A name that indigenous Africans used to refer to their land, their continent (or, at least, part of it), before the Greeks and Romans imposed their will on world history through their conquests and empires. This piece of information that I was just exposed to (whether truthful, accurate, or not) was just the nudge to provoke another wave of disgust at the unfortunate power and arrogance of xenocentricity. Since my first trip to Europe at the still-impressionable age of 20, I have found no little rise of ire whenever I encounter an indigenous name of a non-Anglo-American-occupied place that runs counter to that which I was instructed and conditioned with through the bias of my Anglo-American media and educational brainwashing. "Florence" in place of that which the locals have called "Firenze" far longer than Europeans have occupied the Americas. "Munich" in place of "München." "Brittany" in place of "Bretagne." "Ireland" in place of "Eire." "Danzing" in place of "Gdansk." "Constantinople" in place of "Istanbul." "Carthage" in place of "Qart-Ḥadašt." "Vienna" in place of "Wien." "Rhodesia" in place of "Zimbabwe." "Mexico City" in place of "Ciudad de Mexico" (which replaced "Tenochtitlan"). "Peking" in place of "Beijing." "Saigon" in place of "Gia Định" (which has now been replaced by "Ho Chi Minh City.") "Moscow" in place of "Moskva." "Indonesia" in place of "Dutch East Indies" which replaced a vast area of thousands of islands housing numerous fragmented kingdoms. "Indians," "Iroquois," "Creek," "Comanche," "Ottawa," "Chippewa," and thousands of other indigenous names in place of the numerous names of self-identification these peoples had for themselves.
Why? What gives us the right? (Power? Conquest? "Might makes right"?) Who gave us permission? Why do autonomous nations, states, municipalities, and people not assert their identities? Why don't our individual consciences prompt or allow us to accept a local inhabitant's right to have his/her name for his/her home location to take place of the arrogantly (or "conveniently") re-named moniker we were brainwashed with? What is it in human nature (or human social psychology--or even human linguistics) that makes it so difficult for us to listen, hear, and respect others--to always occupy a position of dominance, control, and/or rightness? I mean, we can't even conjure up enough respect and gratitude to capitalize the names of the very places that give us life--like Earth, Sun, Galaxy, Universe, and Cosmos--can't even admit to our dependence upon external locations for our very existence--so how can we ever expect to learn to respect cultures, people, and ideas that are not our own?
