How Each African Capital Got Its Name
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 มิ.ย. 2024
- ▶ TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Intro
00:24 Algiers (Algeria)
00:43 Luanda (Angola)
01:12 Porto-Novo (Benin)
01:24 Gaborone (Botswana)
01:48 Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso)
02:19 Gitega (Burundi)
02:43 Yaounde (Cameroon)
03:08 Praia (Cabo Verde)
03:32 Bangui (Central African Republic)
03:52 N'Djamena (Chad)
04:15 Moroni (Comoros)
04:28 Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo)
04:59 Brazzaville (Republic of the Congo)
05:26 Yamoussoukro (Côte D'Ivoire)
05:43 Djibouti (Djibouti)
06:01 Cairo (Egypt)
06:30 Malabo (Equatorial Guinea)
06:56 Asmara (Eritrea)
07:13 Addis Ababa (Ethiopia)
07:27 Libreville (Gabon)
07:35 Banjul (The Gambia)
07:48 Accra (Ghana)
08:04 Conakry (Guinea)
08:15 Bissau (Guinea-Bissau)
08:28 Nairobi (Kenya)
08:40 Maseru (Lesotho)
08:49 Monrovia (Liberia)
09:07 Tripoli (Libya)
09:27 Antananarivo (Madagascar)
09:39 Lilongwe (Malawi)
09:48 Bamako (Mali)
09:54 Nouakchott (Mauritania)
10:01 Port Louis (Mauritius)
10:09 Rabat (Morocco)
10:24 Maputo (Mozambique)
10:38 Windhoek (Namibia)
10:52 Abuja (Nigeria)
11:07 Kigali (Rwanda)
11:19 Laayoune (West Sahara)
11:37 São Tomé (São Tomé e Príncipe)
11:43 Dakar (Senegal)
11:51 Victoria (Seychelles)
11:57 Freetown (Sierra Leone)
12:02 Mogadishu (Somalia)
12:15 Hargeisa (Somaliland)
12:28 Pretoria, Bloemfontein, Capetown (South Africa)
12:45 Juba (South Sudan)
13:00 Khartoum (North Sudan)
13:16 Lombaba, Mbabane (Eswatini)
13:34 Dar Es Salaam, Dodoma (Tanzania)
13:53 Lomé (Togo)
14:10 Tunis (Tunisia)
14:31 Kampala (Uganda)
14:41 Lusaka (Zambia)
14:48 Harare (Zimbabwe)
15:07 Summary
▶ Follow me on Twitter: / gkonyoutube
▶ In this video I talk about how each African country's capital city got its name. What the origin is, as well as its meaning. Plus, in some cases, the historical evolution of the name and previous names that those settlements had.
▶ Become a member on Patreon & get exclusive content! / generalknowledge
▶ Join the Discord Server: / discord
▶ Business Contact: gilfamc@gmail.com
▶ Thanks for watching, remember to subscribe to catch future videos!
*Do you have any suggestions for video ideas?*
What if Ottoman empire had colonies 🤷
How did Corsica become owned by a bank that one time?
How each Oceanian country got it's name
Gostaria que você também trouxesse conteúdo em português! Acredito que em algum vídeo você disse que era de Portugal, e sua pronuncia das palavras em português me parece com o sotaque de lá. Talvez pudesse ter um canal secundário com a narração em português! Caso eu entendi errado, peço desculpas! Um abraço e obrigado pelo ótimo conteúdo!!
@@liondz8224 It fid
10:45 I am fron Niger so I could help about the origin of Niamey.
There is a lot of theories about the origin of Niamey but the most plausible comes from an expression in Zarma-Songhaï (group of local languages spoken in the West of Niger and in Mali). The expression is "Gna Mé" meaning the mouth of the mother. But do'nt take it literally, it's kind of metaphorical. It means the place an old woman (one of the first inhabitants of Niamey) came to take water (at the Niger rive).
Another theory suggests that it comes from the phrase "wa gnamma né" which was deformated by the colonizers to Niamey. In fact the phrase means "Yoyou had theses information before so u can stay here". Ironic isn't?
Hope I help. I really enjoyed your video. But I wished you have this information before
Interesting.
Yes the world need more Africa in there general knowledge
Less*
@@BrazilianImperialist more
Africa has really interesting history!
True!
Yes definitely need more on Africa
I think a video about why South Africa has 3 capitals would be interesting.
When the four original colonies were grouped together to form the Union of South Africa, it was agreed upon that they would all share the burden of being the capital. (Their rivalries, cultures and recent war made them quite wary of each other).
Cape Province's capital of Cape Town became the legislative capital. Transvaal province's capital Pretoria became the Administrative capital. Orange Free State's capital Bloemfontein became the judicial capital. Natal province's capital of Pietermaritzburg became the archival capital. They were eventually compensated with money and didn't become a capital.
Yeh.
I did one already! About countries with more than one capital :)
@@General.Knowledge how bout the territorial evolution of morroco
Côté d’ivoire also had 2 capitals , forgot Abidjan the economic capital.
Great video, it's so good to see you talking about Africa's History
For Guinea Bissau I think you mean Leopard Warriors. On that postal stamp is says Panthera Pardus, Latin for Leopard.
Jaguar are endemic
to the Americas
Lovely video, I'd love more videos about African history ore colonisation
No
Thanks! It's a great topic
@One Day I’ll Become A Real TH-camr ?
@@BrazilianImperialist troll
Thank you so much. This is the best video I’ve seen on Africa and it’s capitals. Keep up the good work.
Thanks, I was looking forward to this one.
Wow, over 60 well-researched and interesting data in a 15 minutes video. Other TH-camrs publish over 60 videos before even trying to spell the word research, but only every 15th of it succeeds. - Thank you for your work, it's very appreciated.
Thank you!
@@General.Knowledge how bout the territorial evolution of morroco
Congrats, great video.
Amazing video Great Information
EXCELLENT WORK
Interesting knowledge. Thank you!
My man watched the whole 15 minute video in 1 minute
@@xtraviation time travel was a great invention.
Great video. Very interesting.
this is a great video to test my geography skills! I have been working hard on my African geography
Mais um excelente trabalho. Obrigado pelo conhecimento partilhado. Muitos parabéns.
Congratulations for this info
Love Northern Africa from Turkiye💕
@Anhedon 🤓
Amazing!
Oh yeah bro keep up with the good job! By the way a video on how American cities that declined or increased in population per capita would be interesting
Great video 👏🏻🧐
Thank you!
The old name of Addis Ababa is Finfinne because the hot springs made a fin fin fin sound in oromo language.
Yes and soon it will be renamed Finfinne
Nope
Actually this video is all about how the capitals of African countries found their names not how the territories they're found on got their name. Finfine is a place where the city found on but Addis Ababa is the Capital.
@@lifaddiz6766 1 thats wrong and 2 the capital will soon go back to its original name and be the capital of a new Oromia country. Ethiopia is done for
@@westcrook2718 spotted the Egyptian
Love the Ali Farka Toure music in the background :)
Its actually kind of funny that Sierra Leone and Gabon have actually the same capital name but in different languages.
That was very interesting! I really like your videos. Congratulations! Can you speak Portuguese? I noticed you have a very good pronunciation.
He is native to portugal
Hello!
Great video 👍
Tunis original name comes from the Amazigh word TENEST
Which means the Key in Tamazight language.
I’m an Amazigh-Tunisian- African- Mediterranean.
❤️❤️❤️
Love the African content
Im dutch and you promounce Windhoek as Wind-Hook
It was a 75% german colony and 25% dutch cuz dutch is still spoken there its an Dutch name
I think you mean Afrikaans
Windhoek is an Afrikaans name
Wind-ho-ek(not -ee)?
@@K3rrJu5t1n Try Google Translate and listen to what the Afrikaans language will say
@@linkvos8151 I heard it's pronounced now as Wendhook
at this point, these are no longer general knowldege, but additional knowledge.
nice. 👍👍👍
12:47 Thanks for that beautiful pronunciation of Afrikaans words😂
Afrikaans is the Mutt of languages. Love it though
@@logansymmes2193 Ayo, Afrikaans is the evolved and better version of the second best language (Dutch)
In Addition to South Africa. Pretoria is also called Tshwane. It is a setswana name for the river which runs through the city (names origin is unclear, It is either the name of a chieftain son or it is “the place of the black cow”).
The river also has an Afrikaans name, Die Apies (small monkeys) Rivier.
Interesting history. Winston Churchill was captured during the Anglo-Boer War in 1899 and imprisoned in Pretoria. However, he escaped in December of that same year. But in doing so, he had to cross the “Mighty” Apies/Tshwane River.
burkina's is the hardest to tell and the biggest for me , also for me its like a baby screamed and they liked the name
Silly remark! These are words in a language you don't know. If you knew the language, it would be no funnier a name than London or Paris.
It's not like it's the English translation
im Pakistani but I love Africa especially the Magreb
We also love Pakistan
Esse sotaquezinho a dizer Luanda , great videos tho
Jaguars in Guinea? That's a novelty. They're leopards. Locals happen to casually use the Portuguese term "onca" for them (same as the Brazilian term for jaguar), but they aren't actually jaguars.
Ikr because where the heck there are jaguars in Africa 😂 😂
Do you have a source for the coat of arms for Bangui, CAR? I wanted to make a flag of it, but I can't find the image online, and now I don't know if it's real or not.
cool
Can you do a video about Middle Easts borders and how to draw them properly.
10:47 Did some searching, apparently Niamey is named, in the local Zarma language, after the Niami tree that grows there
Others have probably said this already, but Windhoek is not pronounced windho-ek. In Afrikaans (and Dutch) oe is a diphthong making a similar sound to oo in English (like in hook).
YES, FINALLY!!!
Minor correction: You showed the coat of arms of N’Djamena for Bangui, instead.
5:17 OMG, I've been to Brac!
Asmara, Eritrea oldest African capital continuously inhabited since 800 BC 💪🏽🇪🇷
you spoke porto-novo too right to not speak portuguese. checked the about page and sure enough, it’s a portuguese channel. cheers from across the ocean~
First time hearing someone on TH-cam acknowledge my city of Bloemfontein as a capital city of South Africa
How each Oceanic Capital get its name?
Next video needs to be when did snow last feel in africa and where in each country
In countries like Morocco Algeria or Lesotho it snows a lot there
it does snow in Africa we are not just jungles and dessert we do have topography, rare but sometimes it does snow in the sahara not much and it snows constantly in the mountains
It snows on the tall mountains of Eastern, Northern and Southern Africa. Mount Kilimanjaro in East Africa is near the equator and has a snow cap. The low land areas of Northern and Southern Africa might ocassinally get light snow.
nahh bro what did you do to liberia in the thumbnail lmao
Tunisian here and we ourselves don't know the meaning of our capital!
Wish the country was still called africa/Ifriqiya
فما أكثر من تفسير كيف ما قال إلي نعرفهم هوما أنو ترجع للآهة القرطاجية تانيت و فما إلي ما حكاش علاها و هي أنو الاسم جاي من تؤنس بالعربي
I love this video! Also, for Côte D'Ivoire, its Baoulé (french spelling, look at colonizers influencing the spelling of native words, again) pronounced "bah-oo-lay" !
We also have two capitals: Yamoussoukro is administrative and political, and Abidjan is economic. One theory says that the city git its name from the Bidjan people living there, while another says that a woman replied "Min-tchan m’bidjan " (I'm cutting leaves) when the Europeans asked what the name of the place was. Obviously they heard and understood wrong, and that's how we got Abidjan!~
I'm going back to Italy soon...
Early crew where you at?
During this video I sadly realized that I didn't know practically any of the capitals in African continent (except the obvious ones).
I feel like i found similarity about madagascar capital name
Tanan(malagasy) tanah(malay) which mean land
And rivo(malagasy) ribu(malay)
Which also mean thousand
Batswana's coat of arms looks the best out of all of them
Can you cover the history of south Africa having three capitals, thats just weird
A wild guess but Lomé, Togo could be named after Henri Dupuy de Lôme, a famous French ship designer who developed the first ironclad battleship.
Actually, the city was built where once stood a large field of "ALO" trees (used by the locals for dental care).
Thus, the city was originally called "ALOTIMÉ" or "ALOMÉ" which means "Field of Alo trees".
"Lomé" is just a French transcription of the local name Alomé.
@@williamk70 That’s interesting
Damn.... Thanks for trying hey 😊 but Windhoek is not pronounced that way at all 😅☺️
That's a problem not a solution
Make video about history of Northern Africa
Nice toch with the city flags.
But one thing about jaguars, I thought the live in the Americas
Yup, Jaguars are native to the Americas not Africa. Maybe he confused jaguars with leopards?
This is true! I was confused when researching as well, it must be leopards and the source on the etymology was wrong?
those are country/nation flags not city flags!
chads meaning is wrooooong najma means star in arabic
you forgot the timestamp for Niamey
How about doing the origin and meaning of country names e.g. Nigeria, Niger Republic.
Pretty sure he's already done that one
@@alexpotts6520 General Knowledge put out uncorroborated information about the two states. th-cam.com/video/zCM-dRb8AfU/w-d-xo.html.
I already did that! :)
0:33 the ir isn't supposed to be separated
This video made me realise how little I know about the African continent
I can Add to this that the name of the continent "Africa" comes from the old name of the capital of Tunisia which was "Efrikiyah"
Jaguars native to south america ...so how african native city name means somthing with jaguar ?(bissau)
"The term Bissau comes from the name Itchassu (later N'nssassu and Bôssassum), which means "brave as the jaguar", possibly in reference to the warrior profile of the inhabitants of the island of Bissau, mimicking the African leopard, a feline predator known in the country as "jaguar".
hope that explains it better!
Gitega etymology is not very well known. The most academics have gotten us a theoretical correlation to «Igi-tega» which means «Flat land» in Kirundi.
8:53
What a colossal nose he has.
Ouagadougou is the most fun to say, change my mind
14:58
Maybe the city is called after New York, the city that never sleeps
😉
Back when Zimbabwe was Rhodesia its capital was Salsbury. The natives overthrew the white government, changed the names of the country and capital, and made some VERY bad economic decisions. This resulted in hyperinflation. I suspect, but am not sure, that it is now under control.
iirc part of their solution was to just… abolish local currency. they have something like six officially-used currencies now ranging from the us dollar to the australian dollar. idk if it’s true but i’ve heard that now it’s not uncommon to pay in a currency and get your change in another there. look it up
the word algiers does not mean islands
it is a name for those islands actually
9:28 you said Antanarivo and it's AntanaNArivo
I believe that Gaberone is pronounced with an "h" not a "g"
11:27 just want to say that layoune is actually moroccan because i went there so many times and people there say they are moroccans and there is moroccan flags so i guess western sahara doesnt have a capital
also I like your videos
this is because the video is wrong.
western sahara has two capitals. They claim laayoune to be their capital but morocco controls it. because of this, their functioning capital has to be tifariti.
@@MellohiYT ah thank you for telling me
I found it interesting that names that had roots in European languages were explained as being through the power and influence of colonizers, but the same was not said of the many names derived from Arabic.
To my knowledge arabs didn't actually colonize any part of Africa (other than the north but that's a very complicated subject) they just traded with a lot of african kingdoms especially along the south east coast, and when they came they influenced the place
@@hamzahammami22 Most of the East African cities with Arabic names were actually a kind of collateral from trade between the Red Sea (Egypt) and India. Because of the unique direction the equatorial wind reverses due to the Indian Monsoonal seasons, it was actually faster and easier for Arabic traders to cross the Indian Ocean between East Africa and India than by any other route. This led to semi-permanent coastal communities of Arab sailors in Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique being established, and the inhabitants paid taxes to local African kingdoms in tribute.
@@hamzahammami22 Arabic colonization is complicated, but European colonization is not. Got it.
@@TexasVagabond I said complicated because genetically wise most north afrircans are not arabs, but many do identify as such because of linguistic and culture reasons
@@hamzahammami22 I don’t think that justifies looking at Arabic colonization and European colonization in Africa differently. In the end, cities’ names based in European languages are just as foreign as those based in Arabic. That was my point.
Windhoek is pronounced as windhook. Hoek is an Afrikaans word meaning corner.
Jaguars do not exist outside of zoos in Africa. They are an American species from Arizona to Argentina.
Chad should change their capital name into gigachad on April the 20th for da memes
How come some countries have 2 flags?
one of them is the flag of the city/county and the other is the national flag
Mogadishu was named after persian and arabic word maqcad shah meaning the throne of shah of course the king throne
King’s Tax for Luanda makes sense for today. I mean it’s bloody expensive especially for a poor country. You’d have an easier time buying things in countries that are poorer in fact (monetary wise; resource wise is another story).
Bouti!!!!
There are two capitals named free town
Yes! One in French and one in English
Just so you know, Namibia's capital is pronounced "vind-hook." :)
I thought Abidjan was the capital of cote d'ivoire. I also thought timbuktu was the capital of Mali. I've only been to Nairobi Airport on my way to and from mombasa. I have spent time in Lusaka (amongst other places) on my two visits to Zambia in '06 and '07. What about Johannesburg? I thought it was that and not Cape Town that was one of the 3 capitals of South Africa. Perhaps I'm wrong.
Abidjan is the economic capital, and Yamoussoukro is the administrative and political capital!
How can a person find a land when people are already there. Explain.
Algeria in Algerian dialect is dzayer or dziri it’s from the Berber dynasty of zirids hou ruled North Africa
Benin must have made a change to it's capital (or my info was wrong). I went to a tech school to become a travel agent in 1996, and found that the capital was Kandi (hence my committing it to memory...lol). Maybe it was just the main airport city, but I was pretty certain that the info said it was the capital.
your info was wrong
@@0x0michaelthanks. At least the major airport is in Kandi, right?
Djibouti is the capital of Djibouti because Get Djibouti on the floor tonight, make my day.
Sorry, that is what my brain tells me every time I hear or see the country's name.
GIVE BEAST PHILANTHROPY YOUR MERCH :)
Regarding Brazzaville, please bear in mind that the entire coast of todays Croatia only became Croatian in 1945, before that was for centuries part of the Venetian, Sicilian, Napolitan, Serbian and Bizantine kingdoms. Within the Austro-Hungarian empire most of it was part of the DALMATIAN province which after WWI proclaimed unification with Kingdom of Serbia and subsequently the kingdom renamed to Yugoslavia. After WWII Tito gve much of Dalmatia to Croatia, but it would have made more sense to had became a 7th republic sice Dalmatians have a distinct identity and not all feel well about Croatia. The south for instance, specially Dubrovnik, was usually an outpost for commerce of kimgdom of Serbia, while Croatia lost its independence in 10 cemtury and regain it only in 1992, so Zagreb had little influence there. Of course, Croatia is doing its best nowadays to reclaim it all for them as if it was all theirs troughout history, but historiography indicates a very distinct reality. So please, remember, until 20c. DALMATIA WAS NOT CROATIA. Cumprimentos
How each capitals of Americas ( North and South America) got its name
Noah-ark-shot
Ha, ha, ha, I did not know this!
The capital of the Central African country is named after the Croatian island, for whose inhabitants is said that they are present everywhere, ha, ha, ha.
6:16
The names Windhoek and Bloemfontein come from Dutch and not from Afrikaans. Afrikaans is of course related to Dutch. Afrikaans did not become an official language in South Africa until 1925, before that it was Dutch. Bloemfontein in Afrikaans spelling is Blommefontein.