How Africa Got its Name: After Roman Invader?

How did Africa Get Its Name?

No other continent can rival Africa in the complexity of its human past. Home to 1.2 billion people, the world’s second-largest population and 2nd largest continent after Asia, the name Africa has always been intriguing.

But have you ever stopped to wonder, as home to the first great civilizations, is it really possible to know how Africa got its name and if the name Africa is even African?

Is this the name ancestors used to refer to the motherland? And if Africa and Africans were robbed of their inherent way of life, their culture and their history thanks to slavery and colonization, what if they were also robbed of the knowledge of the motherland’s true name?

For a long time, the historical origins of the name have been in dispute. A school of thought argues that the name Africa never originated from within the people and her people were never associated with the name. The theory suggests that the name ‘Africa’ is derived from the name of a famous Roman invader named Leo Africanus whose writings were used for some 400 years as one of Europe’s principal sources of information about Africa.

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