Abstract
Enframing the collective volume, this chapter elaborates on the distinctiveness of this volume and its contribution to recent critical place-names studies in terms of aims, scope, geography and methodology. It also provides an in-dept historiographic analysis in the field of toponymy against the background of (post-)colonial urban environments in Africa. Implying on a variety of toponymic inter-crossings between time spans, spatialities, scales and (post-)colonial legacies, the advantage of using the relational analytic approach of the ‘entangled’ in this context is brought into light.
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Notes
- 1.
Rose-Redwood, Reuben, Derek Alderman and Maoz Azaryahu, ‘Geographies of Toponymic Inscription: New Directions in Critical Place-Name Studies’, Progress in Human Geography, 34, 4 (2010), pp. 453–470 (p. 455).
- 2.
These references are therefore worthy to be mentioned in detail: Hélène d’Almeida-Topor, ‘Le modèle toponymique colonial dans les capitales de l’ouest africain francophone’, in Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch and Odile Goerg (eds), La ville européenne outre mers (Paris: l’Harmattan, 1996), pp. 235–243; Liora Bigon, ‘Names, Norms and Forms: French and Indigenous Toponyms in Early Colonial Dakar, Senegal’, Planning Perspectives, 23 (2008), pp. 479–501; Liora Bigon and Ambe Njoh, ‘The Toponymic-Inscription Problematic in Urban Sub-Saharan Africa: From Colonial to Postcolonial Times’, Journal of Asian and African Studies, 50, 1 (2015), pp. 25–40; James Duminy, ‘Street Renaming, Symbolic Capital, and Resistance in Durban, South Africa’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32 (2014), pp. 310–328; Garth A. Myers, ‘Naming and Placing the Other: Power and the Urban Landscape in Zanzibar’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 87, 3 (1996), pp. 237–246; Ambe J. Njoh, ‘Toponymic Inscription, Physical Addressing and the Challenge of Urban Management in an Era of Globalization in Cameroon’, Habitat International, 34 (2010), pp. 427–435; Tiago Castela and Maria Paula Meneses, ‘Naming the Urban in Twentieth-Century Mozambique: Towards Spatial Histories of Aspiration and Violence’, lecture presented at the international conference ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Urban Planning in Africa’, the IPHS and the Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning, University of Lisbon, 5–6 September 2013.
- 3.
For only few examples see: Ikany Burije, ‘Note sur l’orthographe des principaux noms géographiques du Burundi’, Kongo-Overzee, 23, 3–4 (1957), pp. 224–225; Enrico Cerulli, Per la toponomastica della Somalia (Roma: Instituto per l’Oriente, 1931); Louis-Ferdinand Flutre, Pour une étude de la toponymie de l’AOF (Dakar: Université de Dakar, Faculté des lettres, 1957); Claude Gouffe, ‘Problèmes de toponymie Haoussa: les noms de villages de la région de Maradi (République du Niger)’, Revue internationale d’onomastique, 2 (1967), pp. 95–127; Eugene Kirchnerr, Place Names of Africa, 1935–1986: A Political Gazetteer (Netuchen: Scarecrow, 1987); Archibald Tucker, ‘Conflicting Principles in the Spelling of African Place Names’, Onoma 7, 2 (1956/7), pp. 215–228.
- 4.
José Anson, Connecting the ‘Unconnected’ in Sub-Saharan Africa: Postal Networks can Leverage Access to Infrastructure (Bern: United Nations’ Universal Postal Union, 2007); Serena Coetzee and Antony Cooper, ‘The Value of Addresses to the Economy, Society and Governance: A South African Perspective’, Paper for the 45th Annual Conference of the Urban and Regional Information System Association (URISA), Washington DC, 20–23 August 2007; Catherine Farvacque-Vitkovic, Lucien Godin, Hugues Leroux and Roberto Chavez, Street Addressing and the Management of Cities (Washington DC: The World Bank, 2005).
- 5.
For the World Bank’s programme for sub-Saharan Africa see Farvacque-Vitkovic (et al), Street Addressing. For its critique and the existence of simultaneous naming systems see: Njoh, ‘Toponymic Inscription, Physical Addressing’; Bigon and Njoh, ‘The Toponymic-Inscription Problematic’; Hélène d’Almeida-Topor’s contribution in this volume.
- 6.
For a representative though incomplete list (in alphabetical order) see: Maoz Azaryahu, ‘German Reunification and the Politics of Street Names: the Case of East Berlin’, Political Geography, 16, 6 (1997), pp. 479–493; Rhys Jones and Peter Merriman, ‘Hot, Banal and Everyday Nationalism: Bilingual Road Signs in Wales’, Political Geography, 28 (2009), pp. 164–173; Duncan Light, Ion Nicolae and Bogdan Suditu, ‘Toponymy and the Communist City: Street Names in Bucharest, 1948–1965,’ GeoJournal, 56 (2002), pp. 135–144; Daniel Milo, ‘Street Names,’ in Pierre Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 363–389; John Murray, Politics and Place-Names: Changing Names in the Late Soviet Period (Birmingham: University of Birmingham, 2000); Catherine Nash, ‘Irish placenames: Post-Colonial Locations’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 24, 4 (1999), pp. 457–480; Paulina Raento and Cameron Watson, ‘Gernika, Guernica, Guernica? Contested Meanings of a Basque Place’, Political Geography, 19 (2000), pp. 707–736; Reuben Rose-Redwood, ‘From Number to Name: Symbolic Capital, Places of Memory, and the Politics of Street Renaming in New York City’, Social & Cultural Geography, 9, 4 (2008), pp. 432–452.
- 7.
Among the most prominent here are the cases of (post-)colonial Singapore and Israel/Palestine, where critical toponymic study has been carried out by native scholars exclusively. Brenda Yeoh, ‘Street Names in Colonial Singapore’, Geographical Review, 82, 3 (1992), pp. 313–322; Brenda Yeoh, ‘Street Naming and Nation-Building: Toponymic Inscriptions of Nationhood in Singapore’, Area, 28, 3 (1996), pp. 298–307. For references on Israel/Palestine see notes 20–24.
- 8.
For instance, the entry ‘Street Names and Iconography’ (vol. 10, pp. 460–465) in the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, ed. by Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift (Oxford: Elsevier, 2009) – comprises no toponyms outside of the global North! Similarly, the entry ‘Semiotics’ in this same source (vol. 10, pp. 89–95), heavily designed around toponymic issues, mentions only three toponyms from the global South, out of a total of sixteen mentioned. For similar rates see: Maoz Azaryahu, ‘The Power of Commemorative Street Names’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 14 (1996), pp. 311–330; Naftali Kadmon, Toponymy : The Lore, Laws and Language of Geographical Names (New York: Vantage Press, 2000).
- 9.
The edited volume by Lawrence Berg and Jani Vuolteenaho entitled Critical Toponymies: The Contested Politics of Place Naming (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009) – is an exception by being a critical collection in English with global geographic coverage. Together with this, the collection reflects the thematic mainstream of the post-1990s research aiming to tackle place naming as “political practice par excellence of power over space” (p. 1); analysis and conclusion are left to the readers; and it seems that all chapters but the editors’ Introduction had been already published. See also: Reuben Rose-Redwood and Derek H. Alderman, Guest Editors, Special Thematic Interventions Section: ‘New Directions in Political Toponymy’, in ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 10, 1 (2011), http://www.acme-journal.org/volume10-1.html (visited 1 July 2015).
- 10.
Kenneth Foote and Maoz Azaryahu, ‘Toward a Geography of Memory: Geographical Dimensions of Public Memory and Commemoration’, Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 35, 1 (2007), pp. 125–144 (pp. 125, 126).
- 11.
Christian Topalov (ed.), Les divisions de la ville, collection ‘Les mots de la ville’, prepared under UNESCO’s Management of Social Transformations (MOST) Programme (Paris: UNESCO, Maison des sciences de l’homme 2002).
- 12.
Governed by socio-linguists and historians, the twelve contributions in the collection consist of two cases each from North Africa, West Africa, South America and the Far East, and one on India. Europe is represented by two English cities and Italy. Interestingly, Eastern Europe, North America and Australia are not represented, nor are anglophone, East or southern Africa.
- 13.
Topalov (ed.), Les divisions de la ville, p. 1 (Editor’ translation).
- 14.
See also: Hervé Guillorel (ed.), Toponymie et politique: les marqueurs linguistiques du territoire, la collection ‘Droits, territoires, cultures’ (Bruxelles: Bruylant, 2008); Hervé Guillorel (ed.), a special issue on ‘Onomastique, droit et politique’, Droit et Cultures: Revue internationale interdisciplinaire, 64, 2 (2012); and the session ‘What’s in a Name? How We Label Peripheral Places’ at the European Association for Urban History 11th International Conference on Urban History, Prague, 31 August 2012 (including Topalov’s lecture on ‘The Urban Vocabulary of Social Stigma in Late 20th Century France’).
- 15.
Mordechai Tamarkin, ‘Nationalism and Nation-Building in Black Africa: Fateful Connections’, Canadian Review of Studies of Nationalism, 20, 1–2 (1994), pp. 83–91 (p. 84). See also: Mordechai Tamarkin, Culture and Politics in Africa: Legitimizing Ethnicity, Rehabilitating the Post-Colonial State’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 2, 3 (1996), pp. 360–380.
- 16.
Myers, ‘Naming and Placing the Other’, p. 237.
- 17.
Myers, ‘Naming and Placing the Other’, p. 237.
- 18.
Rose-Redwood (et al.), ‘Geographies of Toponymic Inscription’, p. 466.
- 19.
Light (et al.), ‘Toponymy and the Communist City’; Azaryahu, ‘German Reunification.’
- 20.
Meron Benvenisti, ‘The Hebrew Map’, Theory and Criticism, 11 (1997), pp. 7–29 [in Hebrew]. For an English version see: Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948, trans. M. Kaufman-Lacusta (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
- 21.
For a partial yet representative list of publications in English see: Maoz Azaryahu and Arnon Golan, ‘(Re)naming the Landscape: The Formation of the Hebrew Map of Israel, 1949-1960’, Journal of Historical Geography, 27, 2 (2001), pp. 178–195; Maoz Azaryahu and Aharon Kellerman, ‘Symbolic Places of National History and Revival: A Study in Zionist Mythical Geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 24 (1999), pp. 109–123; Yoram Bar-Gal, ‘Naming City Streets: A Chapter in the History of Tel Aviv, 1909-1947’, Contemporary Jewry, 10, 2 (1989), pp. 39–50; Yossi Katz, ‘Identity, Nationalism and Place Names: Zionist Efforts to Preserve the Original Local Hebrew Names in Official Publications of the Mandate Government of Palestine’, Names 43, 2 (1995), pp. 103–118; Yossi Katz, ‘Reclaiming the Land: Factors in Naming the Jewish Settlement in Palestine during the Era of the British Mandate’, in These are the Names: Studies in Jewish Onomastics, ed. by Aaron Demsky (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1999), vol. II, pp. 63–112.
- 22.
Maoz Azaryahu and Rebecca Kook, ‘Mapping the Nation: Street Names and Arab-Palestinian Identity: Three Case Studies’, Nations and Nationalism, 8, 2 (2002), 195–213; Nurit Kliot, ‘The Meaning of the Arab Settlements’ Names in Eretz Israel and their Comparison to Hebrew Settlements’ Names’, Horizons in Geography, 30 (1989), pp. 71–79 [in Hebrew]. Methodologically exceptional is: Noam Shoval, ‘Street-Naming, Tourism Development and Cultural Conflict: the Case of the Old City of Acre/Akko/Akka’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38 (2013), pp. 612–626. In Palestinian popular maps Israeli settlements are non-existent.
- 23.
Kliot, ‘The Meaning of the Arab Settlements’ Names’, p. 72.
- 24.
Amer Dahamshy, ‘A Name for a Place: The Naming of Arab Settlements and Natural Features in the Galilee’s Folk Narratives’ (PhD thesis, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2009) [in Hebrew].
- 25.
Liora Bigon and Amer Dahamshy, ‘An Anatomy of Symbolic Power: The Israeli Road-Signs Policy and the Palestinian Minority’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32, 4 (2014), pp. 606–621.
- 26.
Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
- 27.
Saul B. Cohen and Nurit Kliot, ‘Place Names in Israel’s Ideological Struggle over the Administered Territories’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 82, 4 (1992), pp. 650–680.
- 28.
Myers, ‘Naming and Placing the Other’, p. 238.
- 29.
Rose-Redwood (et al.), ‘Geographies of Toponymic Inscription’, p. 466.
- 30.
Written sources for sub-Saharan Africa history (apart from East Africa) gradually emerged with the introduction of Arabic script and accounts from the ninth century – however, these are confined to the Sahel and the northern savannah belt. European accounts originated in the mid-fifteenth century, first for the Senegambia region, but were limited to the coast and its environs, with some ambiguous and often indirect references to the hinterland.
- 31.
Stephan Bühnen, ‘Place Names as an Historical Source: An Introduction with Examples from Southern Senegambia and Germany’, History in Africa, 19 (1992), pp. 45–101 (p. 90).
- 32.
Rowan Roenisch, ‘Mental Maps and Shifting Settlements: The Invisible Boundaries of the Zimbabwean Shona and Tonga Home’, Traditional Dwelling and Settlements, 144 (2002), pp. 17–54 (pp. 25–26).
- 33.
René Baesjou, ‘The Historical Evidence in Old Maps and Charts of Africa with Special Reference to West Africa’, History in Africa, 15 (1988), pp. 1–83; Ann McDougall, ‘The Quest for “Tarra”: Toponymy and Geography in Exploring History’, History in Africa, 18 (1991), pp. 271–289.
- 34.
UNESCO, African Ethnonyms and Toponyms (Paris: UNESCO, 1984).
- 35.
See for instance: Pierre Alexandre, ‘Some Problems of African Onomastics’ (pp. 51–67) and David Dalby, ‘The Transcription of Ethnonyms and Toponyms in Africa in Relation to their Historical Study’ (pp. 80–85) versus Olabiyi Yai, ‘African Ethnonymy and Toponymy: Reflections on Decolonization’ (pp. 39–50) – all in UNESCO, African Ethnonyms and Toponyms.
- 36.
Cheikh Anta Diop, ‘A Methodology for the Study of Migrations’, in UNESCO, African Ethnonyms and Toponyms, pp. 86–109. See also: Cheikh Anta Diop, L’Afrique noire précoloniale (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1960).
- 37.
Bühnen, ‘Place Names as an Historical Source’, p. 45.
- 38.
This argument is inspired by: Jim Duncan and Nancy Duncan, ‘(Re)reading the Landscape’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 6 (1988), pp. 117–126; Jack Goody, The Interface Between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
- 39.
Ambe Njoh, Planning in Contemporary Africa: The State, Town Planning and Society in Cameroon (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 235–260.
- 40.
Liora Bigon, ‘Names, Norms and Forms: French and Indigenous Toponyms in Early Colonial Dakar, Senegal’, Planning Perspectives, 23 (2008), pp. 479–501. For a similar co-existence of the Maori system of naming and mapping with the new one imposed by colonial surveyors see: Giselle Byrnes, ‘Surveying – The Maori and the Land: An Essay in Historical Representation’, New Zealand Journal of History, 31, 1 (1997), pp. 85–98.
- 41.
Bigon and Njoh, ‘The Toponymic-Inscription Problematic’, p. 36.
- 42.
Respectively: Bigon, ‘Names, Norms and Forms’, p. 496; Belkacem Boumedini and Nebia Dadoua Hadria, ‘Les noms des quartiers dans la ville d’Oran: entre changement official et nostalgie populaire’, Droit et Cultures, 64, 2 (2012), pp. 149–160. In Aotearoa, New Zealand, also a case of white settler colony, the reapplication of selected Maori names by the settlers may be seen as an attempt in the structuring of colonialist cultural and national identities. See Giselle Byrnes, ‘”A Dead Sheet Covered with Meaningless Words?”: Place Names and the Cultural Colonization of Tauranga’, New Zealand Journal of History, 36, 1 (2002), pp. 18–35 (p. 29).
- 43.
Kadmon, Toponymy, p. 79.
- 44.
Bigon and Njoh, ‘The Toponymic-Inscription Problematic’, p. 36.
- 45.
Johan Lagae, ‘Navigating |Off Radar”: Liminal Spaces in the City Centre of Colonial/Postcolonial Lubumbashi, DR Congo’, paper presented at the session ‘The Multitude of “In-Between” Combinations in African Urban Spaces’, at the EAUH’s 12th International Conference, Lisbon, September 2014.
- 46.
UN-HABITAT, The State of African Cities 2014: Re-Imagining Sustainable Urban Transitions (Nairobi: United Nations Human Settlements Programme, 2014), esp. pp. 14–59; Jennifer Robinson, ‘Global and World Cities: A View from Off the Map’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 26, 3 (2002), pp. 531–554.
- 47.
Ambe Njoh, Planning in Contemporary Africa: The State, Town Planning and Society in Cameroon (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 335–260; Ambe Njoh and Liora Bigon, ‘Adapting Modern ICTs to the Spatial and Cultural Environment of Urban Africa with Emphasis on Cameroon’, presented at the 6th Annual International Conference on ICT for Africa, Yaoundé, Cameroon, 1–4 October 2014.
- 48.
Coetzee and Cooper, ‘The Value of Addresses to the Economy.’
- 49.
Anthony D. King, Urbanism, Colonialism and the World Economy (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 14. See also: Terence McGee, The South East African City (London: Bell and Sons, 1967), pp. 56–57.
- 50.
As for British colonial urbanism, King’s 1976 study on British India was innovative in this respect and is certainly still unique. By dwelling on key generic notions such as the ‘cantonment’, ‘mall’ and ‘bungalow-compound complex’, King illuminated the reliable connections between classifying terminological systems and the colonial space, conceived as a social, cultural, behavioural and perceptual space. Though King is thin on evidence regarding the indigenous conceptions of settlement organisation and terminologies, his ability to de-familiarise and revisit his own British culture was then remarkable. As far as we are aware, this was the first book-length study to deal extensively with the relationships between language, social organisation, and physical urban form: Anthony King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power and Environment (London, Henley, Boston: Routledge, 1976). For less systematic generic terminologies of colonial urban landscapes in some other contexts see the ‘classical’ works of: Janet Abu-Lughod, Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Alain Sinou, Comptoirs et villes coloniales du Sénégal: Saint-Louis, Gorée, Dakar (Paris: Éditions Karthala, Orstom, 1993); Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1991); Brenda Yeoh, Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
- 51.
Louis-Ferdinand Flutre, Pour une étude de la toponymie de l’AOF (Dakar: Université de Dakar, Faculté des lettres, 1957).
- 52.
See, for instance, the two-volumes collective project edited by Robert Home: Essays in African Land Law; and Local Case Studies in African Land Law (Cape Town: Pretoria University Press, 2011). And: Nancy Odendaal, ‘Rethinking Urban Planning in the African Urban Century’, a lecture presented at the International IPHS Conference ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Urban Planning in Africa’, Lisbon, 5–6 September 2013.
- 53.
Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, The History of African Cities South of the Sahara: From the Origins to Colonization, trans. by Mary Baker (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2005), pp. 12–13.
- 54.
Achille Mbembe, On the postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 1–4.
- 55.
As elaborated by Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, ‘Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity’, History and Theory, 45, 1 (2006), pp. 30–50.
- 56.
Because the perspective of ‘entangled histories’ is somewhat undefined, thereby promoting creative flexibility and indefinite conclusions – it was also preferred here to other relational but more specific, approaches. Amongst the latter is histoire croisée, which developed as an explicit methodological ‘toolbox’ in order to produce particular knowledge effects (Werner and Zimmermann, ‘Beyond Comparison’); or ‘transnationalism’, which essentially undermines or bypasses the ‘national’ factor by expanding on alternative channels of dissemination – yet the ‘national’ still remains, even subconsciously. This complicates references to the pre-colonial period and even to the post-colonial present in Africa.
- 57.
Shalini Randeria, ‘Entangled Histories of Uneven Modernities: Civil Society, Castle Solidarity and Legal Pluralism in Post-Colonial India’, in Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka (eds), Comparative and Transnational Histories (Oxford, NY: Berghahn Books, 2009), pp. 77–105 (p. 80). Randeria’s conceptualisation of the term ‘entangled histories’ is inspiring for this collection though she focuses on historical and contemporary entanglements of multiple modernities between western and non-western societies. In this collection the meaning of the term was further diverted in order to meet its aims, structure and nature as explained in this paragraph.
- 58.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000).
- 59.
East Africa Tourist Travel Association, Gedi: Royal National Park (London: n.p., the 1980s).
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Bigon, L. (2016). Introduction: Place Names in Africa: Colonial Urban Legacies, Entangled Histories. In: Bigon, L. (eds) Place Names in Africa. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32485-2_1
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