osei alex

Whoever decided that we should take up the name “Ghana,” God bless you. It’s a refreshing break from the “-ia” pandemic that swept across many countries. J. B. Danquah once suggested the name “Voltaria,” after the Volta River. Thoughtful, but that would have made us all “Voltarians,” wouldn’t it? 😀 More notably, it would have placed us in the category of the more than 50 countries whose names all end in “-ia.” No uniqueness in that 🙄 Nigeria, Albania, Algeria, Ethiopia, Bolivia, Micronesia, Rhodesia, Namibia, Georgia, Somalia, Tanzania, and the list goes on. If you’re wondering why so many country names end in the suffix “-ia,” it’s because many of the names trace back to Latin or Greek origins, where the suffix traditionally meant “land” or “territory.” So Nigeria is the land of the Niger (river), Algeria is the land of Algiers (the islands), Ethiopia is the land of burnt faces, and so on. In that sense, Voltaria would have meant the land of the Volta, which would still have accurately captured the essence of the country, since the Volta River runs from the north of Ghana to its southern coast. But honestly, to borrow Gen Z’s language, our forefathers really cooked with the name Ghana.