By Brian Palmer|Posted Friday, March 9, 2012, at 5:19 PM ET

A San Diego-based human-rights group has released a video documenting atrocities committed by Joseph Kony, the leader of a Ugandan rebel group that has been hiding out and killing people in the Central African Republic. Now that the Central African Republic has our attention, one has to ask: How did that country get stuck with such a boring name?

French bureaucrats got involved. The Central African Republic was once a French colony known as Ubangi-Shari, because the land is split between the basins of the Ubangi and Shari rivers. The leader of the colony’s independence movement in the mid-20th century, Barthélemy Boganda, had a grand vision for post-imperialist Central Africa. He wanted to combine Ubangi-Shari with nine other countries in the region that spoke Romance languages, to form something called “the United States of Latin Africa.” Leaders of the neighboring regions, however, did not like his idea. When they declined to join, Boganda had to abandon the grandiose name. At one point, the outgoing French colonial administrator Pierre Kalck recommended that Boganda adopt the name République Centrafricaine to describe a stripped-down version of Boganda’s proposed union, including just Ubangi-Shari, Congo-Brazzaville (now the Republic of the Congo), Chad, and Cameroon. When those partners rejected the coalition, too, Boganda decided to keep the French-inspired name for what had become a freestanding, independent Ubangi-Shari.

More: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2012/03/joseph_kony_video_why_does_central_african_republic_have_such_a_boring_name_.html