Jenga was created by Leslie Scott, the co-founder of Oxford Games Ltd, based on a game that evolved within her family in the early 1970s using children's wooden building blocks the family purchased from a sawmill in Takoradi, Ghana. The name Jenga is derived from kujenga, a Swahili word that means "to build". A British national, Scott was born in Tanganyika, now Tanzania, where she was raised speaking English and Swahili, before moving to live in Ghana, West Africa.

Source: Wikipedia