Revised African nameset
 

For years, the African names files in OOTP have driven me crazy because it's full of names that aren't especially common on more than half of the continent. I have no idea where they sourced it from, but it obviously hasn't changed in many years.

ANYWAY, I finally got annoyed enough tonight to do something about it.

What I'm uploading is going to be somewhat limited by the structure of the game using an entire continent full of names that has many diverse ethnic groups and so forth, BUT to be fair baseball isn't especially common there so this is really for a super niche audience.

SO with that said.

This file comes with 319 last names and 259 first names. They really won't necessarily make sense together -- essentially think of your Africans as Pan-African because I've merged more West African names into the file than the bizarre East African/Muslim representation of the original file that was almost too hard to look at.

While West Africa isn't really a baseball playing part of the continent to the extent that it exists, it does represent a larger share of the continent's population and so, it makes more sense in that respect. It's mostly a personal preference thing, so...download it if you want, but this isn't really an accuracy thing I can't stress enough.

African names are country 19, so replace the ones you have with these. See how it goes for you. I will probably make modifications down the road, but given it took me probably 7 years to finally do this, I wouldn't hold my breath.

bump

are these more inline with south africa or just western africa?

No, but I'll make a new set for South African names since that seems like the most logical place to do it for it and post it. Stay tuned.

South African names
 

I've done a test run of South African only names. I didn't add any Afrikaans first names or English ones to the list, because I have my South Africa language distribution setup to add UK English, Dutch and Indian names in addition to African ones.

For the purposes of this situation, the names are mostly Zulu and Xhosa, as well as other tribes so they will be mixed up and won't make any sense to someone who knew those languages, but it's better than the status quo in-game which largely has you using Muslim names. There are some Afrikaans surnames, but that's because there are indeed black south africans with dutch last names and native african surnames, but it's mostly an ethnic set of surnames.

If I get ambitious or find people are REALLY wanting to use this, I'll make it more accurate or add to it, as it could be expanded pretty heavily.

But it'll only make sense for South Africa, tbh.

To do Africa properly would require a bunch more namesets. The same granularity as the game has with Europe, i.e. every ethnicity at least as large as Albania, would require about 50 namesets just for Africa. Even limiting to ethnicities at least the size of Ireland would require close to 30 namesets for Africa.

Now, if making it seem right to native Africans isn't important, the continent could be covered with about six groups similar to what you've done here with South Africa. There would be groups for Central Africa (Luba, Mongo, Kongo, Kanuri), East Africa (Oromo, Amhara, Somali, Tigrayan), North Africa (Maghrebi, Egyptian), Southeast Africa (Hutu, Chewa), Southern Africa (Shona, Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Tswana), and West Africa (Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Mande, Akan, Fula).

It would be a lot of work no matter how you wanted to slice it.

If the game's name files were different or if it were possible to add additional ones, this would be worth it. But it's tough otherwise, because as you've said Africa alone would be more than the available names in-game.