Title: Whatever Happened to Tanganyika?
Author: Campbell, Harry
Published by: Portico Books, London
Year: 2007
First published: Portico Books, 2007
Date reviewed: 04.08
ISBN: 9781906032050

How often do places change their names? If I asked most people who walk up and down my road I bet they’d say "Not very often". But Brian the stamp collector would know better. I remember the pages in my childhood album: Straits Settlements, Orange Free State, Burma, the collective Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika. More recently I think of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union. The modern state of Iraq is less than 100 years old. Cumberland and Westmorland disappeared and were replaced by Cumbria. Euskadi is emerging as the name of choice for the Basque region. It’s happening all the time.

Place names change as a result of conquest or colonisation, revolution, inhabitants’ pride or bureaucratic convenience. In "Whatever Happened to Tanganyika?" you’ll find examples of all these. This book could be consigned to the genre of Books Of Quirky Lists That Appear In All The Shops A Month Or Two Before Christmas, but it deserves better than that. Campbell’s research is thorough and well-documented, and although the dust jacket suggests a nostalgia trip there is little here to be nostalgic about. Intrigued, probably; amused, certainly: but also saddened and even angered at the stories behind some of the now-defunct place names – the Belgian Congo, for example, or the still-unresolved cynical disregard of the human rights of the Chagos Islanders by successive British governments.

As I said, there are plenty of lighter stories too. I particularly liked the account of British Heligoland, resonating from childhood radio as the shipping forecast area of Heligoland and German Bight. I never knew it had been British. Nor did I know that after the end of the Second World War the British tried to blow these entire islands out of the water. Typically we didn’t manage to, but it did leave Heligoland in rather a strange shape (look on Google Earth). But if you want to know which nation has a language which is named after the sea cucumber you’ll have to read the book.