Lake Chad: The World’s Most Complex Humanitarian Disaster | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/04/lake-chad-the-worlds-most-complex-humanitarian-disaster
https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5a15e8988ab5f8185b10991f/16:9/w_1200,h_630,c_limit/171204_r31037_rd.jpg 
https://www.newyorker.com/projects/interactive/2017/171120-chad-gallery/map/img/lake_chad.svg Chad was named for a mistake. In the eighteen-hundreds, European explorers arrived at the marshy banks of a vast body of freshwater in Central Africa. Because locals referred to the area as chad, the Europeans called the wetland Lake Chad, and drew it on maps. But chad simply meant “lake” in a local dialect. To the lake’s east, there was a swath of sparsely populated territory—home to several African kingdoms and more than a hundred and fifty ethnic groups. It was mostly desert. In the early nineteen-hundreds, France conquered the area, called it Chad, and declared it part of French Equatorial Africa.