Place name · 1897 · Disputed
Image: View of River Niger and River Venue from the top of Mount Patti in Lokoja (Confluence city).jpg — Samlokoja, CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
A hill above Lokoja carries a famous story about Flora Shaw, but the paper trail leaves one big question open.
Ask in Lokoja and someone will tell you the story. Flora Shaw climbed Mount Patti, the long hill above the town. She looked down at the place where the Niger and the Benue meet. And there, looking at the great river, she thought of a name: Nigeria.
It is a lovely picture. Up on the hill there is even a building called Lord Lugard's Rest House, and Flora Shaw married Lugard. It all seems to fit.
Here is what we can prove. Flora Shaw was a British journalist. On 8 January 1897 an article of hers appeared in The Times of London. The Royal Niger Company's territories, she said, needed a shorter name. She suggested Nigeria, after the river.
She was not yet Lady Lugard. She married Frederick Lugard five years later, in 1902. And she was naming the lands around the Niger under British influence, not the country we know, whose borders came later.
Nothing in the record puts her on Mount Patti when she had the idea. No letter, no diary, nothing. One version of the hilltop story even dates the naming to 1914, seventeen years after the article was printed.
That doesn't prove she never climbed the hill. It just means the scene is a story, and the article is the evidence.
Mount Patti doesn't need the legend. On Saturday mornings, Lokoja people climb it for exercise, to meet friends and to escape the heat in the town below. From the top you can see the whole town, and the brown Niger and the Benue running together.
Stand there and the story makes sense. If you were going to name a country after a river, this is where you'd want to have done it.
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