Africans who are Africans even mentally and they are known as Africans. In this case, African could be what we used to be called in the past as white, brown, black, and yellow skins and not exclusively black as was erroneously called in Europe and America of the pass and by racists of today who are naïve or uneducated minorities. It is not only archaeological evidence but modern DNA do indicate that the first man to live on earth started in Africa. True they assumed different colors due to climatic, adaptation, and other fathers Charles Darwin and others have elucidated. That will never ever make us to look at them as different and not having one origin.

After Benetton: http://beibysrabbithole.blogspot.com/2010/10/united-colors-of-benetton.html

Can you differentiate the color of a person from his blood and heart? (After Benetton)

[The name will be in which of the official languages of Africa? Is there a standing or an ad-hoc committee established that could see to this? When the UNGEGN or ICA calls for a convention how many Africans nations bother to send in delegates even when being held in Africa? Something is not going on well in Africa or with Africans. They have been used to aliens doing things for them and when it comes to working for themselves that dependency syndrome or paradigm is not easily done away with. Colonialism was wrong. How many Africans are prepared to rectify the damage done by the colonialists? ]

PICTORIAL VERSUS ABSTRACT SYMBOLS OF COMMUNICATION

Don’t let your opinion be a line of steel that cannot be bent with our bare hands. I don’t want you to enter the paradigm of the erstwhile Major of New York City, His Lordship Rudy Giuliani who is out for a grandeur that had eluded him since 911 at the dawn of his life. He will not yield and his words is his bond. I will talk about video game addiction and pictures or pictorial interaction. The object of writing is communication. In some cases, the readers or interlocutors need to interact with the speakers. I do not favor quietism that follows most of my renditions. My genuine interpretation is acquiescence, ignorance or summary dismissal as bunkum by some readers if at all there are any or last and not least, quiescence. Then I may be awry as the new generation is not essentially growing to be book-learned but pictorially-learned. This is not of their making but ours that are bent on getting rich at the expense of their successes and continuity of the foundation of knowledge we have laid or inherited.

A strident picture of a naked Hollywood actress in her prime posted on Face Book or YouTube, Twitter or Instagram by some euphoric member would attract a million likes from viewers, ‘readers’. Whereas information on how to escape from a marauding desperado armed with guns, invading a bucolic school is ignored at the readers’ peril. You may be surprised that only ten readers may browse not because such information is not relevant as incidentally, from their perspective reading is painful, boring and not ‘exciting’.

Pictorial communication ardently promoted by the Face book and others is inadvertently outdistancing the alphabetically written formats or alphanumeric symbols of communication with certain groups of Internet users in North America. My apprehension is how pure scientific information would be transmitted in the future? It is easy when we employ a refined form of pictorial symbols, alphanumeric symbolism. However, if the trend of video gaming and use of still pictures continue, I envisage with naïve difficulties how quantum physics, psychology, linguistics and the learning of foreign languages would be effectively learned. Would we be regressing or progressing? I may be downgrading pictorial transmission of information of the type on Internet at this juncture. However, it is a known fact that most alphanumeric symbols we employ in our daily media had their genesis in pictorial symbolism. The fact that we do not take this into consideration is because most of our reasoning is abstract, refined symbolism and not necessarily pictorial or a combination. The outward facets of our thoughts are symbolic. If it were essentially pictorial that could retard the progress of our communication. I know many questioning if the Japanese and Chinese scripts do retard or accelerate communication above all to the uninitiated?

Armed with information that most abstract symbols have their genesis in pictorial symbols, should we not question it if the graphic generation that is indulged in video plays with pictorial symbols from dawn to dusk would be moronic or super intelligentsias since they would require no throes of laborious and serious reasoning to comprehend what is being transmitted? Many are greeted by video games when they rise up in the morning and bid good night by them at night. The absurdity of killing 8 to 10 hours at the expense of reading those great books that made the Western Civilization to ranking among the greatest on earth and if not in the universe is what makes me wonder if serious research has been carried out to see the danger we are putting these children and even adults into. Then, do all thoughts or psychic uses necessitate the use of symbols and would pictorial symbolism in our communication media accelerate or decelerate our comprehension? If it is professed that most living things with eyes learn to interpret pictures automatically vis-à-vis abstract symbols where some learning is required for effective interpretation, there might be some need in pictorial transmission of information irrespective of its addictive tendencies. Our dilemma is where users get addicted to and other vital chores suffer. Pictorial symbolism has been employed in cartographic communication since time immemorial and even today when it comes to tourist maps, plans and charts. Then in most maps, the use of abstract symbols apart from being clear in presentation, avoids crookedness, noise that may interfere in the transmission of intended information. This is a different perspective from video games that is geared towards entertainment and not necessarily for pedagogic purposes. However we are wondering aloud if it could be employed for teaching purposes now that we have seen it wastes a great deal of valued times of youths in schools and colleges.

You will remember that no one has ever visualized in real-time but always in the past. The object being visualized is captured by the photographic lens of the eyes, sent to the processing parts of the brain for interpretation before it refined or prostituted with our innate foreknowledge before being seen. Time elapses in the process. Therefore no one can see in the present and none had ever done so. It will ever be in the past. Even when you are speaking to yourself employing that auditory system of symbols you have to reason and then articulate and that takes time.

Knowing that one of the merits of pictorial presentation is getting youths to focus for hours and hours therefore could pictorial or video gaming be employed for pedagogic purposes which could be a bonus for those who have schooled themselves to read photographically. This draft that took me five minutes to pen could be read in one quarter of a second. With the acquisition of that skill of reading, it could take an enthusiastic scholar on average to read with formidable comprehension a thousand books in eight-working-hours’ day. Such would be classed among geniuses and many who have not mastered that skill would be flabbergasted and even surrender before the battle is declared. 

I am left with conjectures as some persons are of the opinion that inculcating knowledge and theories on the youths is torturing their innate witticism when they could with the click of a button ask Google and other sites, WWW, to produce billions of variegated answers. If applicable, we could envisage a vista of schools springing up where tests were not essential since everyone traveled with an up-to-date computer and could get answers to every conceivable question in the universe with a click of a button. Then would man not be controlled by machine, robots and look moronic? The fact is man is more intelligent than the computer and the moment he would allow himself to be dominated by it with the assumption of being comfortable, he would signal his demise. Domination is infiltrating through many guises. This is no longer scientific fiction or what could be examined casually, but many have working mini computers that translate and articulate in the languages of their interlocutors, do their assignments and a thousand and one others. With such possibilities, would there be any need to learn to learn or learn other languages or things?  Perhaps one of my readers would ponder a solution or solutions to this apparent conundrum. I will not sneak away from your comments as I am flexible and not like the toughened steel line of the former Mayor of New York earlier mentioned.