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The Names and the Naming of Durban

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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 differ- ent 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 992625_ONOMA_42_05_Koopman2625_ONOMA_42_05_Koopman 7733 115-02-20105-02-2010 111:09:551:09:55 74 ADRIAN KOOPMAN 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 settle- ment, 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 prom- ontory 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. 992625_ONOMA_42_05_Koopman2625_ONOMA_42_05_Koopman 7744 115-02-20105-02-2010 111:09:551:09:55 THE NAMES AND THE NAMING OF DURBAN 75 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 popu- lar 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 dif- ferent 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) 992625_ONOMA_42_05_Koopman2625_ONOMA_42_05_Koopman 7755 115-02-20105-02-2010 111:09:551:09:55 76 ADRIAN KOOPMAN 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 allo- nomes, 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 allo- nym, 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. 992625_ONOMA_42_05_Koopman2625_ONOMA_42_05_Koopman 7766 115-02-20105-02-2010 111:09:551:09:55 THE NAMES AND THE NAMING OF DURBAN 77 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.
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