No you aren’t. You are showing how to create a synonym. You still don’t have a tag named africa. You have a settings where given africa will change to afrique. If you will delete that synonym, you still don’t have tag africa. So, that is basically search & replace 
I realliy like that new option to create synomy in the fly. But better would be ability to create new real tag at /tags.
And disclaimer: I upgraded an hour before you wrote that original comment. So, there is chance things are different now, and creating a synonym creates a tag and even if/when connection is removed there is two tags, not only the original one.