Congo was named by Europeans. Congo’s dictator Mobuto later changed the name of the country and the river to Zaire with the objective of Africanising names of persons and spaces. However, the name Zaire was a Portuguese alternation of Nzadi o Nzere, a local African term meaning ‘River that swallows Rivers’. Zaire was the Portuguese name for the Congo river in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Which one of the following statements can be inferred from the paragraph above?