Rename White House to Black House

By MAHMUD JEGA

Thank you very much, Mr. Donald John Trump, for proposing to rename the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America. You unwittingly reminded us that there are many, many places in the world that have been misnamed and we must hurry up and restore their old names or give them appropriate new names. For a President-elect to hold a wide-ranging press conference, Trump ignored President Olusegun Obasanjo’s wisdom, that in Africa there cannot be two chiefs in the same village.

Never mind all the other inflammatory things he said during his press conference last week, threatening to make Canada the 51^st state of the US, threatening to slap high tariffs on Canadian goods, threatening to use military force to take Panama Canal back from Panama despite the treaty that Jimmy Carter got the US Senate to ratify in 1978, threatening to cut off all support to Ukraine after the Western powers led by the US encouraged it into a war with Russia, threatening NATO countries if they don’t spend 5% of their GDPs on defence, threatening to seize Greenland from Denmark, threatening to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities and thus shower its neighbours with radiation Chernobyl-style, threatening China with very high tariffs, and threatening to “let all hell loose on Gaza” if Hamas does not release Israeli hostages before he takes over the US Presidency on January 20 [which hell again can anyone unleash on Gaza, after a genocide lasting 14 months, which even the UN has decried again and again and for which the Western powers led by the US connived, abetted, encouraged, supplied the weapons and the diplomatic support?]

The part that really interested me in Mr. Trump’s rambling press conference was his demand to rename the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America. Mr. Trump has unwittingly opened a Pandora’s Box. On what basis does he want names to be changed? Is it because of ancient-ness? Well, in contrast to the United States which became a country only 249 years ago, human civilisations had flourished in present-day Mexico for 5,000 years. Even before the Mayas and Aztecs that we are more familiar with, there had been the Olmecs, Teotihuacans, Mixtecs and Zapotecs. Together with their Maya and Aztec successors, they built gleaming cities, stone temples, golden carved figures and other great cultural artifacts long before starving Irishmen arrived in dinghy boats in Manhattan Island.

According to History books written by Whites, it was their son, the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, who “discovered” the American continent. Columbus didn’t even know where he was. He only knew that the world was round, and he was trying to find a western route from Europe to India when his sailing ship crashed into an island that is now part of The Bahamas. Later, the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci told Columbus that it was not India that he found, but a new continent previously unknown to Europeans. White geographers and historians then conspired and named the continent America, after old man Amerigo. We now know that 20,000 years before Columbus and Amerigo, Asian wanderers known as Clovis people crossed over from Siberia, through Alaska and wandered all the way down to South America. Therefore, United Nations General Assembly should do justice here by immediately passing a resolution to rename America as Clovisia, after the original founders.

We Africans are very familiar with this fraud called “discovery.” In our primary school textbooks [which were written by colonial historians], we were told that it was the Scottish doctor Mungo Park who “discovered” River Niger in 1896. Discovered, when humans had been living near and fishing in that river for thousands of years, all the way from Fouta Djallon to the Niger Delta?

Mr. Trump, if you rename Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America or any other fancy White name, will that stop hurricanes bearing down from the Atlantic, through the Gulf and splashing all the way through Florida, Louisiana and the Carolinas? Even your Mar-a_Lago golf course could be washed away one day by a hurricane or a tornado, what you Americans call twister.

Sixty percent of all US oil production is in that Gulf, which your oil companies have severely polluted. That Deep Horizon oil rig owned by BP that exploded in 2010 and splashed 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf, have you guys finished cleaning up the mess? If you rename the Gulf, the European eel Anguilla anguilla, which spawns in the Sargasso Sea near the Gulf of Mexico and then travels all the way to European rivers and back, would probably never come back because its map will be disoriented.

Is it only Gulf of Mexico that needs renaming? What about the English Channel? If I were President Emmanuel Macron, I will immediately rename it French Channel because the French coastline on that channel is about as long as England’s. It is even because the Americans somehow forgot. In 1944 when General Dwight Eisenhower launched Operation Overlord from England with 160,000 troops, 5,000 ships and 1,200 planes across the channel to dislodge Adolf Hitler’s army from France, if Donald Trump had been US President at the time instead of Franklin Roosevelt, he would have renamed it Eisenhower Channel. Fortunately, Mr. Trump wouldn’t like Eisenhower because the Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force [SCAEF] and his men killed thousands of soldiers from Germany, from where Trump’s grandfather Friedrich Trump bought a one-way ticket to America in October 1885 in order to escape the draft into Otto von Bismark’s army.

Ok, that is for the Whites to sort out. Meanwhile, we have our own renaming issues here in Africa. For example, why should the Indian Ocean be so named, when Africa’s 5,000 kms coastline on that ocean is as long as mainland India’s coastline on it? Africa’s coastline on the Indian Ocean  stretches all the way from Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and South Africa. What about Zanzibar, Madagascar, Comoros and Seychelles, African island nations completely surrounded by that ocean? African Union should immediately take steps to rename it African Ocean instead of Indian Ocean.

That reminds me of the Red Sea, a tributary of the Indian Ocean.  Why is it called Red Sea when anyone can see that, most of the time, its water is blue like most other seas and oceans? Some say it was the Greeks that named it because the Greek word for south also means red. Many Geography books however say it was Arabs that named it because the red algae Rhodophycophta seasonally bloomed in that sea, turned its colour red and causes red tides that kill fish and other marine animals. Whatever the reason was, it is time to rename it Africa Sea. We cannot rename it Black Sea only because there is such a sea somewhere.

Trouble could soon erupt in East Asia also over the name South China Sea, the western end of the great Pacific Ocean. Does it belong only to China? It is bounded in the north by South China,  in the west by Indochinese Peninsula, in the east by Taiwan and the Filipino islands of Luzon, Mindoro and Palawan, and in the south by Indonesia’s Borneo, Sumatra and Bangka Islands.  All these countries could now get together and demand a change of its name. Even more combustible is the name of the Sea of Japan, another adjunct of the Pacific Ocean. This sea is bounded not only by the Japanese Archipelago but also by the Russian mainland, Russia’s Sakhalin Island as well as North and South Korea. If Donald Trump thinks he is a combustible man out to disrupt the world, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is like the core of a nuclear reactor. He will soon demand a renaming of the Sea of Japan after his grandfather, the Great Leader Kim Il Sung.

Even the names that US imposed on the world, e.g. Near East, Middle East and  Far East. Near who? Are Greece and Turkey near Australia? Middle East; middle of where? Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, which are snug in Arabia, why should they agree to be called Middle East? You call China and Korea Far East; far from where? When the Manchus were sweeping into China and forcing its emperors to build the Great Wall, did they consider it to be far, or just nearby?

We  Africans have been very slow to change fake names that were imposed on us by the Whites. I know we have somehow tried by changing some names such as  Gold Coast to Ghana, Malagasy to Madagascar, Dahomey to Benin Republic, Northern Rhodesia to Zambia, Southern Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, Upper Volta to Burkina Faso, the cities of Bathurst to Banjul, Leopoldville to Kinsasha, Fort Lamy to Ndjamena, Salisbury to Harare, Pretoria to Tshwane. During my primary school days, we used to have a Bight of Biafra in our Atlas maps. I think the Federal Government  manoeuvred after the civil war and changed it to Bight of Bonny.

What are we Africans waiting for that we have not changed the name of Lake Victoria, the world’s second largest lake, a name the British imposed after their Queen Victoria in 1858 and threw away all its local names? Why can’t we rename Lake Albert, Port Harcourt, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Monrovia, Windhoek and Johannesburg? Even Sahara Desert; some linguists say the Arabic word Sahra could mean “empty”. How can we call it empty when it has so much sand, so much wind, so much sunlight and so many Berbers, Bedouins and Tuaregs living in it?

Donald Trump should have looked before he leapt. Right now, only 26 of USA’s fifty states have Native Indian names. They are Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Connecticut, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming. What about the other 24? Why should the Whites arrive at a place where some people had been living for thousands of years, displace them, grab their lands, shoot all their bison and proceed to rename them after the home towns they abandoned in Europe? New York, New Jersey, New England, New Hampshire, New Orleans, New London, New Haven, New Brunswick. If they are so nostalgic about home, they should bid farewell to the Statue of Liberty, jump into their boats, sail  back to Europe and allow the Indians to regain their old names.

Even that White House that Mr. Trump is about to enter should be renamed. Afterall, Black slaves drafted from Virginia and Maryland outnumbered White craftsmen in quarrying the rough stone, cutting it and building the Executive Mansion and The Capitol. It should be renamed Black House before January 20.