The Names and the Naming of Durban

The names and the naming of Durban

Adrian KOOPMAN

Introduction The city of Durban lies at 29.7o on the coast of KwaZulu-Natal in South-East Africa. With its constantly pleasant tropical temperature, its wide, golden beaches, and its proximity to the Drakensberg Moun- tains and a number of game reserves, it is a world-renowned tourist spot and favoured holiday destination. Durban was built around a wide bay which over the years has developed into the busiest harbour in the Southern Hemisphere. Durban was not always known as “Durban”, and even now, the majority of its inhabitants—Zulu-speakers—do not refer to it by this name. In the early 1820s what was to become Durban was known as Port Natal; the Zulus refer to the city as eThekwini ‘place of the bay’, while modern Zulu youth refer to it as eGagasini ’the place of the waves’. Inland visitors to the beaches have always fondly remembered their holiday to Durbs. This article deals with a number of such varying references to the city of Durban, and tries to account for the wide variety of different names by constructing a theory of intersecting “axes of meaning”. We shall look at the following 20 names which at one time or another have been used to refer to the geographical entity known officially as “Durban”:

Baai van Natal eManteku kwaKhangela Bay of Natal eMdubane kwaMalinde Durban eMhlume kwelikaBanana Durbs eThekwini Natalbaai D’Urban iSibubulungu Port Natal eBhodwe iTheku Rio de Natal eGagasini Tekweni

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Different names and different versions of the same name A quick glance at the list of 20 names above shows that on the one hand there are many different names, while on the other there are also many versions of some of the names. For example, Port Natal, Durban and eThekwini are clearly different names, while D’Urban, Durban and Durbs are clearly variations of the name Durban. Re-listing the 20 names above and putting the different versions of the same name together, reduces the list to 11 different names: 1. Durban, also the earlier version D’Urban, the informal (English) Durbs (sometimes jocularly as “Durbs-by-the- sea”), and eMdubane (informal Zulu version). 2. eThekwini (Zulu: ‘place of the bay/lagoon’), also in non- locative form iTheku,1 poetically (in a Zulu praise-poem) as eManteku, and incorrectly spelt as Tekweni, one of many misspelling to be found in supposedly authoritative works on KwaZulu-Natal toponyms. 3. Bay of Natal, an early name given by cartographers, also found as Baai van Natal (Dutch) and Natalbaai (Afrikaans). Bay of Natal and Natalbaai can still be found in a mapbook produced in the 1990s. 4. Port Natal, the earliest settler name for both bay and settlement, also occurs as the Zulu eBhodwe (‘at the port’) 5. KwaKhangela is the early Zulu name for a military garrison in the environs of Durban, echoed in the Durban dockside suburb Congella. 6. iSibubulungu is the Zulu name for The Bluff, the large promontory overlooking the harbour on the south east side of the entrance. Zulu King Dingane kaSenzangakhona used this name in the early 1830s to refer to a much wider area of land which encompassed the whole of the then early settlement

1 Each and every toponym in Zulu has two forms: the locative form and the non- locative form. The locative form is used in locative contexts (Ngihlala eThekwini— ‘I live in Durban’) while the non-locative form is used elsewhere (iTheku yidolobha elihle—‘Durban is a lovely city’). Each form is a valid form of the name and there is still much debate about which form should be recorded on maps, in atlases, on signboards, etc.

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of Port Natal. [The name iSibubulungu also occurs in a number of forms, such as Bubolongo.] 7. eGagasini (‘place of the wave’) is a late 20th century popular Zulu name for Durban as a ‘hot venue’. Often used hand in hand with: 8. kwelikaBanana (‘at the place of the banana’), also found jocularly as Banana City. 9. kwaMalinde, an early and now defunct name for the flat- lands to the north of the harbour, where the whole of the early settlement of Port Natal was situated 10. eMhlume (poss. ‘place of the mangrove tree’): an obscure Zulu name for Durban. 11. Rio de Natal: the Portuguese name given by early explorers on the assumption that the lagoon visible from the sea must be the mouth of a vast river.

Allonyms It is debatable whether the term allonym can be applied to these different names, or to the different versions of names given above. Har- valík (pers. comment, Aug. 2006) says: In the list of key onomastic items, that is being prepared by the ICOS Terminology Group, /…/ An allonym is defined as follows: 1) the name of a person, assumed by another person /…/ (cf. pseu- donym and cryptonym); 2) each of two or more toponyms employed in reference to a single geographic feature; 3) a variant of a name. He points out that Naftali Kadmon’s book on toponymy favours the second definition, not surprisingly, seeing it is a book specifically on toponymy. Kadmon, then, would regard all 20 names listed above as allonyms for the city of Durban. Harvalík, on the other hand, favours definition (3), which would make Durban, Durbs, D’Urban and eMdu- bane all allonyms of the same name, and eThekwini, iTheku, and eManteku allonyms of another name. Harvalík also introduces the concept of “communication variants of proper names”, leading to the idea of the nomeme and allonomes: [The] term [communication variants of proper names] means those forms of proper names, which are based on the same base (etymon)

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as the basic (official) form of the name, but phonetics, word forma- tion, paradigm, grammatical number or gender of which have been changed. /…/ Given that the communication variants of proper names have the same basis as the official form of the name, the speaker is thus aware of the connection between them. They can also be called allonomes, i.e. the realisation of a nomeme—a unit of language which enables a competent speaker from a specific language to recognise various forms or proper names as identical.2 Re-interpreting Harvalík in terms of this paper on the naming of Dur- ban, Durban is the basic or official form of the name (the etymon) while the nomeme of this etymon may be realised as any one of the allonomes Durban, D’Urban, Durbs and eMdubane. If the terms allonomes or allonyms are to be used for variations of a single base form, then Harvalík suggests (personal comment, Aug. 2006) that different names for the same topographic feature (e.g. Dur- ban, eThekwini, Port Natal) be referred to as parallel names, while in Russian onomastics this phenomenon is apparently called polyonymy, which, if I understand correctly, would make a polyonym a synonym of an allonym (as Kadmon uses the term). No matter which way various onomasticians use the term allonym, to understand the naming of Durban, we need to look at why there are so many names for Durban and so many variations of some of the names. I suggest that there are four main reasons why there are so many different ways to refer to Durban, and these lead us to four axes. These reasons (and their associated axis) are: Different names at different times: since the first recorded explorations of the Portuguese seafarers in the 15th century, different groups over the years have given names to Durban. We can say that names occur on a historical axis. Names from different languages: the earliest inhabitants of South Africa were Khoisan, and their legacy is strong in South African toponymy. The earliest maritime explorers who have left records were

2 From Harvalík (in press), “Theoretical and Methodological Principles of the Ono- mastic Grammar of Czech”, paper read at the 22nd ICOS Congress, Pisa, 2005.

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Portuguese speaking, and they were followed by Dutch, English, French and Italian seafarers and cartographers. Early settlers in the Natal area were Bantu speakers speaking a form of Proto-Nguni, later to become Zulu, while the 19th Century saw English-speaking settlers, as well as Dutch-speaking settlers, whose language in South Africa became Afrikaans. All these languages have left their mark on the toponymic history of South Africa, and no less on Durban. We can say that these names occur on a multi-lingual axis. Formal and informal names: some names have been formalised or officialised in that they are recorded in writing or adopted formally in town or city charters, recorded in atlases and on maps. They are the documented and formally known names for geographical entities. Other names, no less widely used, are the informal ‘popular’ names, usually oral in nature rather than written, and often referred to as the ‘nickname’ of a place. We can say that names occur on an stylistic axis The part for the whole: in the same way that iconic buildings and structures can stand for the city in which they are found (Paris’ Eiffel Tower, London’s Big Ben, Sydney’s Opera House), so also can the names of part of a city be used to stand for the whole. In the history of Durban there are many instances in which a name which today at least is used for only a part of Durban was at one stage used to refer to the whole place. Such names, we can say, fall on a metonymical axis.

The Historical Axis Clearly, names on the historical axis occur on a time continuum. One of the ways we can contrast names on this continuum is the contrast ‘earliest/latest’. This would produce Rio de Natal as the earliest and eGagasini as the most recent. Another contrast might be to select a specific date, say 1820 when the first colonial settlement took place, and categorise the names as pre-1820 and post-1820. This would contrast Rio de Natal with Durban, but not Port Natal with Durban, as the name Port Natal occurs in either side of this date. But there are further contrasts on the historical axis: long- enduring names such as eThekwini with short duration names such as D’Urban, or names with a specific and exact ‘lifetime’ with those whose lifetime is unknown or indeterminate.

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A brief ‘time-line’ of Durban’s names is as follows: The earliest name we have on record for this part of the world is the name Natal, ascribed to the Portuguese explorer and navigator Vasco Da Gama, who, on Christmas in 1497, “sailed along /…/ an undiscovered coast, which they named (from the day of exploration) Natal or Christmas” (Bird 1965, 23). From this name comes the earliest name for the Durban bay or estuary—Rio de Natal—apparently assumed by the passing seafarers to be the mouth of a mighty river, although they never entered the bay at the time. It is difficult to say when this name first became used. Accounts of various seafarers who stopped in the Durban Bay in the 1680s refer to the place as Rio de Natal, using the name in such a way that it appears to have been long established. Maps of the south-east coast start to proliferate from the 1760s onwards, and Durban bay is recorded as Natal Bay, Baai van Natal and variants in other languages. These two names survive in the twenty-first century. The earliest documented use of the name Port Natal is on a French map dated 1782, and thereafter the name is found regularly. The first decades of the nineteenth century saw the arrival of the first settlers: explorers, traders and missionaries, and the first settlement was known as Port Natal. By 1835, however, once their numbers had grown and it was clear that this settlement was destined for greater things, the local inhabitants decided to lay out a town, and to call it D’Urban, in honour of Sir Benjamin D’Urban3, Governor of the Cape Colony. This spelling was to last for about 10 years before settling as Durban, by which name this port and city is officially known today. The older spelling exists today only in the name of a single institution, the Hotel D’Urban, a decidedly seedy hotel in the oldest part of the city. The names Port Natal and Durban co-existed for many years, until about 1870, when the name Port Natal fell away. For several years Port Natal referred to the bay and harbour, while Durban referred to the settlement some five kilometres away. But as the settlement grew, eventually it encompassed the whole bay area, and one could say the name Durban ‘swallowed up’ the name Port Natal.

3 Historical works consulted on Sir Benjamin D’Urban say nothing about the deri- vation of his surname, but I assume it to be a variation on the same theme as the French De Ville and the German Städler, i.e. ‘person from the town’.

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No-one can say when the Zulu name eThekwini (from itheku ‘bay’, ‘lagoon’) was first used. The language itself would not have been known as ‘Zulu’ until Shaka kaSenzangakhona expanded his small Zulu clan into the much larger Zulu nation in the 1820s. The Zulu language developed out of one of the main dialects of a language which historical linguists have called “Proto-Nguni”. It is likely that the name for this bay was in existence for centuries before the rise of the Zulu nation, and it must count as one of the oldest names. The poetic form eManteku occurs in the oral praises of one of Durban’s earliest white settlers and so we can date this form as being coined within ten years of 1815. The name uMhlume for the bay and surroundings is a curiosity. No Zulu historian I have spoken to has ever heard of it. No South African onomastician knows of it. I am the only one who appears to have ever heard of this name. And yet, there it is, on page 338 of the 1958 edition on Doke and Vilakazi’s Zulu-English Dictionary, still the most authoritative dictionary of the Zulu language: umHlume, Dur- ban Bay (cf. iTheku). So unless this is some kind of subtle onomastic joke on the part of Professor Doke and Doctor Vilakazi, at some stage prior to 1958, Durban Bay must have been known as uMhlume. The most recent name for Durban is eGagasini (lit. ‘the place of the wave’). This name was popularised by K.E. Masinga, an announcer on what was then Radio Zulu in the 1960s. He used to announce him- self as “uKE Masinga ogibel’ igagasi” (‘KE Masinga who is riding a wave’), a neat pun which combined the new interest in surfing on Dur- ban’s beaches, and the radio waves by means of which his message was broadcast. Today, Zulu announcements for the youth on radio and television refer to Durban as eGagasini, and the official newsletter of the municipality is named eZasegagasini, an abbreviated form of izindaba zasegagasini (‘matters from the place of the wave’).

The multi-lingual axis South Africa is distinctly a multi-lingual country, with at present no less than eleven official languages.4 To these are added what are

4 These are the nine Bantu languages isiZulu, isiXhosa, siNdebele, siSwati, seSotho, sePedi, seTswana, xiThonga and tshiVenda, as well as the two Germanic languages English and Afrikaans.

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known in South Africa as ‘heritage languages’—the languages of the nearly extinct Khoisan language family, and the languages of Indian settlers. And then again, there are significant numbers of people speaking European languages like German and Portuguese. As was seen in the section above, a minimum of four languages have contributed to the names of Durban: Portuguese, Dutch, English and Zulu. Even smaller parts of Durban reflect this multi-lingual heritage. The name iSibubulungu, the Zulu name for the long and bulky promontory which separates the bay from the Indian Ocean, known to Eng- lish speakers today as The Bluff, is one of those toponyms where the generic has become a specific. (Another example is, of course, eThek- wini—‘place of the bay’.) The earliest name for this headland was apparently Point de Pescadores, named by the Vasco da Gama expe- dition on account of their stopping here (without entering the bay) and landing much fish. During the late 18th century, when survivors from a Dutch shipwreck were treated hospitably by even earlier survivors of an English shipwreck, who had set up camp on The Bluff, the Dutch survivors named the place Het Engelmans Loge (‘the English- man’s Hotel’). Some fifty years later, on a map drawn by Lieutenant Farewell, one of the first settlers in Port Natal, the headland is marked as Cape Nathaniel, a clear reference to another early settler, by name Nathaniel Isaacs. The Zulu name for this promontory, iSibubulungu, means ‘long, bulky object’. Despite the Portuguese and Dutch influence on the names and naming of Durban, it is primarily a bi-lingual city, with English the main language of commerce, trade and tourism, as well as the main language of the white and Indian inhabitants, while Zulu is the home language of the vast majority of the population. Even English- speaking inhabitants whose knowledge of Zulu is scanty use the Zulu name of several land- marks like the Entabeni Hospital (‘on the hill’) on Durban’s highest ridge, and the Elangeni Hotel (‘in the sun’) on Durban’s beachfront. Other names are Anglicisations of earlier Zulu names, like the dockland suburb Congella, from Zulu Khangela, of which more below. The relationship between so-called “indigenous” Zulu names and so-called “colonial” European names is a matter of much debate in South Africa currently, and I will treat the relationship between the names Durban and eThekwini under the stylistic, formal/informal axis below.

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The stylistic axis

The stylistic axis has a number of contrasts underlying it. ‘Formal’ vs ‘informal’ would characterise pairs like Durban and Durbs, where Durban occurs in formal speech, while Durbs is a slang term found in informal speech. Another contrast is official/unofficial. Since 1845, the ‘official’ name for Durban has been Durban. This is the name found on all South African and world maps, atlases, and nautical charts. It is the name used in gazetteers, minutes, reports, logs, textbooks, government directives, and any kind of official document that one can think about. In this sense, all other names for Durban are ‘unofficial’. A third contrast could be the written/oral axis. Names like Bay of Natal, Port Natal and Durban have existed and still do exist on maps and in documents, while even the majority name eThekwini was for many years primarily an oral name, and is seldom found on maps or in atlases.—I would like to look briefly at each of these—formal/ informal, official/unofficial, written/oral—in turn. Informal versions of toponyms are found the world over. I am not talking about nicknames here, like The Big Apple for New York, Auld Reekie for Glasgow, or Sleepy Hollow for Pietermaritzburg. Nor am I talking about exonyms like Londres for London, Munich for München, or Gothenburg for Göteborg. I am thinking more here of abbreviated forms like, to use South African examples, Joburg, Joeys and eJozi for Johannesburg, and Maritzburg, Piemburg and PMB for Pietermaritzburg. This type of morphological and/or phonological variation of a name is what I would call an allonym. Allonyms of Durban include Durbs and the Zulu eMdubane. The Zulu name eThek- wini has the allonym iTheku, but these two variations do not occur on a formal/informal axis, but rather on a syntactic axis. ITheku is used in a non-locative context, as in the newspaper billboard of July 2006: ITHEKU LIZOLWELA IMIDLALO KA-2009 (‘Durban will fight for the 2009 games’), while eThekwini is used in locative contexts such as Ngihlala eThekwini (‘I live in Durban’) or Baya eThek- wini (‘they are going to Durban’). It is not clear whether the rare form eManteku should be regarded as an informal version of eThekwini/ iTheku. It occurs in the oral praises of early settler Henry Francis Fynn, in the line “ubuhle b[e]zindlazi zaseManteku” (‘beautiful

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mousebirds of the [Durban] Bay’). Perhaps one needs a separate category for ‘literary toponyms’ (where we would find, for example Albion for England, Caledonia for Scotland, and Hibernia for Spain). A name like eGagasini is not an informal version of anything, it is simply an informal name in its own right, although there are sug- gestions in the current toponymical debate about the continued existence of the name Durban, that eGagasini could become a contender for formal status. The official/unofficial contrast raises a number of points about toponyms in South Africa, and about the relationship between Durban and eThekwini. Before 1994, South Africa had two ‘official’ languages—Afrikaans and English—which implied that the Bantu languages spoken by the majority of South Africa’s population were unofficial. Many major places in South Africa had two names or more correctly, two versions of the same name, such as Cape Town/ Kaapstad and East London/Ooslonden.5 Many other places had two names as well, but as only one was in English or Afrikaans, only one was regarded as official. We could consider here Grahamstown (eRini), Bloemfontein (Mangaung), Pietermaritzburg (eMgungundlovu), Johan- nesburg (eGoli, Gauteng) and of course Durban (eThekwini). During the early and mid 1990s in South Africa there was a great deal of media angst about whether the government was going to ‘change’ the ‘colonial’ names to the ‘indigenous’ names. Virtually all the various news- papers, magazines and radio shows missed the point, which is that you cannot change the name Durban to eThekwini when the place has already been know as eThekwini for an even longer time, and by a greater majority of people. What you can do, is have the minority recognise the alternative name of the majority as a valid name and accord it (gradually if necessary) equal status. The other thing you can do is to change the official name, but this would involve changing the name on hundreds of thousands of documents of all kinds, not just in South Africa but all over the world. I understand that the legal costs alone, for changing all legal contracts involving the city of Durban, would be

5 The only place I know of that had (and still has) two different but equally official names is the tiny fishing village and tourist spot at the most southerly tip of Africa (Cape Agulhas), which is known as both Arniston and Waenhuiskrans.

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astronomical. The government of South Africa, and the various municipalities that decided on names, naming and renaming, have used the 1999 Municipalities Act to good effect here. This act required that in each town or city, a municipality with a separate and named identity be formed to run the town or city. While many municipalities chose the name of the town or city in which they fell as their municipal name, others chose the indigenous name of the place where this differed from the European name. So today we find Bloemfontein being run by the Mangaung Municipality, Grahamstown by the eRini Municipality and Durban by the eThekwini Municipality.6 In Durban this now means that the two names are used side by side, with Durban referring to the city as a locality, a place, and eThekwini referring to the city as an administrative unit. This kind of onomastic partnership is clearly shown in the following extracts from Ezasegagasini, the official newsletter of the eThekwini Metro:7 For example, in their issue of 29th April 2005, we find the following (my emphases throughout): Tourism KwaZulu-Natal is pulling out all the stops to ensure Dur- ban remains the host city for Africa’s premier travel and tourism trade exhibition /…/ (p. 3). [The city as a place will be the host.] A vehicle monitoring system is to be introduced to tighten control of eThekwini’s fleet. (p. 3). [The administrative entity will introduce the system.] EThekwini is co-hosting a Workers’ Day celebration in Durban on Sunday. (p. 3). [The administrative entity will host the celebration, which will be held in the locality Durban.] EThekwini’s campaign to get ratepayers to use EasyPay facilities is bearing fruit /…/ (p. 3) [This campaign is being run by the admin- istration.]

6 In Pietermaritzburg, the city fathers decided not to use the city’s Zulu name eMn- gungundlovu, but to use the Zulu name of the river running through the city, with the result that I pay my rates account to the uMsunduzi Municipality. 7 A number of the bigger urban municipalities have applied for ‘metropolitan status’ which in addition to bringing fiscal benefits, allows the municipality to call itself the “Such-and-such Metro”.

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EThekwini is well on course to retain its AA credit rating which comes up for review later this year. The AA rating recognises Dur- ban as the best financially rated city in Africa. (p. 4) [The adminis- tration has a credit rating for the locality Durban.]

The metonymical axis Under this sub-heading we consider those names of parts of Durban which at some time or another have served as a name for the whole. We should start here by looking at the names Bay of Natal, eThekwini and Durban. The first name was given to the Durban bay as early as the 1760s and is recorded on maps of that era. It is still found on maps published today, and the reference of this name has not changed. The name still refers to the bay, and nothing else but the bay. The name is not a synonym for Durban, but served in earlier days as a referent to the locality where Durban is today. On the other hand the name eThekwini started off as a reference to the bay only, but as the city of Durban has grown over the last two hundreds year, the name has ‘grown’ as well, and the name refers to the city as a whole, of which the bay is now only a small central part. (In fact, in the name eThekwini Metro, the name has grown to include a very large part of KwaZulu-Natal). The name Durban originally did not include the bay—it was the name for the small town situated about 5 km from the bay, and in fact in the original surveyor’s description, the bay was one of the boundaries of Durban. Since those years, however, the name has grown with the city, and just as eThekwini has swallowed up the town together with the bay, Durban has swallowed up the bay along with the town! The name Port Natal is an interesting one in this context. The word port normally assumes the town surrounding a bay or harbour as well as the water itself. But in the years in which the names Port Natal and Durban co-existed, from 1835 to about 1870, the name Port Natal specifically was used in a way that excluded the town, and referred to the harbour only. Also of interest is the Zulu name eBhodwe, derived from Port [Natal]. This name is used not just for the harbour, nor even for the city of Durban, but for the whole of Natal up to the uThukela River. An interesting angle on the ‘partnership’ between the two names Port Natal and Durban is given by Pettman (1985, 134) who quotes

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Bishop Colenso as saying “There is no such place as /…/ Port Natal”: Port Natal […] was the name by which Durban was known in the early days of the colony, and by which it is known to mariners. Colenso says: Port Natal is to Durban what Port Philip is to Mel- bourne, that is to say, there is no such place as either Port Philip or Port Natal, these being only names applied to the towns of Mel- bourne and Durban, considered as ports.8 Other names which at one stage or another or in one context or another have represented Durban as a whole although actually referring to a part are iSibubulungu, and Congella iSibubulungu, as we saw earlier, is the Zulu name for The Bluff. When King Dingane of the Zulus, half-brother of Shaka, wanted to give early settler Capt. A. F. Gardiner some authority over all the white settlers, he report- edly said: You must have power /…/ I give you all the country called Sibubu- lungu. You must be chief over all the people there. (Fynn 1969, 244) This is to my knowledge the only time this name has ‘stretched’ to encompass the greater Durban area. Congella is today the name of a dockland suburb of Durban, an area of wharves, warehouses, and industry. There is general historical agreement that this name is derived from the name kwaKhangela, supposedly a military garrison of Shaka at Port Natal in the earliest years of the settlement, established so that Shaka could ‘keep an eye’ on the white settlers. There is some doubt about this, and it has been postulated that kwaKhangela was the name that Boer commandant Andries Pretorius gave to his fortified camp when the Boers and the English were contesting possession of Port Natal in the early 1840s, having ‘borrowed’ the name from the palace of Dingane situated far north in Zululand. Whichever version of history is true, for either Zulu warriors or Boer soldiers the name kwaKhangela stood for Dur- ban.

8 A footnote reference at this point in Pettman directs the reader to Colenso’s “Ten Weeks in Natal” (1855).

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Conclusion

In this paper we have looked at a wide variety of different names for Dur- ban, and several allonyms for some of these names. I have tried to explain that the variety arises from a number of different circumstances: degree of officialness, time period, multilingualism, and metonymy. I have described names as occurring on an axis of one of four types. All names in this study in fact occur on all four axes. For example, the name Durban occurs about midway on the chronological version of the time axis, and is a comparatively long-lasting name compared to Port Natal and eGagasini. On the axis of officialdom, Durban is the ‘most official’ name, occurring on maps and atlases worldwide as well as on an enormous range of official documentation. On the multilingual axis, Durban could be considered an English name in that it was derived from the surname of an English speaker, and is the name used by English speaking inhabitants of the city where the Zulu speakers would use eThekwini. On the metonymical axis, Durban is one of the names which always refers to the whole, never a part, and is a name which has grown in reference as the city has grown. Each different name for Durban, and each allonym for some of the names, has the same referential meaning: ‘the major harbour city on the south eastern coast of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa’. But each name and each allonym conveys a slightly different identity for Durban, simply because each name occurs on a different intersection point of the four axes. I do not want to go through each one in this concluding portion of the paper, but just to choose three: D’Urban identifies a new and rather small town of perhaps no more than fifty white individuals plus their Zulu servants and attend- ants, a town of few buildings and fewer roads scattered randomly around the area now known as Greyville. It has a distinctively historical flavour and speaks unquestionably of ‘times past’. Port Natal speaks of the same historical period, but identifies the locality primarily in terms of its bay and its potential even then as a major harbour. It is a name redolent of ships and shipping. EGagasini is a ‘fun’ name, a slang name used by younger, Zulu- speaking people. It identifies Durban as an up-to-date, swinging, hip- hop holiday place where beach and disco combine. Together these names make a palimpsest, an overlaying of identity upon identity, making the city of Durban a unique place of multi identities.

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References Bird, John. 1965 [1888]. Annals of Natal. 1495–1845. Vol. I., Cape Town: C. Struik. Doke, C. M. & Vilakazi, Benedict Wallet. 1958. Zulu-English Dic- tionary. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University press. Ezasegagasini. Official newsletter of the eThekwini Metro. 29th April 2005. Fynn, H. F. 1969. James Stuart and D. McK. Malcolm (eds.), The Diary of Henry Francis Fynn. Pietermaritzburg: Shuter and Shooter. Harvalík, Milan (in press). Theoretical and Methodological Principles of the Onomastic Grammar of Czech. Unpublished paper [see footnote 3] read at the 22nd ICOS Congress, Pisa, 2005. Kadmon, Naftali. 2000. Toponymy. The Lore, Laws and Language of Geographical Names. New York: Vantage Press. Koopman, Adrian. 2004. The Names and the Naming of Durban. In: Natalia 34, 70–87. Pettman, Charles. 1985 [1931]. South African place names. Past and present. Johannesburg: Lowry Publishers.

Adrian Koopman School of Zulu Studies University of KwaZulu-Natal Private Bag X01 SCOTTSVILLE 3209 South Africa [email protected]

Summary: The names and the naming of Durban This paper looks at various names for the South African coastal city of Durban. Four onomastic [see above] axes are explored: an historical axis which looks at the changing names for Durban over a period of time; a multilingual axis, which looks at names for Durban in Portuguese, Dutch, English and Zulu; an axis of formality, here called a stylistic axis, which compares official written names to oral popular names; and a metonymic axis, which looks at names for parts of Durban which have on occasion served as names for the whole.

Resumé: Les noms et la nomination à Durban Le présent article traite des différents noms de la ville côtière de Durban, en Afrique du Sud. Quatre axes onomastiques sont étudiés: un historique, sur les

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changements de noms à une certaine époque; un plurilingue, sur les noms d’origine portugaise, afrikaans, anglaise et zouloue; un formel, stylistique, comparant les noms officiels écrits et les populaires oraux; un métonymique, sur les noms de parties de la ville qui ont servi à dénommer des ensembles.

Zusammenfassung: Namen und Namengebung in Durban Der Beitrag befasst sich mit verschiedenen Namen für die südafrikanische Küstenstadt Durban, die aus vier unterschiedlichen onomastischen Blickwin- keln betrachtet werden: zunächst mittels einer historischen Achse, die die Namenwechsel für diese Stadt über einen gewissen Zeitraum untersucht, zum anderen mittels einer Achse der Mehrsprachigkeit, die die Namen für diese Stadt im Portugiesischen, Niederländischen, Englischen und Zulu betrachtet. Zum dritten wird die Achse der Formalgültigkeit, hier als stylistische Achse bezeichnet, eingeführt, die die offiziellen geschriebenen Namen mit den münd- lich kursierenden volkstümlichen Namen vergleicht; und schließlich gibt es eine metonymische Achse, bei der es um Namen für Stadtteile von Durban geht, die gelegentlich als Bezeichnungen für die gesamte Ansiedlung verwen- det worden sind.

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