Curated playlist
Countries in West Africa
- Burkina FasoIn 1984, Captain Thomas Sankara renamed Upper Volta as Burkina Faso. The new name blends words from two local languages.
- 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.
- MauritaniaNear the town of Ouadane, on the Adrar Plateau in Mauritania, the desert floor is marked by a set of concentric rings. From above, the formation looks like a giant eye. It is called the Richat Structure, and it has been dubbed the Eye of…
- Sierra LeoneSierra Leone is named for a line of mountains that Portuguese sailors saw from the water in 1462. The explorer Pedro de Sintra mapped that stretch of the West African coast and called the heights Serra Leoa, which means lioness mountains.…
- GhanaGhana, a country of more than 35 million people on the Gulf of Guinea, made history on the 6th of March 1957. That day it became the first colony in Sub-Saharan Africa to achieve sovereignty. Its capital and largest city is Accra, and it…
- The GambiaThe Gambia is the smallest country on the African mainland, and in 1964 its prime minister wrote a letter to protect a single word. Dawda Jawara asked a British committee on geographical names to let the country keep the definite article…
- Ivory CoastIvory Coast supplies more cocoa beans than any other country. It has also endured two civil wars and a coup.
- Cape VerdeCape Verde, officially the Republic of Cabo Verde, is a nation of volcanic islands scattered across the central Atlantic off the coast of West Africa. Its 2021 census counted 491,233 people. Nearly one million Cape Verdeans live abroad,…
- NigeriaNigeria's name was coined by a British journalist in 1897. Flora Shaw borrowed it from the Niger River.