Where did Africa come from? Of course, we all know where Africa is – it must be the easiest continent to identify on a map – but how did the name come about?
It was the Romans who named the southern shore of the Mediterranean ‘Africa’, apparently after an indigenous Berber tribe called the ‘Afri’. Their traditional territory lay to the south of Carthage, near present-day Tunis. In time the name Africa was applied first to the Roman province and then to the whole land-mass as its true extent progressively became known.
The Roman name was adopted into Arabic as ‘Ifriquiya’, and virtually every language today uses some recognisable form of the original word. Tunisia itself was still called Africa (Ifriquiya) until the Turks made it part of their Ottoman Empire in the 16th century and began to call the country by its modern name.
So while Africa now refers to one of the most diverse and colourful regions of the world it can be said to have originated in Tunisia, whose early inhabitants gave their name to a whole continent.