Coming on the heels of the historic inauguration of our 44th president, February 2009 seems to demand a bigger-than-usual celebration of Black History Month. Last Word does its humble best with a quiz on the world’s second-largest and second most-populous continent.

1. Had Barack Obama been born in Nyang’oma Kogelo rather than Honolulu, his native tongue would likely have been this Nilo-Saharan language – though he would also have understood from an early age the Bantu language that is Kenya’s lingua franca.

2. Geneticists say all humans ultimately trace their ancestry to these African hunter-gatherers, considered the world’s oldest people. In 1979, a comedy revolving around a discarded Coca-Cola bottle first brought popular attention to their culture. More recently, they have given dieters new hope in the form of a flowering succulent prized for its appetite-suppressing properties – a boon to indigenous hunters during long trips into the Kalahari.

3. Primarily known for its deserts and plains, Africa boasts some mighty mountains in the eastern states of Kenya and Tanzania. The two tallest rise up 19,000 and 17,000 feet, respectively. Though snow covers their peaks, both are equatorial volcanoes.

4. Paleoanthropologists have traced the earliest hominid fossils to a place not far from this ancient East African capital, now a city of 3 million people.

5. Starting in 1821, black Americans began to emigrate to West Africa by the thousands with funding from “colonization societies” of dubious motives. In 1847, these settlers established an independent state – the precursor to a modern coastal African nation whose flag clearly derives from the Star-Spangled Banner.

6. Depending on whom you ask, this geographical moniker could derive from the Phoenician word for “dust,” the Berber word for “cave,” the Latin for “sunny” or the Greek for “without cold,” among other possible etymologies.

7. He is to Africa what William Faulkner was to North America. Published in 1959, his first novel – the saga of a Nigerian wrestling champion and his descendants – remains the most widely read book in modern African literature.

8. An icon of African cultural heritage, this sacred fabric was first developed in 12th-century Ghana to be worn by royalty. Made of interwoven strips decorated in dazzling, multicolored patterns and geometric shapes, each garment alludes to native philosophy and oral tradition, religious beliefs, political thought and aesthetics.

9. Though its Francophone name harks back to a banned export, this West African country is best known today as the world’s top cocoa-bean producer. Coffee and palm oil are also important exports, along with petroleum obtained from off-shore drilling.

10. The majority of people in the aforementioned region belong to a distinct race with its own Afro-Asiatic language. Fair hair and light eyes are not uncommon traits, attesting to some admixture with European slaves imported in large numbers under Ottoman rule.

›› CONTEST RULES
We are looking for the specific places, persons or things referenced in each clue. Up to five $30 gift certificates from Borders Books and Music will be awarded to the most geographically gifted Last Worders. If more than five perfect entries are received, five winners will be drawn by lot.

Send your answers no later than March 15 to The Last Word c/o USC Trojan Family Magazine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-7790.

Submissions by fax (213-821-1100) and e-mail <magazines@usc.edu> are welcome.