Recently Changed Capitals and Country Names
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This is the classic exam-trap zone: a question bank compiled even three or four years ago may still carry an old name, so both directions — old name to new, and new name to old — are fair game. Cross-check every entry here against the latest year's current-affairs compilation before your exam, since this list is, by definition, the part of the book most likely to have moved again by the time you read it.
Renamed countries
| Old name | Current name | Year / context |
|---|---|---|
| Ceylon | Sri Lanka | 1972, on adopting a new republican constitution |
| Burma | Myanmar | 1989, renamed by the ruling military government |
| Upper Volta | Burkina Faso | 1984, under Thomas Sankara ("land of upright/honest people") |
| Dahomey | Benin | 1975 |
| Zaire | Democratic Republic of the Congo | 1997, after Mobutu Sese Seko's fall |
| Swaziland | Eswatini | 2018, by royal decree of King Mswati III (meaning "land of the Swazis," and to avoid confusion with Switzerland) |
| Macedonia (Former Yugoslav Republic of) | North Macedonia | 2019, under the Prespa Agreement with Greece, unlocking its NATO and EU accession path |
| Czech Republic | Czechia (short-form English name; "Czech Republic" remains the official long-form name) | Adopted 2016 |
| Turkey | Türkiye | 2022, at the country's own request that the UN and other bodies use "Türkiye" in all official contexts |
| Cape Verde | Cabo Verde | 2013, adopted as the official name in all languages, including English |
Recently relocated or contested capitals
| Country | Change |
|---|---|
| Kazakhstan | Capital renamed Astana → Nur-Sultan (2019, honouring outgoing president Nazarbayev) → back to Astana (2022, after mass protests against Nazarbayev-era symbols) |
| Myanmar | Capital moved from Yangon to the purpose-built Naypyidaw in 2005 |
| Tanzania | Capital functions shifted from Dar es Salaam to Dodoma, formally designated in 1996 and substantially completed by 2019–20 |
| Indonesia | Law passed in 2022 to relocate the capital from Jakarta to a new planned city, Nusantara, in East Kalimantan (Borneo); as of late 2025, Jakarta legally remains the functioning capital, and Nusantara's status was downgraded to a "political capital" with completion now targeted for 2028 — treat this as unsettled and check the latest position before your exam |
| Burundi | Political capital moved from Bujumbura to Gitega in 2019 (Bujumbura remains the commercial capital) |
| Egypt | A new, still-unnamed administrative capital is under construction east of Cairo to house government ministries, but Cairo remains the official capital as of this writing |
A broader pattern worth recognising across several of the entries above: many 20th-century capital relocations shared the same underlying motive — moving the seat of government away from a colonial-era coastal city toward a more centrally located, often purpose-built interior city, partly to spur balanced regional development and partly to physically distance the government from one dominant ethnic or commercial power base. Nigeria moved its capital from Lagos to the newly built Abuja in 1991; Pakistan moved from Karachi to the newly built Islamabad, with the transition beginning in 1959 and completing through the 1960s; Brazil moved from Rio de Janeiro to the newly built Brasília in 1960; and Kazakhstan, Myanmar, and Tanzania followed the same broad logic decades later, as already detailed above. Treat this cluster — Nigeria, Pakistan, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Myanmar, Tanzania, and (if its relocation eventually completes) Indonesia — as one repeating global pattern rather than seven unrelated facts, since recognising the pattern is what lets you correctly guess an answer even for a country-capital pairing you haven't specifically memorised.
The newest country in the world remains South Sudan, which seceded from Sudan and joined the United Nations on 14 July 2011 — no country has been added to the UN's membership since, making this an unusually stable fact to hold onto even as the rest of this section keeps shifting.
Memory hook — "Old skin, new name — same country underneath": whenever a question names a country or capital you don't recognise but describes an obviously familiar place (a Southeast Asian country once called Burma, an African capital called Zaire's capital, a Kalahari-adjacent kingdom once called Swaziland), check this table first — it is very likely an older or newer name for something you already know, exactly the same logic as the "Renamed Schemes" trap in this series' government-schemes book.
Practice Recall: Name the old names of Myanmar, Eswatini, North Macedonia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and state the year South Sudan became the world's newest country.