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NEW CITIES NEW ECONOMIES Johannesburg, Ontario: Street Naming Strategies and the Decolonised City to Come By Melissa Levin | Peer Review outh Africa’s transition from apartheid to the white-owned economy. Coupled with that social democracy was both enabled and burdened by reality was an ideational perspective articulated by Sthe global political conditions of the late 1980s. the leading liberation movement, the African National The shifting balance of forces at the time meant that Congress (ANC), that ‘South Africa belonged to all the global appetite for authoritarianism was passing who live in it, black and white’. In other words, the as the horizon of possibility suggested by socialism national imaginary accommodated both oppressor was fading. In other words, democratisation efforts and oppressed, albeit in a new relationship of political were encouraged by the international community, equality. The navigation of this moment and the while radical transformative economic and social compromises that ensued significantly limited the projects were not. Tied to this global ‘pressure from depth of democratisation that would unfold in the above’ for political transformation was country-wide polity. Whilst momentous, the project of democracy- mobilisation of the masses of people for change. This building without a twin project of decolonisation of local organisation put pressure on, but was unable the social, economic and cultural life of the polity to dismantle the power of the apartheid military and has reinforced the power of the already empowered 36 THE THINKER NEW CITIES NEW ECONOMIES and naturalised the impoverishment of the formerly, formally oppressed. This neo-apartheid reality However, while the reversal of (cf. Ratshitanga, 2019) is evident politically in the historical injustices discursively informs all reproduction of the bifurcated state (cf. Mamdani, statist policy, the reckoning with history as 1996), economically in the persistence of massive a site of struggle and transformation does un- and under-employment of African people in not. The end of authoritarian and colonial particular, and culturally in the symbolic presence of regimes has generally been accompanied colonial statuary and monuments throughout the by the spectacle of the demolition of their country. symbols, or, at least, the removal of their symbols to less prominent spaces. This has Over two and a half decades after its official demise, not happened in South Africa. apartheid’s presence remains ubiquitous in South Africa. It is visible in the gulf between rich and poor, in the spatial geography that still segregates the character of coloniality is its global reach, and that country, in the statues of Boer generals that still nationalising memory and counter-memory serves stand tall and proud across the land. Central to the to reinforce institutional practices (like the nation- transformative agenda of the new state is the undoing state itself) that derive from European expansion. of this legacy and the elimination of persistent social As illustration, each day I spend countless hours divisions. However, while the reversal of historical commuting to my place of work at the University of injustices discursively informs all statist policy, the Toronto (or Tkoronto, the Mohawk name for the city) reckoning with history as a site of struggle and along the Bathurst core to the St. George campus. transformation does not. The end of authoritarian and colonial regimes has generally been accompanied Bathurst Street is named for Henry Bathurst, the 3rd by the spectacle of the demolition of their symbols, Earl Bathurst who ran Britain’s colonial office, sent or, at least, the removal of their symbols to less settlers to Canada after the War of 1812 and appointed prominent spaces. This has not happened in South Lord Somerset as administrator of the Cape Colony. As Africa. The statue of the Boer General Louis Botha markers of his colonial reach and success, numerous proudly stands before the entrance to the parliament towns and streets are named for him, such as Bathurst in Cape Town. Queen Victoria’s statue guards the County in New South Wales, Australia; Bathurst Island back of the relatively democratised legislature. To in Nunavut, Canada; and Bathurst, a small town in the reinforce the normalcy of the memorial presence Eastern Cape in South Africa. Bathurst was also once of colonial leaders are the city monikers and streets the capital city of Gambia. That city was renamed whose names commemorate colonial leadership, Banjul after the end of formal colonialism. St. George thus obscuring their atrocities. Modernist theories signifies a multitude of histories. He was obviously of the nation suggest that the manner in which not a coloniser himself, but his memory was deployed the past is constructed is central to building national in the service of imperialism, his cross the symbol of solidarities and that nationalists build nations through English domination as represented in the flag, and as constructing usable pasts. The ANC has chosen a call to conquest when Portuguese soldiers captured a bureaucratised route to accommodating histories Africans as chattel in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: in an effort at building national solidarities and legitimising statehood. Nowhere is this ambiguous, ‘The Age of Discovery required a man of arms, administrative, and often denationalised practice of and George fit the bill. The conquering knight nation-building more evident than in the street and personified civilization pitted against beastly place re/naming processes in South African cities. antagonists and monstrous races. The dragon slayer mounted on his steed antedated the But the reproduction of coloniality through public charge: “Exterminate all the brutes.” It would be memorialisation on city streets is not a South African hard to imagine a better representative of the issue alone. The title of this essay deliberately yokes Portuguese errand or a saint more suitable to together two distant places: Johannesburg and the task’ (Hartman, 2007: 65). Ontario, in an attempt to make the point that the very Volume 85 / 2020 37 NEW CITIES NEW ECONOMIES The history of both of these characters is not evident as much oppositional concern and antagonistic immediately; their roles in the violence of imperialising mobilisation of both people and resources (Pillay, projects is not apparent. In masking that historical Personal Communication, 2009/2010). I argue violence, we tend to mask the on-going ‘slow violence’ that the everydayness of the street, or Azaryahu’s of systems of coloniality that are reproduced in the ‘mundaneness’ of streets and their names after the present. To get rid of Bathurst everywhere, to decolonise event of naming, reinforces and reproduces a sense the city, in symbolism and practice, demands that of cultural belonging and ownership. To change the the city to come must be imagined transnationally. landscape, through renaming practices and in spatial terms, is a form of unsettling, in the sense of both a An analysis of the symbolic import of street and place feeling of unease and instability, and in the practice names as well as processes of renaming in cities alerts of removing settlers (not the people, but the practices us to the multiple articulations of power in the settler of coloniality). colony/neo-colony. It contemplates the ways in which street and place naming practices normalise a settler Streets – as signs of mobility, modernity, and freedom presence and colonial present; and, in particular, alerts – are central objects in the imagining of a ‘new’ us to the possibilities and challenges that inhere in South Africa. The apartheid state tasked itself with efforts to transform the city. significantly curtailing the mobility of black people. The ‘tribalisation’ of Africans found expression in the Street re/naming too presents a productive avenue ‘Bantustan’ system that apportioned homelands to for reading the relationship between cities and the different tribal authorities, in an attempt to deny the colonial present. Street names, according to Maoz possibility of unified African nationalism as against Azaryahu (1997: 311) have been understudied by primordial segregation. The strategy was classically social scientists ‘in their studies of the structures of ‘divide and rule’ and, in Mamdani’s terms, South authority and the legitimation of power’ since they African apartheid did what colonialism achieved are ‘ostensibly visible, quintessentially mundane, and across the continent, which was to erect a ‘bifurcated seemingly obvious’. Duncan Light (2004: 154) suggests state’ – a state that was racialised at the centre and that streets have garnered less attention than public tribalized at the periphery. A significant part of the place renaming more broadly in political life and the ‘traditionalising’ apparatus of the modern apartheid academy since they are seen at first glance as a ‘trivial state was to create urban zones of impermanence for topic of investigation’. Africans who laboured in white South Africa. These transient zones, the urban townships of South Africa, However, Light argues that street names can be racialised the landscape into segregated living spaces. ‘significant expressions of national identity with Movement, for African people, was circumscribed a powerful symbolic importance’ (2004: 154). by the advance of settler colonialism, ultimately Nowhere is this more apparent than in South Africa articulated as apartheid. where, according