Rafiki's name means "friend" in Swahili

[FriendlyHyena]

I was just fooling around with Google translate, trying to figure out the names of the characters to see what language they might be in. I typed in Rafiki and it detected Swahili and translated it to "friend".

Do you think that's just coincidence?


Of course, Zira translates to "for" and Kovu translates to "metal", so maybe it's nothing.

[TheLionPrince]

It was intentional. Almost all of the characters have names that are words in Swahili. Kovu is Swahili for "Scar". Zira translates to mean "to hate, hated" according to some Swahili-to-English online translators, but Zira does translate in Turkish to mean "for".