Curated playlist
1960 establishments in Africa
- Burkina FasoIn 1984, Captain Thomas Sankara renamed Upper Volta as Burkina Faso. The new name blends words from two local languages.
- First Congolese RepublicThe First Congolese Republic was born on the 30th of June 1960, when the Belgian Congo declared independence after decades of colonial rule. Within days, Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba had wired the United Nations requesting membership,…
- NigerNiger is a landlocked country in West Africa, and more than 80 percent of its land lies in the Sahara. Yet it takes its name from a river, and nobody can say for certain where the river's name came from. The geographer Ptolemy described a…
- SenegalSenegal is named for a river, not the ocean it faces. Where the river's name came from is still debated.
- State of KatangaThe State of Katanga broke away from Congo on the evening of the 11th of July 1960. Moïse Tshombe led the split.
- MadagascarMadagascar appears on a map drawn by Muhammad al-Idrisi in 1154 under the name Gesira Malai, Arabic for Malay island. That is a strange label for a place off the southeastern coast of Africa. Today the Republic of Madagascar is the world's…
- South KasaiSouth Kasai had its own flag and stamps, yet no government recognized it.
- CameroonIn 1472, Portuguese sailors reached the coast of Central Africa and found the Wouri River teeming with shrimp. They called it Rio dos Camarões, the river of shrimps, after the Cameroon ghost shrimp, Lepidophthalmus turneranus. English bent…
- ChadChad is a landlocked country in Central Africa, and its capital, N'Djamena, lies 1060 km from the nearest seaport, Douala in Cameroon. That distance, together with a largely desert climate, gave the country a bleak nickname: the "Dead…
- NigeriaNigeria's name was coined by a British journalist in 1897. Flora Shaw borrowed it from the Niger River.