Central African Place Names

Central African names include those from Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equitorial Guinea, Gabon, and the Republic of the Congo. See also about African names.
type
usage
Timbuktu (Settlement) English, Arabic, Central African, Bamileke
Meaning uncertain. It could be derived from Songhai meaning "hollow, hole", or from Berber meaning "place of small dunes". This is the name of a city in central Mali. Descriptions of the city's wealth and remoteness first reached Europe from the 16th-century Berber author Leo Africanus. Since then the city has been used in Western Culture as a symbol for a distant, mysterious place.