Nigeria

On January 8, 1897, Flora Shaw published a letter in The Times of London proposing a single name for the British territories clustered around the lower Niger River. "Nigeria" was her coinage, formed by attaching the Latin territorial suffix "-ia" to "Niger," the river's established name. Shaw was the colonial editor of The Times and one of the most influential journalists in Britain on imperial affairs. She was not a government minister, but her suggestion carried the weight of one.

The name entered official use quickly. By 1900, "Northern Nigeria" and "Southern Nigeria" appeared in Colonial Office documents as protectorate names. In 1914, Lord Lugard merged them into the "Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria," imposing a single administrative structure on a territory of enormous linguistic and cultural complexity. Shaw had by then married Lugard; the woman who named Nigeria watched her husband govern it.

The root of the name is the Niger River, whose own etymology runs through Portuguese cartography and Tuareg antecedents. European writers of the nineteenth century sometimes connected "Niger" to the Latin word for black, but that connection is coincidental. The river name comes from an older West African source, probably a Tuareg form meaning flowing water or great river, worn down across centuries of transcription into Arabic and then European.

Nigeria became independent in 1960, retaining the colonial name. No pre-colonial state had covered the same territory, so there was no historical name to reclaim. The name that Shaw invented in a Fleet Street office now belongs to a republic of over two hundred million people, the most populous country in Africa, home to more than five hundred languages.