Top 10 African Countries and What They Were Called Before Colonisers Renamed Them

Summary

• European powers controlled about 10 per cent of Africa in 1870 and about 90 per cent by 1914. No African representative was present at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, which formalised the partition (The Standard, Kenya, 2025)
• The name "Nigeria" was first proposed in print on 8 January 1897 by British journalist Flora Shaw in The Times of London, almost 17 years before the country was unified on 1 January 1914 (The Times, 8 January 1897; Dubawa, 2020)
• Zimbabwe carried the name of Cecil Rhodes for almost 85 years, from May 1895, when the British South Africa Company adopted "Rhodesia", to independence on 18 April 1980 (Wikipedia, "Rhodesia (region)")
• The country now called DR Congo has had five official names since 1885: Congo Free State, Belgian Congo, Republic of the Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zaire. It returned to its present name in 1997 (Britannica; Wikipedia, "Zaire")

This list is ordered by the year each colonial name was imposed, oldest first, rather than ranked. Most of these countries did not exist as single units before colonisation, so the "before" column names the main states that stood on the land.

Selected Details About Each Country on the List

1. Ghana (formerly the Gold Coast)

Portuguese sailors reached this coast in 1471 and found gold on sale, and Europeans called it the Gold Coast until 1957 (Britannica). Britain declared the coastal strip a colony in 1874. The Asante Empire inland was not formally annexed until 1901 (Wikipedia, "Ashanti (Crown Colony)"). At independence on 6 March 1957, the new nation dropped the trade label and took the name of a medieval empire that Arab traders called Ghana and its own people called Wagadu. That empire stood in today's Mali and Mauritania, and historians have found no direct migration link between it and the Akan of the Gold Coast (Citi Newsroom, 2026). The name was chosen for its prestige.

2. DR Congo (formerly the Congo Free State, Belgian Congo and Zaire)

Before 1885 this land held the Kingdom of Kongo in the west, founded around 1390 according to tradition, and the Luba and Lunda states further east (Britannica). In 1885, after the Berlin Conference, King Leopold II of Belgium named his personal possession the Congo Free State. Belgium annexed it in 1908 as the Belgian Congo. Independence came on 30 June 1960. On 27 October 1971, President Mobutu renamed the country Zaire as part of his "authenticity" campaign. The irony is that Congo comes from the Kongo kingdom itself, while Zaire is a Portuguese version of the Kikongo phrase nzadi o nzere, "the river that swallows rivers". The old name returned in 1997.

3. Mali (formerly French Sudan)

This was the heartland of the Mali Empire and then of Songhai, which a Moroccan army invaded in 1591. When French forces moved in from about 1880, the Toucouleur and Wassoulou empires were among the states in the region (Wikipedia, "French Sudan"). On 18 August 1890, France named its new territory French Sudan. The label was dropped in 1899 and brought back in 1920 (WorldStatesmen). In June 1960, the territory became independent in a federation with Senegal. Senegal walked out two months later, and on 22 September 1960 the country that remained declared itself the Republic of Mali, taking the name of the old empire.

4. Tanzania (formerly German East Africa and Tanganyika)

There was no single country here before colonisation. On the coast, Omani forces drove the Portuguese out of Zanzibar and Kilwa at the end of the 1690s (HistoryWorld). A German company obtained a charter over the mainland in 1885, and in 1891 the German government declared a protectorate, German East Africa (Britannica). After the First World War, Britain took over and in 1920 gave the territory a name with no earlier political use: Tanganyika. It became independent on 9 December 1961. On 26 April 1964 it united with Zanzibar, and on 29 October 1964 the new state joined "Tan" and "Zan" into one word: Tanzania (South African History Online).

5. Uganda

Uganda is one kingdom's name stretched over its neighbours. "Uganda" is the Swahili form of Buganda, the kingdom that dominated the region. On 18 June 1894, Britain declared a protectorate that legally covered Buganda alone (The Observer, Uganda). Treaties then pulled in the other kingdoms: Toro in 1900, Ankole in 1901 and Bunyoro in 1933. Bunyoro, Buganda's greatest rival, ended up inside a country named after that rival. Uganda kept the name at independence in 1962.

6. Benin (formerly Dahomey)

Here the colonial name was the African one. The Kingdom of Dahomey, a Fon state dating from about 1600, fought two wars against France in 1890 and 1892–94. France won and kept the kingdom's name for its colony, French Dahomey, from 1894 (Wikipedia, "Republic of Dahomey"). The country became independent as Dahomey on 1 August 1960. On 30 November 1975, President Mathieu Kérékou renamed it Benin, after the Bight of Benin on its coast. The reason was balance: the country has about 42 ethnic groups, and Dahomey was the name of only one kingdom, in the south (Encyclopedia.com). The bight itself is named after the Kingdom of Benin, in present-day Nigeria.

7. Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia)

The territory was first called Zambesia or Charterland. In May 1895, the British South Africa Company made a new name official: Rhodesia, after its founder Cecil Rhodes (Wikipedia, "Rhodesia (region)"). Two years earlier the company had taken the Ndebele kingdom of Mthwakazi. In 1960, nationalists met to pick a replacement. Machobana and Monomotapa were proposed, and Michael Mawema's suggestion won: Zimbabwe, after the stone city of Great Zimbabwe. The word is usually translated from Shona as "houses of stone"; archaeologist Peter Garlake read it as "venerated houses". It became official at independence on 18 April 1980.

8. Kenya (formerly the East Africa Protectorate)

For 25 years as a British protectorate, this country had no name of its own, only a direction. Britain declared the East Africa Protectorate on 1 July 1895 (State House, Kenya). The name Kenya arrived in 1920, when the territory became Kenya Colony, and it came from the mountain. The Kikuyu call the mountain Kirinyaga, and the Kamba call it Kĩĩ-Nyaa. In 1849, the German missionary Johann Ludwig Krapf wrote the name down as "Kenia" (Wikipedia, "List of names on Mount Kenya"). Kenya's government gives a different account: that the British could not pronounce Kirinyaga. Kenya kept the name at independence on 12 December 1963.

9. Nigeria

Nigeria was named in a newspaper. On 8 January 1897, Flora Shaw, colonial editor of The Times of London, proposed "Nigeria" as a shorter label for the Royal Niger Company's territories (The Times, 8 January 1897). Her proposal left out Lagos and the Niger Protectorate on the coast. She later married Frederick Lugard, the governor who merged north and south into one colony on 1 January 1914 (Dubawa, 2020). No single name covered this land before. It held the Sokoto Caliphate, Bornu, Oyo and the Kingdom of Benin, among others. British troops took Benin in 1897, the year Shaw wrote, and Sokoto fell in 1903.

10. Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta)

From the 11th century, the Mossi built kingdoms here, among them Ouagadougou, Yatenga and Tenkodogo. France took Ouagadougou in 1896 and, on 1 March 1919, created a colony named after a river: Haute-Volta, or Upper Volta. It dissolved the colony in 1932 to save money and restored it in 1947. Independence came on 5 August 1960. On 4 August 1984, one year to the day after he took power, Thomas Sankara renamed the country Burkina Faso (Wikipedia, "Burkina Faso"). "Burkina" is Mooré for upright and "Faso" is Dioula for fatherland. The Upper Volta name had lasted 65 years.

Quick Answers to Commonly Asked Questions About this Topic

What was Nigeria called before colonisation?

It had no single name, because it was not a single country. The land held separate states, including the Sokoto Caliphate, Bornu, Oyo and the Kingdom of Benin. The name Nigeria was proposed in 1897 and applied to the whole territory in 1914.

What was Africa called before it was called Africa?

There is no evidence of one name for the whole continent. People named their own kingdoms and regions. "Africa" began as the Roman name for the area around modern Tunisia and was stretched over the rest of the continent across centuries (Wikipedia, "List of continent name etymologies"). The claim that the original name was "Alkebulan" is widespread online, but the pages we reviewed that repeat it cite no ancient source.

Which African countries still use names from the colonial era?

From this list: Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda. Elsewhere, Cameroon comes from Rio dos Camarões, "river of prawns", the name Portuguese sailors gave the Wouri River in the 15th century. Sierra Leone comes from Serra Lyoa, "lion mountains", a name linked to the Portuguese explorer Pedro de Sintra around 1462 (Quartz Africa).

Why are Ethiopia and Egypt not on this list?

Ethiopia was not colonised in the Scramble: it and Liberia were the only African countries still independent of European control in 1914. "Abyssinia" was an outside name for it that stayed in international use until the mid-20th century. Egypt's renaming is far older. Ancient Egyptians called their country Kemet, "the black land", and the Greeks called it Aigyptos (Etymonline).

Which African country changed its name most recently?

Eswatini, which was Swaziland until 2018. We tell that story in 10 African Countries That Changed Their Names and Why.

Key Sources

Other sources are named in brackets in the text. All pages pulled October 4, 2026.

• Flora Shaw, "Nigeria", The Times, 8 January 1897, p. 6, reproduced by Farooq Kperogi (2019). https://www.farooqkperogi.com/2019/10/the-first-article-that-proposed-name.html
• Britannica, "Ghana: Contact with Europe and its effects". https://www.britannica.com/place/Ghana/Contact-with-Europe-and-its-effects
• Britannica, "Democratic Republic of the Congo: History". https://www.britannica.com/place/Democratic-Republic-of-the-Congo/History
• Britannica, "German East Africa". https://www.britannica.com/place/German-East-Africa
• WorldStatesmen, "Mali". https://worldstatesmen.org/Mali.htm