Liora Bigon Editor Place Names in Africa Colonial Urban Legacies, Entangled Histories Place Names in Africa Liora Bigon Editor Place Names in Africa Colonial Urban Legacies, Entangled Histories 123 Editor Liora Bigon The Institute of Western Cultures The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Jerusalem, Israel Holon Institute of Technology Holon, Israel ISBN 978-3-319-32484-5 ISBN 978-3-319-32485-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32485-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016940553 © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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Printed on acid-free paper This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland Foreword Over the past two decades, there have been numerous efforts to reorient the field of place-name studies toward a critical account of the social and political struggles over toponymic inscription by situating such practices within the broader politics of space and place. This edited collection provides a welcome addition to the emerging body of scholarship on critical toponymies while also drawing important linkages with urban planning history and postcolonial studies. As Liora Bigon rightly points out in the introductory chapter, critical toponymic scholarship has drawn considerable attention to the contested politics of place naming in Europe and North America, yet far less consideration has been given to other world regions such as Africa. This volume, therefore, fills a significant gap in the literature by bringing African toponymies to the foreground through a series of spatial histories that explore the cultural entanglements of indigenous, colonial, and postcolonial regimes of toponymic inscription. The book’s emphasis on the “colonial legacies” and “entangled histories” of place naming acknowledges the complexity of the toponymic tapestry in African cities. This is nicely illustrated by a combined focus on both the long-term historical structures shaping toponymic landscapes over the course of centuries (longue durée) as well as the history of events (l’histoire événementielle) that have transformed the symbolic infrastructure of urban spaces. Pivotal “events”, such as revolutionary changes in political regime, often bring about radical transformations to a city’s toponymy, as various contributions to this book show. Yet the present collection also highlights the ways in which multiple layers of meaning and memory – both official and vernacular – often coexist simultaneously in the very same cityscape. Taken together, the contributions to this book offer a wide ranging set of case studies from across the African continent that enrich our understanding of the spatial narratives and geographical imaginaries that have been etched into urban spaces by colonial regimes and their postcolonial successors. The result is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that draws upon the insights of urban history, sociolinguistics, political science, and cultural geography, among other fields. Given v vi Foreword this diverse cast of authors, it is to be expected that each will approach the subject matter in a somewhat different fashion. Some authors are interested in tracing the genealogy of individual toponyms while other contributors draw upon semiotics and postcolonial theory to unpack the symbolic power of entire regimes of toponymic inscription. There is also a diverse array of methodological approaches – from archival research to ethnographic fieldwork – that informs the studies in this volume. A number of contributors have adopted a “top-down” approach highlighting the administrative procedures that shape the official naming of places, whereas other chapters underscore the importance of “bottom-up” processes of vernacular speech that constitute the toponymic spaces of everyday life. This collection also broadens the focus of critical place-name studies beyond “specific” toponyms by also considering a number of “generic” naming practices that played a significant role in the social ordering of urban space under colonialism in Africa. For example, Luce Beeckmans’s account of the establishment of so-called neutral zones – which were anything but “neutral” – nicely demonstrates how the use of euphemistic, generic place names was central to the legitimization of the white supremacist doctrines of racial segregation that underpinned colonial planning practices. Similarly, Liora Bigon and Yossi Katz’s chapter on the transplantation of “garden city” discourses from Europe to the Global South is equally instructive in showing how generic toponymies were employed to literally naturalize the geographical divisions between colonizer and colonized. Another important contribution that this edited collection makes to critical toponymic scholarship is its emphasis on the relationality of place naming. As various authors in this volume contend, the naming of places in one location cannot be fully grasped in isolation. This is true on multiple levels. For example, a toponym can link multiple places together through long-distance trade (as in the case of Walter Brown’s account of Bagamoyo in East Africa). Additionally, colonial authorities in Africa often adopted similar place-naming practices in different colonial cities, which makes relational critiques of toponymic “regimes” all the more salient. And if one needed any further evidence that place naming should be understood in relational terms, Wale Adebanwi’s provocative account of the retaliatory renaming of streets in New York and Lagos provides a compelling case that place naming can be far more than a local affair alone. Put simply, toponyms must be understood not as isolated linguistic objects but rather as inscriptions which are enmeshed in socio-spatial processes that are best grasped relationally. Yet beyond its theoretical and methodological contributions, it’s worth reiterating that one of the chief advances that this book makes is to call into question the Eurocentrism that pervades critical toponymic scholarship. To be sure, there have been a number of critical studies of place naming in the African context, yet, up until this point, such studies have been largely scattered across different scholarly journals that are tailored to specific disciplinary audiences. To my knowledge, this collection is one of the first books to be published that brings together into a single volume the interdisciplinary literature on place naming in Africa. In doing Foreword vii so, the present book broadens the geographical scope of critical place-name studies considerably and will hopefully make such works more accessible to scholars and the broader public alike. Victoria, BC Reuben Rose-Redwood August 2015 Acknowledgements This collection is first and foremost the fruit of the team effort of its seventeen participants, bridging between challenging multilateral channels of communication, a variety of languages, a variegated use of primary and secondary sources, and work in situ. I would like to warmly thank all the participants. Special thanks are due to Professor Ruth Fine and the Institute of Western Cultures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for their encouragement of this research initiative and their provision of the necessary financial support during all the project’s stages. The Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (SAHGB) also provided some financial assistance. Further administrative and contextual support was provided by Professor Noam Shoval and Professor Ruth Kark from the Department of Geography of the Hebrew University. This collection and the motives behind its creation were primarily designed to correspond with some thematic, geographic, methodological, and historiographic gaps in the field of toponymic studies today (see introductory chapter). It is a result of a few thoughtful years regarding place names and Africa, which yielded, inter alia, a series of conference papers that were authored by the Editor or co-authored especially with Professor Ambe Njoh from the University of South Florida and Professor Yossi Katz from Bar Ilan University. These papers were presented in a variety of platforms, e.g., the European Association for Urban History (EAUH): a specialist session entitled: “What’s in a name? How do we label peripheral places”, Prague, 2012, and a main session entitled “Ubiquitous yet unique: green spaces in cities from the eighteenth century to the present”, Lisbon, 2014; the International Planning