Place names that bring shame must be removed

I concur. No one with his right frame of mind wants to return to derogatory place names or names that were given or coined out of ignorance or blatant racism in the past by pioneering Caucasians in North America. In my early preview in this forum I vehemently pointed to the fact that it was opprobrious to hitherto still refer to Ivory Coast as such, as in the days of darkness when slavery and slave trade were at their height, one could buy a black or white ivory. Ivory in the phrase regionym of "Ivory Coast " can be that of an elephant tusk and a African slave. Not long ago (2011), the people of Bimbia in SW Region of the Cameroons were still referring to African Americans whose grand parents were sold from this coastal town to European slavers as "ivories." They had come from the USA to see the town and region were their fore parents were said to have emanated from as slaves. For that reason and many more, I have elaborated in my work, ORIGINS OF AFRICAN PLACE NAMES, I challenge the international communities and citizens of that region in West Africa, naively called IVORY COAST to change that name to a befitting modern name after a common consensus. The First Nation Peoples and any other group in the world do not want demeaning names that liaise or remind them of shame, slavery, ignorance and other evils of the past that are out of place in our apparent civilized world. If changes of names or place names are to come, they should not be imposed but had to be arrived by a consensus of a qualified place name committee as was the case of Burkina Faso, former Upper Volta.

We cannot hitherto call FIRST NATION PEOPLES of Canada or USA, Eskimos, Red Indians and other derogatory renditions. These will be politically incorrect. Owing to a plethora of names that designate these group of aborigines of North America, the next best alternative Canadian Caucasians arrived at was First Nation People.
Dr. Viban Ngo,
Toponymist and author.

> Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2011 09:46:08 +0000
> From: beckerleschar@ORANGE.SN
> Subject: Student problems with 'nations' : REPLY
> To: H-WEST-AFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU
>
> Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2011 20:31:10 -0600
> From: Tony Kaye
>
> ------------------
>
> Greetings friends,
>
> I suggest that the term "First Nation" is a label that "First Nations" people
> would accept only to an extent. "First Nations" is a settler society label that
> privileges the perspective and power of the colonizer in at least Canadian
> society. It, along with "Indigenous" and "Aboriginal" are only politically
> correct attempts to, forgive my coarseness, wash the nastiness and misuse that
> the word "Indian" has become in the public mind in Canada and the US when
> referring to "First Nation". Yet, these broad words completely fail to honor
> the names and language of the societies they attempt to refer.
>
> Yes, "First Nations" reflects the contemporary context of the power of
> Nationality in the minds of the powerful who have shaped what the academics
> call the colonial world.
>
> Might we see this problem in the discussions on H-Net and elsewhere about Africa
> that accept or deny the "nationality" of pre-colonial life in places like Ghana.
>
> So, a question to the more schooled on the topic than I: wasn't it true that in
> the 1960s academics proposed a "pre-colonial" nationality for the Asante
> Confederacy, after the Gold Coast became the current republican nation-state?
>
> It remains a quandary, for sure, in trying to understand the "nationality" of
> anything/place when or if we see the word Nation as meaning those borders in
> Europe and North America, the places where the scholarship has shaped the
> discussion.
>
> With regards,
>
> Tony