Abstract
Globes, maps, and gazetteers are not typically familiar with mobile spaces and places that have no fixed coordinates or precise limits. This chapter focuses on the mobility of Africa’s social and spatial formations, past and present, and provides a conceptual critique of the normative equivalence between geographic fixity and toponymic recognition. Building on examples from North, West, and Central Africa, the chapter points out that African societies are not always where linear boundaries and conventional toponyms say they are. Common assumptions about the desirability and feasibility of toponymic standardisation are questioned.
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Notes
- 1.
Kamel Daoud, Meursault, contre-enquête (Arles: Actes Sud, 2014), pp. 22–23.
- 2.
Christian Jacob, L’empire des cartes: Approche théorique de la cartographie à travers l’histoire (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992), p. 309.
- 3.
Marrakech is an Amazigh toponym with uncertain meaning(s). Allegedly based on the verbal root RKS (‘to hide’), derogatory meanings like ‘the place where [hidden] bandits attack caravans’ or ‘decamp quickly [and hide]’ were quite popular in colonial times. Current linguists rather focus on the Amazigh words mur (‘rescue’ or ‘protection’), amur (‘protected place’), Kush (grandson of Biblical Noah) or akush (‘divinity’) to reinterpret Marrakech as ‘land of God’, ‘mountain of Kush’, or a ‘blessed place […] where respect of a divine pact excludes violence.’ See A. Toufik, ‘Marrakech: La signification du nom’, in Salem Chaker (ed.), Encyclopédie Berbère (Louvain: Peeters, 2010), vol. 30, pp. 4627–30.
- 4.
Christopher C. Taylor, ‘Fluids and Fractals in Rwanda: Order and Chaos’, in Mark S. Mosko and Frederick H. Damon (eds), On the Order of Chaos: Social Anthropology and the Science of Chaos (New York, Berghahn Books, 2005), pp. 136–165.
- 5.
Martin M. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997); Achim von Oppen, ‘Bounding villages: the enclosure of locality in Central Africa, 1890s to 1990s’ (unpublished habilitation thesis, Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, 2003).
- 6.
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of Decolonization (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2013).
- 7.
Yacine was his first name and Kateb his family name. He insistently asked to be known as Kateb Yacine. Reversing the usual name order was, in his view, a way of mocking the colonial civil system.
- 8.
Kateb Yacine, ‘C’est africain qu’il faut se dire’ [reprint of a 1987 interview with Tassadit Yacine], in Le Poète comme un boxeur: Entretiens 1958–1989 (Paris: Seuil, 1994), pp. 101–120 (pp. 101, 109).
- 9.
Maoz Azaryahu and Arnon Golan, ‘(Re)naming the Landscape: The Formation of the Hebrew Map of Israel 1949–1960’, Journal of Historical Geography 27, 2 (2001), pp. 178–195.
- 10.
Denis-Constant Martin, Sounding the Cape: Music, Identity and Politics in South Africa (Somerset West: African Minds, 2013), p. 350.
- 11.
Martin, Sounding the Cape, p. 350.
- 12.
UNESCO, Ethnonymes et toponymes africains, Histoire générale de l’Afrique: Etudes et documents, 6 (Paris: UNESCO, 1984), p. 9.
- 13.
Atoma Batoma, ‘African Ethnonyms and Toponyms: An Annotated Bibliography’, Electronic Journal of Africana Bibliography, 10, 1 (2006), see http://ir.uiowa.edu/ejab/vol10/iss1/1/ (visited 28 December 2014).
- 14.
See, respectively: Eva Krapf-Askari, Yoruba Towns and Cities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 8; Eric Ross, ‘Marabout Republics Then and Now: configuring Muslim towns in Senegal’, Islam et sociétés au sud du Sahara, 16 (2002), pp. 35–66.
- 15.
Eric Ross, ‘Touba: A Spiritual Metropolis in the Modern World’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 29, 2 (1995), pp. 222–259 (pp. 223–224).
- 16.
Frédéric Giraud, Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch and Sylvain Guyot, ‘Au nom des territoires! Enjeux géographiques de la toponymie’, L’Espace géographique, 37, 2 (2008), pp. 97–105.
- 17.
Now a landlocked country, Mali takes its name from the Mali Empire, one of the most powerful and most mobile polities in West African history. Ancient Mali at its height, in the fourteenth century, encompassed about half the current Malian territory, stretched across present-day Mauritania and Senegal to the Atlantic Ocean, and had its capital in present-day Guinea. Toponymic displacement is a pronounced phenomenon in Africa – the prime example being Ifriqiya/Africa itself (once a Roman province centered on modern Tunisia), along with, inter alia, Libya, Mauritania, Ghana and Sudan. As Lewis rightly points out, however, the ‘migration of place names […] taking on different meanings as they are translated and as basic geographic conceptualizations change’ is not that surprising, since ‘change is intrinsic to language itself.’ Martin W. Lewis, ‘The Migration of Place Names’ (2011), www.geocurrents.info/historical-geography/the-migration-of-place-names-africa-libya-ethiopia-eritrea-and-sudan (visited 28 December 2014).
- 18.
Stéphanie Lima, ‘L’émergence d’une toponymie plurielle au Mali’, L’espace politique, 5, 2 (2008), http://espacepolitique.revues.org/1115 (visited 22 January 2015).
- 19.
Still regarding Mali, another great paradox was the NMLA’s (National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad) proclamation of a breakaway (and unrecognised) state in April 2012. The Tamasheq word azawad translates to ‘land of transhumance’ and it basically refers to an open area, one whose fuzzy borders vary according to climatic conditions, community relations, and other factors of uncertainty. By contrast, the NMLA conception of Azawad as being the northern half of legal Mali derives from, reflects and even reproduces the very territorial model that has long caused Tuareg rebel groups to take arms.
- 20.
Compiled lists available on http://my.ynet.co.il/pic/news/nombres.pdf (visited 28 July 2015).
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Ben Arrous, M. (2016). Sarah’s Globe and the (Un-)naming of Mobile Space. In: Bigon, L. (eds) Place Names in Africa. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32485-2_2
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