Street-Naming Cultures in Africa and Israel

Power Strategies and Place-Making Practices

Liora Bigon, Michel Ben Arrous

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000432411
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This book is focused on the street-naming politics, policies and practices that have been shaping and reshaping the semantic, textual and visual environments of urban Africa and Israel. Its chapters expand on prominent issues, such as the importance of extra-formal processes, naming reception and unofficial toponymies, naming decolonisation, place attachment, place-making and the materiality of street signage. By this, the book directly contributes to the mainstreaming of Africa's toponymic cultures in recent critical place-names studies. Unconventionally and experimentally, comparative glimpses are made throughout between toponymic experiences of African and Israeli cities, exploring pioneering issues in the overwhelmingly Eurocentric research tradition. The latter tends to be concentrated on Europe and North America, to focus on nationalistic ideologies and regime change and to over-rely on top-down 'mere' mapping and street indexing. This volume is also unique in incorporating a rich and stimulating variety of visual evidence from a wide range of African and Israeli cities. The materiality of street signage signifies the profound and powerful connections between structured politics, current mundane practices, historical traditions and subaltern cultures.

Street-Naming Cultures in Africa and Israel is an important contribution to urban studies, toponymic research and African studies for scholars and students.

Chapters 1 and 2 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003173762

1 Introduction

Toponymic cultures and the study of place naming in African (and Israeli) contexts

This book expands on the processes that have been shaping and reshaping the semantic, textual and visual environment in urban Africa and beyond. It touches the multidisciplinary field of place-names studies, which incorporates political geography, cultural and subaltern studies; landscape and urban histories; sociology; anthropology; economics; and Information and Communications Technologies (ICT)/GPS knowledge, together with the growing multidisciplinary field of ‘linguistic landscape’, which “attempts to understand the motives, uses, ideologies, language varieties and contestations of multiple forms of ‘languages’ as they are displayed in public spaces”, such as in “flashy advertisements and commercials, names of buildings, streets and shops, instructions and warning signs, graffiti and cyber space” (Linguistic Landscape, online). Yet the contribution of this book is unique in three main aspects:

• Firstly, it concentrates on street names and street-naming processes rather than on place names (toponyms) more generally, which brings to the fore the urban context and the actual and conceptual organisation of cities. Moreover, the cities in question are predominantly in Africa, a region which – considering Eurocentric academic traditions, research topics and related methodologies (see the following) – has so far been poorly represented in toponymic studies.
• Secondly, the book directly contributes to the incorporation of neglected toponymic cultures into the meta-narratives of global (urban) history. We emphasise this point, not merely for the sake of better representing a currently underrepresented world region but also because the toponymic cultures we are examining here can hardly be grasped using the frameworks of analysis that have been developed ignoring them. Thus, many of the toponymic cultures that this book expands on challenge the relevance, heuristic scope and alleged universality of much of conventional toponymic scholarship.
• And thirdly, the book incorporates an especially rich variety of visual evidence from a wide range of cities, large and small, drawing attention to the often-overlooked materiality of signage. We show, for example, that the materials used for street signs, their state of wear or maintenance, their rewriting with makeshift means or the uneven display of the languages in which official or alternative names are posted can provide valuable insights into the complex interplay of naming policies and politics, government bureaucracies, mundane practices, attitudes toward history and the production of urban space.

The book provides textual and visual analysis of signage in some 30 cities, covering 14 countries with different official languages, language policies, colonial histories and political cultures: Morocco (Casablanca, Fez), Senegal (Dakar, Pikine, Gorée, Saint-Louis, Thiès), Mali (Gao), Niger (Niamey), Nigeria (Ibadan, Lagos, Zaria), Cameroon (Douala, Mutengene), Congo (Brazzaville), Democratic Republic of Congo (Lubumbashi), Angola (Luanda), Mozambique (Maputo, Mapelane), South Africa (Cape Town), Kenya (Nairobi), Israel (Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Holon, Ashkelon, Be’er Sheva and environs, Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, Haifa, Akko and the village of Ṭurʿān) and France (Bordeaux). Figure 1.1 constitutes a visual synopsis of the geographical scope that is dealt with in this book. As the title of the book indicates, our research deals with urban Africa and Israel. Chapters 1 and 2 are Africa-centred while offering several theoretical and empirical glimpses at Israeli cities; Chapter 3 addresses Bordeaux in addition to discussing Africa-cum-Israeli related aspects of urban namescapes. Chapters 4 and 5 then portray a genealogy of namescapes through a multiplicity of trajectories in an African and an Israeli case study, respectively.

The juxtaposition of a huge and diverse continent (Africa), a tiny country (Israel) and a single French city (Bordeaux) might seem odd at first glance. While our regional positioning might recall the Surrealists’ games intended to evoke ideas, imageries and deeper truths by recomposing random words and images together (Brotchie and Gooding 1995), it still inspires meaningful connections and conversations. For instance, it invites interrelated investigations of place-naming processes under different colonial or imperial rules (French or of other European powers in Africa, Ottoman then British in Mandatory Palestine) and their transformations in subsequent contexts of decolonisation and state-building. This juxtaposition has already inspired previous book-length discussions inaugurated by the authors of the present study, such as the volume Garden Cities and Colonial Planning: Transnationality and Urban Ideas in Africa and Palestine (eds Liora Bigon and Yossi Katz 2014). In the present context, such a juxtaposition reflects the relations between the politics of the production of linguistic landscape and their reception in contexts of ethno-linguistic diversity and place-making. It is exemplified in the forceful strategies of toponymic Hebraisation in Israel and the more toponymic laissez-faire in Africa’s cities, resulting in gradually evolved mixes of formal and informal toponymic inscriptions in a variety of ex-colonial and African languages. Moreover, comparing differently located viewpoints leads to exposing and challenging some unspoken assumptions and beliefs, regarding, for instance, the influence of street naming on the shaping of public memory, the effectiveness of street naming as a technology of power, or the supposedly universal use of street names to navigate in cities. This in turn highlights the importance of considering the toponymic practices of underprivileged groups, their counter-hegemonic memories as expressed in the urban landscape and the complex webs of relations binding together formal and informal toponymic systems – at different scales in each region.

Figure 1.1 Location map of the cities covered in this book.

Source: Drawn by Tamar Lev-On.

In addition, beyond the academic rationale that stands behind the book’s geographic and thematic juxtaposition, there are a couple of further reasons. The first is to challenge some conventional habits in critical toponymic studies, such as a problematisation of ‘mere’ street indexing and mapping, as mentioned in the following, and the inattention to subaltern place-naming processes and practices in a way that unconventionally creates fresh methodological excitement. The latter cuts across the second reason, which simply stems from the authors’ native and residential backgrounds. Being a Tel Avivian Israeli and a Dakarois currently living in Bordeaux, we chose to add these layers of situated experience to our otherwise preoccupation with Africa’s urban cultures and history, striving, by such juxtaposition, to generate some new toponymic insights, innovative perspectives and fresh understandings.

In examining the streetscapes of so many different cities, our concern has been to link them in a way that the analysis of each would contribute to the analysis of one or more other cities through its peculiarities, suggestive similarities or differences. However, we refrained from developing systematic comparisons between the cities in question for two main reasons. We were uncertain that this would be relevant. What should be compared? Streetscapes at given points in time, whatever their unique (hi)stories? Their contribution to the urban order, by definition unstable, of ever-changing cities? Formal models or processes of street naming, but how then to account for the streetscapes ‘experienced’ by city dwellers? Intended or actual meanings, with great variations between those who name the streets and those who interpret or reinterpret names in the lived space of mundane activities? Our second reason for refraining from systematic comparisons is that all of these issues arise in different ways in specific contexts, and we did not want to diminish and thereby impoverish their understanding. Any comparison involves a selection of comparables – that is, a small number of characteristics that will by priority be sought in each of the objects or situations to be compared. This may lead to fruitful connections, but at the same time, there is a disadvantage in overlooking the non-comparable aspects and reducing the richness of each case. While providing occasional comparative glimpses, we have favoured extensive analyses whenever possible, linking different toponymic situations through open-ended problematics rather than fixed sets of comparables.

In several respects, this work continues our previous collective volume Place Names in Africa (Bigon 2016b), which proposed a long-term exploration of African toponymic landscapes and their colonial or present-day transformations. Through in-depth area studies research and the convergence of varied perspectives shared by authors in related disciplines, the 2016 volume showed the importance of ‘culture’ in toponymic research. From a multidisciplinary standpoint, the preoccupation with ‘culture’ or more precisely with ‘planning cultures’ enabled us to treat toponymic processes as a cross-sectional topic, while at the same time highlighting the varied site-related conditions, historical contexts and present-day societies. The present book also maintains the long-term approach, but it sharpens and more tightly integrates the problems and questions particular to our respective fields of study – urban history and political geography – into a holistic perspective on street naming. It relies again upon a ‘cultural prism’ for diffracting a wide spectrum of research directions, but the change of prism that we operate here, from ‘planning cultures’ to ‘toponymic cultures’, considerably extends the scope of research. It allows for a more comprehensive view, not only of naming processes as inaugurated by the naming agencies but also, quite unusual in toponymic studies, of the reception of street names in everyday life.

This introductory chapter is made up of threxe sections. In the first section, we develop our notion of ‘toponymic cultures’, intertwining its conceptualisation with the research avenues that this notion helps to open or broaden. Our purpose is to clarify why we deem the reception of place names pivotal to the understanding of the actual state of urban toponymies and what, in particular, can be learnt from the meaning-making practices of everyday life in African cities. Writing from (mostly) African terrains involves two risks. One is to appear to confirm the supposedly dysfunctional character of African cities – whose realities tend to resist conventional patterns of urban management and general analysis. The other risk is to indulge in ad hoc theorising, which would supposedly ‘work’ in Africa only – and would therefore have no theoretic value at all. Our ‘other’, Israeli terrains, helped to circumvent both pitfalls. Besides their own specificities, not least in terms of political and ideological climate, the Israeli cases we discuss in this book have provided a valuable counterpoint to our ‘African’ intuitions, leading us to develop the notion of toponymic cultures in ways that could offer novel and inspiring insights on very diverse situations. The second section of this introductory chapter examines the difficulties and challenges of expanding the conceptual horizons of place-naming studies from our atypically African and Israeli position – and what this position can contribute to the field of place naming and adjacent research areas. The third section consists of the book outline, highlighting its thematic coherence.

Conceptualising toponymic cultures: why, what for and how?

How are place names used in everyday life? What do they mean for whom? How do people transform them or adapt them to their practices? How do they consider (or ignore) the signposts above their heads and other toponymic inscriptions around them? These questions are central to this book but are rarely addressed in place-name studies. The aspect of place-name reception that has attracted the most scholarly attention since the 1990s has been the popular acceptance, or non-acceptance, of elite-led initiatives to rename places, generally following radical political change. The collapse of the Eastern Bloc, for example, or the official demise of apartheid in South Africa, provided specific contexts for grasping a (limited) range of popular attitudes towards place-renaming (Duminy 2014; Kumalo 2014; Creţan and Matthews 2016). However, cases of non-use of the new names in daily life have as a rule been considered through the lens of more or less deliberate resistance – a lens that further reduced the range of observable processes of toponymic reception. As an unorthodox study on the persistence of socialist-era street names in post-socialist Bucharest points out, resistance is certainly an important practice, but it “does not explain every instance where place names fail to find popular acceptance” (Light and Young 2014, 672).

Years before the rise and current burgeoning of critical toponymic studies, a distinguished representative of old-school onomastics had advanced a much broader conception of place-names reception.¹ In the context of apartheid South Africa at the time, Peter Edmund Raper considered place names as a “social barometer” and suggested that “the study of the reception of toponyms may be of value in anticipating and avoiding names and name forms which could cause offence” (1984, 29). In particular, he advocated the study of “idionyms” – i.e. unofficial names employed orally – arguing that they were “very revealing of attitudes and emotions”, including “acceptance, resignation, antagonism, aggression, satisfaction or whatever the case may be, towards the entity that bears the name and in the eyes of the users” (Raper 1984, 30). Post-apartheid authorities have since officialised many such idionyms and the toponymic reconfigurations underway have become an extensive focus of attention (Guyot and Seethal 2007; Jenkins 2007; Ndletyana 2012; Adebanwi 2018). In the words of Sarah Nuttall, “the examination of the idea of desegregation constitutes a politics in itself”, which cultural expressions at present invite us, inter alia, “to take the surface more seriously” (2009, 15, 155). Yet, ironically, the social practices that, in post-apartheid South Africa as in post-socialist Europe, ultimately make official renaming effective or not in everyday life have not stirred any noticeable trends in research.

Here as elsewhere across Africa, widespread practices such as calling the same place by different names, different places by the same name or having different toponyms used by young and old largely remain below the radar of academic scrutiny (Dorier-Apprill and Van den Avenne 2002; Ben Arrous 2016). The same goes for orienting oneself by landmarks or alternative toponyms rather than street names – when they exist. Figure 1.2 shows an aerial view of Pikine, a large suburban city bordering Dakar, Senegal. The only named street visible on the photo is Tally Icotaf (Icotaf Street), a name derived from an old textile factory, now closed, at one of its ends. Interestingly, it has been a widely used idionym that became formalised. The other streets and alleys have recently been numb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: toponymic cultures and the study of place naming in African (and Israeli) contexts
• 2 Names in the city: street signage in urban Africa and Israel
• 3 A tale of two Brazzas: intertwining (post-)colonial namescapes
• 4 Beyond street names: a tapestry of toponymic legacies in Dakar, Senegal
• 5 An off-the-grid toponymic ambiguity at the heart of a world city: the case of Givat Amal, Tel Aviv
• 6 Conclusion: The worldling of toponymic legacies
• Bibliography
• Index