Africa‘s primordial role in the inception and sophistication of the human race has been superbly documented for so many decades; sometimes out of genuine anthropological and biological curiosity and other times, because of racism.
We have been told that the first ancestors of the human race were formed on the continent. So were the earliest attempts at human self-preservation and community made in the east and south of the continent more than one million years ago. The cradle of human civilization as it is called, Africa’s meaning to the general human story is not in debate, largely.
On the other hand, however, what the name of the continent means and how we came to call it ‘Africa’ are two of the least-raised and answered questions about the mother continent. Frankly, toponomastics, the research into the meaning of place-names, is not the most popular branch of the historical sciences except when a place-name is so out of the common that it begs our curiosity.