Cameroon

In 1472, the Portuguese navigator Fernando Poo sailed into a broad estuary on the West African coast and found the waters thick with prawns. His crew hauled in nets of the crustaceans, and the river received a practical name: Rio dos Camarões, the River of Prawns. The Portuguese word camarão descended from the Latin cammarus, itself from the ancient Greek kámmaros, a term for a horned sea creature. The estuary was the Wouri River; the prawns were abundant and apparently unforgettable.

The name spread outward from the river. By the sixteenth century, Portuguese traders referred to the coastal region around the Wouri as the Camarões coast. When the British arrived in the seventeenth century and Germany established a protectorate in 1884, each power adapted the name to its own phonetics: Britain wrote Cameroons, Germany wrote Kamerun, and France wrote Cameroun after receiving the territory following World War I.

The country achieved independence in 1960 as the French Cameroun, and the following year the southern portion of British Cameroons voted to join it. The unified republic settled on a bilingual identity: Cameroun in French, Cameroon in English. The shrimp population in the Wouri estuary has declined considerably since 1472, pressured by industrial fishing and the growth of the port city of Douala.

The prawns that named a country appear nowhere in its flag or coat of arms. The national symbols show a green, red, and yellow tricolor with a gold star, representing unity, sovereignty, and the two territories that merged in 1961. The name itself carries the memory of Fernando Poo's crew dragging nets through an estuary, finding abundance, and writing it down.