Cameroon is named after crayfish, should we rename it?
By Hans Ngala
It is a well-known fact (or so we are told in history), that Cameroon got her name from the Wouri River because Portuguese explorers who arrived Cameroon in the 15th century found a lot of shrimp or prawns in the river and named it Rio dos Camarões which translates to “river of shrimps” in English. The name Cameroon is simply Camarões in Portuguese to this day.
Now, if we infer correctly, it means that Cameroonians are “shrimp”! We are seafood (at least by the implication of the Portuguese) just because our country’s history has been told to have started with Portuguese explorers – unfortunately.
The name does not capture our essence as West Africans because it is a reflection of European imperialism and not our intrinsic African values or customs. It is wrong to teach that Cameroon’s history begins with the Portuguese, because before they landed on our shores, people lived there. Those people may not have set sail on boats to distant lands, but they lived there and they certainly had their own names for local places, which would never have been Portuguese names for sure. However, we will never know for certain what they called the Wouri River themselves as there are no historical records of this.
Another fact worth establishing is the fact that Cameroon as we know it today, also did not exist at the time of the arrival of the Portuguese and the people that today make up Cameroon, would have most likely never had anything to do with each other at the time because they spoke different languages and had different tribal chiefs and kings and didn’t speak English and French as we do today (a holdover from the European colonial enterprise in Cameroon of course).
So what needs to be done?
Name change is nothing new to Cameroon. A solid example of a well-known name change of a city in Cameroon is the case of today’s Limbe. From 1858 to 1982, the town was known as Victoria, after Queen Victoria of England, but a Presidential decree by President Ahmadou Ahidjo changed it to Limbe in 1982. According to some oral narratives, the name Limbe is believed to be a mispronunciation/ misspelling which originated from the name of one of the German engineers, a General Limburgh (or Limbeigh) who is said to have built one of the bridges in the city during German rule in Cameroon. Of course the name change was not without controversy. In 2009, some chiefs in Limbe wanted a return to the former name, Victoria.
Name change is not new for cities or countries in Africa either. As recently as 2018, the tiny kingdom-nation of Swaziland changed its own name to Eswatini to avoid confusion with the similarly-named country of Switzerland in Europe and also to reflect a more African identity. In South Africa, authorities changed the name of a seaside city from Port Elizabeth to Gqeberha to reflect the name of a river named by the local tribal groups and authorities also changed the name of another city, Grahamstown to Makhanda, after a tribal chief from the 1800s who resisted colonialists in his day.
Is a name change feasible in the case of Cameroon?
Changing the name of a country is no easy task. It comes with a lot of legislative implications and huge financial costs because everything from the country’s money, to official documents, airplanes and ships would need to be rebranded. Printing of official documents such as passports would need to have a do-over to reflect the name change as well, but nonetheless, it can be done.
In the case of Cameroon, it is necessary to make the change because we cannot go around calling ourselves shrimps, crayfish (or ‘njanga’ in local parlance), just because the Portuguese named a river so. We need to re-examine the name and question how reflective it is of us as a nation. Is this our identity? That we are sea creatures? Most Cameroonians would agree that this is not a befitting name. Never mind that most of us cannot tell the difference between shrimp, prawns or crayfish either.
However, we need to consider something that is more uniting and reflective of Cameroonian culture across the board. Maybe we can think of the name of a national landmark in the local tribal name of the area where it is found e.g Mount Cameroon, Lake Nyos etc or a favourite Cameroonian dish cherished by all Cameroonians – maybe waterfufu and eru, maybe fufu and njama-njama (or kahti-kahti) or a favourite genre of music that is unique to us like Makossa and see how we can leave it to our sociologists and anthropologists to come up with a coinage for a name that would be generally accepted by ALL Cameroonians.
Conclusion
At a time when the country is grappling with high numbers of unemployed graduates, ailing infrastructure, weak governance institutions and a deadly war in the Anglophone Regions of the country, changing the name of the country is not the most pressing issue on the foremost minds of Cameroonians, but it is certainly still a topic worth discussing. Even if the changes that are required for renaming the country won’t be immediate, it’s worth having the conversation or at least starting it.
