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Street Names and Statues: the Identity Politics of Naming and Public Art in Contemporary Durban

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Abstract

Changing and new public symbols in Durban have been the source of much contestation. Here, the focus is on two state-led instances of urban inscription: the renaming of streets and the installation of a group of elephant statues. Public dissention over the rationale, selection and implementation process of new road names was vocal and signs bearing the revised names were defaced. The completion of the elephant statutes was hampered by political intervention, raising concerns regarding the role of art and politics and their relative influences in the landscaping of the city. Engagements between government, politicians and the broader citizenry highlight the power relations invested in urban landscapes, as well as competing notions of place. By examining these struggles, this paper explores the ongoing negotiation of representation in the contemporary South African city and thereby signals the ways in which identity formation is enmeshed in the politics of urban transformation.

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Notes

  1. Duminy (2018: 263) has argued in relation to street renaming that ‘public concern and antagonism emanated from a variety of sources, for different reasons, and across racial and class lines’. While a print-media-based methodology has limitations such as privileging the views of those who engage in such fora, these sources facilitate access to the key points of debate proliferating in Durban at that time. For other examples of recent reliance on print media in relation to representation in South Africa, see Hammett (2011), Orgeret (2010) and Sandwith (2010). The period included is also interesting because it predates the current explosion of online and social media (and the decline of print media) which was starting to become more prolific in terms of the upper date of the sample.

  2. For instance, a building height artwork of Anton Lembede in the inner city was funded by Urban Lime (Publicity Matters 2017).

  3. It is worth noting that Orgeret (2015) has critiqued journalist constructions of the issue in terms of the predominance of white male voices in The Mercury. This study drew on multiple print media sources.

  4. Municipal Manager and Mayor respectively.

  5. There has been a parallel dispute regarding Botha’s statue tableau of Shaka and Nguni cattle at the King Shaka International Airport in Durban which remains unresolved and is not dealt with in this paper (Ndaliso 2018).

Abbreviations

BM :

Berea Mail

DN :

Daily News

EM :

Ezasegagasini Metro

IS :

Independent on Saturday

MB :

Metrobeat

TM :

The Mercury

ST :

Sunday Tribune

STS :

Sunday Times

WW :

Weekend Witness

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Gerry Maré for access to and assistance in collecting newspaper material. Responses to earlier versions of this paper are appreciated.

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  1. We have contributed equally to the production of this paper.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Agricultural, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa

    Orli Bass

  2. Graduate School of Business and Leadership, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa

    Jennifer Houghton

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Correspondence to Orli Bass.

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Bass, O., Houghton, J. Street Names and Statues: the Identity Politics of Naming and Public Art in Contemporary Durban. Urban Forum 29, 413–427 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12132-018-9352-5

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