Gender-biased Street Naming in Urban Sub-Saharan Africa: Influential Factors,Features and Future Recommendations

Abstract

This article explores the present-day problematic of gender-biased street names as prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa’s cityscapes. That is, the abundance of masculine street names as opposed to feminine ones in the urban environments of this region. The article first provides a comparative view on the scope of this toponymic phenomenon in other geographic regions with relation to sub-Saharan Africa. It also identifies few decisive factors in the creation of the gender-biased urban landscapes in sub-Saharan Africa. These factors consist of: recent tendencies in critical toponymy studies; colonial and post-colonial cultures of governmentality; and inadequate urban planning legislation and vision as pertained by post-colonial states. This toponymic problematic is then exemplified in a site-specific analysis of the city of Bindura in north-eastern Zimbabwe. The article concludes with recommendations for designing a more socially inclusive urban management policy in the region, pointing to future research directions of this under-studied phenomenon in critical place-name studies.

Keywords

Critical toponymy studies gender-biased street names sub-Saharan Africa Bindura/Zimbabwe urban planning urban management

Introduction

Urban landscapes can be regarded as complex networks of human and environmental agencies connected by an assemblage of cultural, political, socio-economic and ecological processes. In decoding urban landscapes, it is essential to capture the variety of interactions between these agencies, and between pattern, function and meaning (Alberti, 2008). As components in the shaping of the urban landscape, street naming and signage not only constitute part of a wider infrastructural arena. They also provide for ‘encountering and experiencing the city in terms of regions, paths, and flows’, operating as a cultural construct that defines ‘patterns of sameness and difference’ of ‘what you see [or do not see], when you look around you’ (Dourish and Bell, 2007: 417). This qualitative dimension has been clearly acknowledged in recent toponymic studies, according to which beyond the primary purpose of place names as an administrative act designated to facilitate spatial orientation, the symbolic and socio-political aspects of their production must also be taken into account. Street signs can constitute part of a highly invested political strategy operating as part of the symbolic construction of the public space. They can be instrumental in conveying nationalistic ideologies and demarcating borders between groups (Fishman et al., 1985). Often reflecting the dominance of political and ideological powers over the landscape, street signs can represent an authoritative version of history through its writing, rewriting and erasure (Light et al., 2002; Rose-Redwood et al., 2010; Yeoh, 1996). As asserted by Pierre Bourdieu (1991: 167) in his theory of ‘symbolic power’, ‘the culture which unifies (the medium of communication) is also the culture which separates (the instrument of distinction)’.

Street naming and street sign policies are associated with further variegated aspects, such as practices of renaming motivated by commemorative (e.g. following political regime change) or economic considerations. In many sub-Saharan Africa states at present, for instance, efforts are made for street naming and renaming in spite of the expense involved and inconvenience to the street’s residents and businesses with respect to confusion and having multiple addressing systems (formal and informal) simultaneously (Bigon and Njoh, 2015). In 1992 the World Bank’s Urban Development Program, an initiative targeted at the problem of nondescript spatial structures in many sub-Saharan capital cities and engaged in street codification, had failed due to its imposition of top-down and meaningless street numbered systems totally ignoring the actual street users (Bigon and Njoh, 2015). Against this background and the effort for more efficient tax collection and commercial opportunities, few of the region’s urban governments have recently initiated new street (re-)naming operations that include direct consultation with the respective communities and the need for the latter’s approval.¹ Due to the extent of a-formality in planning and extra-legal settlements in sub-Saharan Africa ‒ as indicated by the Universal Postal Union, only 22% of the region’s population has mail delivered at home in comparison to the worldwide average of 82% (Anson, 2007: 7) ‒ there is a limit to the accountability of street names. This is also true in the face of navigation through ICT/GPS systems, which provide an alternative address-free way-finding with implications for the region’s business logistics in both urban and rural areas (Satnav Maps, 2020).

Against this backdrop and against other topics that arise from today’s variegated and composed toponymic landscapes and that deserve critical attention, this article focuses on an unexplored topic in place names studies: the relative proportion of female anthroponyms in the urban environment. It assigns significance to these seemingly ‘mundane semiotic aggregates about gender and sexuality’, representing ‘two important axes of power along which public spaces are structured, understood, negotiated and contested’ (Milani, 2014: 201). This topic is significant not only in informing our understanding and experiences of sexual roles and subjectivity in a city or society, but also, in its intimate relation with aspects of social justice, participatory planning, right to the city, and good governance at both state and municipality levels.

Moreover, the gendered street names problematic as prevalent in the urban landscape of sub-Saharan Africa, in the form of an almost exclusive dominance of masculine street names at the expense of feminine names, is significant in view of the urbanization rates of this region. Sub-Saharan Africa is often regarded as the world’s fastest urbanizing region. With close to half a billion urban residents in this region today, their global share, which was 11.3% in 2010, is projected to grow to 20.2% by 2050 (Saghir and Santoro, 2018). This rapid urban rise necessitates, in the words of Joan Clos, the Executive Director of UN-Habitat, ‘the need for radically different, re-imagined development visions to guide sustainable urban and other transitions in Africa over the decades to come’ (UN-Habitat, 2014: 1). It also necessitates, according to the UN Millennium Development Goals and its transformative 2030 Agenda, the promotion of gender equality, and women’s and girls’ empowerment, and to make cities and human settlements just, inclusive and safe (UN General Assembly, 2015: Goals 5 and 11).

Gender-biased street naming does not only characterize sub-Saharan Africa’s urban environments, but it also prevails in other regions, such as in Western cities or Asian cities. Though research that maps the gender imbalance in the latter regions is still meagre, it has been found, for instance, that in central Bucharest, Romania, only 7% of commemorative street names refer to a female personality; and of those, about a quarter are presented in a role that accentuates their relationship with an important man, such as wives or daughters (Niculescu-Mizil, 2014). Moreover, when taking into account the total commemorative street names in Bucharest’s metropolitan area, female personalities drop to 1.5% (Neaga, 2014). In Spain, religion is the main reason that motivates naming public spaces in honour of women; that is, they are named after saints. In Madrid, 21% of its total street names are of female anthroponyms, while that proportion is 19% in Barcelona. This percentage is, however, considerably higher than the 9.2% in Santiago de Compostela, or the 3.2% in Cordoba (Novas-Ferradás, 2018). In Rome, 3.5% of the total number of city’s streets are named after women (Bosworth, 2012); in Paris, the figure is 2.6% (Sanghani, 2015); while in New York, a few women have been commemorated in relatively recent street names (Solnit, 2016). Similarly, an activist female research group that has recently mapped the street of seven cities ‒ London, Paris, San Francisco, Mumbai, New Delhi, Chennai and Bangalore ‒ found that, on average and when filtering out neutral names, only 27.5% of the studied streets had female names (Poon, 2015).

In spite of the fact that this apparent bias features Western and Asian cities and is not the share of Africa’s cities alone, it seems that in (sub-Saharan) Africa the situation of gender-biased street naming is especially extreme. The very few studies that deal directly or indirectly with this question show that in their respective urban sites ‒ also located in the continent’s main sub-regions of north, east, west and south ‒ the percentage of honoured female anthroponyms ranges from zero names, to one name, to very few names only. Cases of zero female names were found, for instance, in Lusaka, Zambia (Wakumelo et al., 2016), Oran, Algeria (Boumedini and Hadira, 2012), and downtown Dakar, Senegal (Bigon and Ben Arrous, 2019). Two female names have been documented in the periphery of Harare’s central business district (CBD) (Mamvura et al., 2018; Pfukwa, 2012), and two names in downtown Lagos, Nigeria (Bigon, 2009). In Durban, South Africa (Forrest, 2018; Turner, 2009), Nairobi, Kenya (Muhonja, 2016), and Douala and Yaounde, Cameroon (Njoh, 2010), very few female names have been documented. Our case study of a secondary city in Zimbabwe, discussed in the following, seems to be representative, with no female street names at all. Moreover, unlike some major European cities whose city councils have increasingly became aware of this issue and promoted regulation of affirmative action to achieve gender parity, such as Florence, Italy or Barcelona (Novas-Ferradás, 2018) – similar efforts, to the best of our knowledge, are yet to be documented in sub-Saharan Africa.

The contribution of this article lies in evoking gender-equality thought within the context of the planning, production and management of urban settlements in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. It also lies in identifying three decisive factors in the creation of the gender-biased toponymic landscapes that are so ubiquitous today in sub-Saharan Africa’s cities, namely: (a) historiographic tendencies in critical toponymy within the fields of urban studies and human geography; (b) the cultural and political ambiance of pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial governmentalities; and (c) an inadequate urban planning legislation and vision currently advocated by most of sub-Saharan Africa’s states. Exemplary for the article’s main arguments is a site-specific analysis of the toponymic landscape of Bindura, a secondary city in Zimbabwe, through a gendered lens. Pointing on the wider socio-political implications of this problematic, the article ends with some recommendations for designing a more socially inclusive urban management policy in the region, and for a further exploration of this rather neglected subject in future place names studies.

The scarcity of female anthroponyms in sub-Saharan Africa’s streetscapes: three influential factors

Historiographic tendencies in critical toponymic studies

The lack of professional discourse on the gendered streetscape in general is noteworthy. This lack is intensified in view of the relative scarcity in critical toponymic studies of research on urban and rural settlements in the global South. We shall comment here about this double research gap. The post-1990s period is characterized as a ‘critical turn’ in place-name scholarship, productive in its ‘self-reflexive engagement with critical theories of space and place’, while situating the study of toponyms within the context of broader debates in critical human geography (Rose-Redwood et al., 2010: 455). However, this period yielded so far only a meagre number of references concerning sub-Saharan Africa, though this literature is burgeoning (e.g. Bigon, 2016; d’Almeida-Topor, 1996; Duminy, 2014; Myers, 1996; Njoh, 2010; Wanjiru-Mwita and Giraut, 2020).² In the current literature on urban management and governmentality in the global South, featuring in a ‘developmentalist’ attitude concerning sub-Saharan Africa, scant attention is accorded to the meaning of place names and their symbolism. More quantitative and technical aspects as to efficient spatial navigation in the cities of this region are clearly preferred to qualitative ones, including the economic consequences of an efficient street addressing system (e.g. Anson, 2007; Farvacque-Vitkovic et al., 2005).

While the recent critical study of place names does expand on the symbolic and socio-political aspects of the production of the names, it is over-concerned with understanding the naming process as reflecting the power of modern political regimes, nationalism and ideology (Giraut and Houssay-Holzschuch, 2016; Guillorel, 2008, 2012). The preoccupation with political power’s control over both landscape and history is particularly true for a bulk of publications which tend to be centred on the West (North America and Western Europe) and Eastern Europe (e.g. Jones and Merriman, 2009; Light et al., 2002; Murray, 2000; Nash, 1999; Raento and Watson, 2000; Wideman and Masuda, 2018), with only a few geographic exceptions (e.g. Benvenisti, 2000; Berg and Vuolteenaho, 2009; Shoval, 2013; Topalov, 2002; Yeoh, 1996). Moreover, some of the relevant encyclopedic entries and other key references are highly Eurocentric (e.g. Kadmon, 2000; Kitchin and Thrift, 2009). As pointed out by the geographers Kenneth Foote and Maoz Azaryahu in the context of contemporary studies on public memory and commemoration as expressed materially in landscape: ‘Much of the research both inside and outside of geography has focused on wars, revolutions, and other major historical events [in Europe and North America] from the late eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century.’ Among the issues that have received the most attention are ‘nationalism and wars of independence’, which means, they argue, ‘that scholarship is rich for some periods and places, but weak in others particularly for Latin American, Asia, and Africa’ (Foote and Azaryahu, 2007: 125‒126).

Together with this, there is a growing recognition that the naming of streets and urban sites is also involved in questions that go beyond the nationalistic: ‘Rather than simply reflecting the impress of state or elite ideologies’, in the words of the geographer Garth Myers on Zanzibar, we shall also explore how toponyms ‘indicate the presence of many interwoven layers of power’ (Myers, 1996: 237). Thereby, toponyms – many of which are located between exogenous and indigenous models, regional and urban, formal and informal, generic and specific – constitute a rich source for analysis of the ‘capillary’ nature of power and wider socio-cultural processes. Indeed, understanding the local, regional, national, international, transnational, pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial contexts of place names in Africa and its urban environment might be useful. This is because toponymic situations in practice and theory might challenge some typical conceptions, and by thus could be inspiring. In many respects, the designation of the linguist-historian Stephan Bühnen that: ‘la toponymie [ouest-] africaine n’est pas encore sortie de l’oeuf’ [the (West) African toponymy has not yet emerged from the egg], (1992: 45) – implies not only the scarcity of relevant research in the process of shedding the egg shells. It also implies that the linguistic landscape needs to be ever decoded and (re)interpreted (see also Duncan and Duncan, 1988; Goody, 1987).

Indeed, there is an intensified preoccupation in place-name studies with the relations between multicultural policies and marginalized cultural, linguistic and national minorities ‒ though this interest has been concentrated so far in postmodern Western states. It has been shown that administering signage policies in these states is entangled with the regulation of ethno-linguistic and socio-political conflicts. These states seem to be aware of several influential factors, such as the considerable symbolic and psychological meaning assigned to the presence or absence of the language of an ethno-linguistic minority on signs; the language order of the competing societies; the relationship between colonial and post-colonial languages; the connection between different languages and the number or percentage of speakers of a specific language in a certain territory; and considerations of consumption under multicultural policies (e.g. Jones and Merriman, 2009; Medway and Warnaby, 2014; Piller, 2016; Raento and Watson, 2000; Wideman and Masuda, 2018). However, looking through a gendered lens, the silence of feminist perspectives in contemporary toponymic studies in general (this is true as to both global hemispheres) is vociferous. This subject is hardly evoked under this geography sub-field, and so far has failed to gain attention. Rather, at both the academic and popular levels, the subject has been lately evoked particularly by women scholars or social/feminist activists, through sociology and gender-studies professional platforms (Forrest, 2018; Milani, 2014; Muhonja, 2016; Neaga, 2014; Niculescu-Mizil, 2014) or other more popular media (Poon, 2015; Sanghani, 2015; Solnit, 2016). The awareness of and the influence of these academic and media platforms, we presume, will gradually grow to be disseminated into the professional discourses in geography, town planning and urban management, though at the moment their presence within these fields is limited at best. This awareness is important because of its direct relevance to imminent issues that stand at the heart of urban planning theory and practice, such as social inclusion, community involvement, gender-balanced affinity to the city and good governance more generally. These issues will be exemplified later in the article with regard to the case study.

The cultural and political ambiance of pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial governmentalities

Another influential factor in the gender-biased toponymy in sub-Saharan Africa’s cityscapes today is rooted in colonial and post-colonial traditions of governmentality. We shall comment here about the double layers of women’s marginalization in Africa, first under European colonial rule and then under the post-independent states. A review of literature as to the status of women in pre-colonial, pre-capitalist Africa, however, shows that women used to occupy equal and sometimes more powerful positions compared to their male counterparts. This does not imply the absence of a gender-based division of roles, but rather the existence of a complementary system, not necessarily hierarchical. According to Barbara Lesko (1999, 2008), the classic African matriarchal system was thriving in Ancient Egypt, as well as among the Ashanti of Ghana, Angolan Nzinga, Kandake of Sudan and Zazzau of Nigeria. She further posits that methodological inequality among the sexes was unknown. While most Eurocentric analysts argue that Africa’s indigenous cultures are the sole cause of gender-based political and socio-economic disparities (e.g. Nadasen, 2012; UN Human Rights, 2013), further research on African indigenous cultural systems shows no special such disparities (e.g. Bhebe and Ranger, 2001; Garlake, 1982; Njoh et al., 2017, 2018; Pikirayi, 2001). In fact, it is especially in colonial and post-colonial, as opposed to pre-colonial, Africa, that girls are often raised to serve domestic roles as housewives, mothers and homemakers. Practices that are exclusionary of women are also partially a product of Arabo-Islamic influence that preceded European colonialism in Africa by about a millennium (Njoh and Akiwumi, 2012). Upon the tolerance and the wide acceptance of what became contemporary systematic sexism, this phenomenon became institutionalized (Ajala, 2017; Mills and Mullany, 2011; Walby, 1990).

Cameroon constitutes a usable example as it was subjected to the colonial control of three European powers, namely Germany (1884–1916), France (four-fifths of the territory, 1919–1960), and Britain (one-fifth of the territory, 1919–1961) ‒ each of which imposed its own version of Eurocentric legislation in a variety of administrative and other issues.

According to a comprehensive study that identifies and analyses factors causing women to procure fewer land titles than men in Cameroon (Njoh et al., 2018) ‒ the Christian missionaries ‘were wont to lift and preach passages that buttressed the Victorian Eurocentric view of women as the subordinate sex from the Holy Bible’, which was literally interpreted among Africans as ‘a belief of women’s inferiority to men, and women’s acceptance of their own oppression’ (Njoh et al., 2018: 123). Not only was the colonial culture essentially a masculine one (King, 1976), this belief was also intersected with the ‘Eurocentric patriarchal system of property ownership, compounded the problem by commodifying land ‒ a move that effectively limited women’s chances of ever becoming veritable real property owners in Africa’ (Njoh et al., 2018: 123; see also Fonjong et al., 2013). A very similar process of native-women dispossession of land ownership due to the received colonial (British) culture was noted, for instance, in the cases of Zimbabwe (Gaidzanwa, 1994) and India (Kishwar, 2014). Such a gender-based dispossession intersects with a multiplicity of other colonial dispossessions of indigenous societies globally in the cultural-cum-economic-cum-geopolitical spheres (there is definitely not enough space here to indicate all the relevant references).

In our context, however, the linguistic landscapes of the colonial cities in general, and of sub-Saharan Africa’s cities in particular, were a mirror of the variegated colonial heritages in terms of planning cultures and philosophies of governance (Bigon, 2016). Upon looking again at these namescapes through a gendered lens and examining the anthroponyms in their old colonial downtown centres, a panorama of masculine-biased toponymy is exposed. Though there is a need to promote much more systematic and comparative research on this question, our partial experiencing of several urban centres so far, especially in west, central and southern Africa, seems to approve this problematic, which is further approved by the existing, though meagre, research. That is, that in the erstwhile colonial downtown areas of Lagos, Dakar, Durban, Harare, Nairobi, Douala, Yaounde, and Lusaka (respectively: Bigon, 2009; Bigon and Ben Arrous, 2019; Forrest, 2018; Mamvura et al., 2018; Muhonja, 2016; Njoh, 2010; Pfukwa, 2012; Wakumelo et al., 2016) ‒ there is between zero, to one, or to only a few streets bearing female anthroponyms. This is also true of Bindura (see the following), while we urge for the necessity of pursuing comprehensive research into gender-biased toponymy in the northern and eastern parts of the continent, under Arabo-Islamic influence.

An insight into Lagos Island’s toponymy under British rule can serve as an example in this regard, where ‒ putting aside the imperial/colonial feminine toponym of ‘Victoria’ so prevalent in Anglophone spatialities globally ‒ there were only two feminine street names. These names, Tinubu (which still exists for that street and adjunct square), and Faji (which refers today only to its nearby market) symbolize both the persistence of pre-colonial toponymy enabled under the British ‘indirect rule’ policy in Nigeria, and the West African tradition of powerful market women. Madam Faji was an eighteenth-century Yoruba market woman (Whiteman, 2013), a precursor of the nineteenth-century Madam Tinubu, a renowned anti-colonial heroine who was deported by the British authorities (Isola, 1998) (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

The signpost of Tinubu Street, Obalende, Lagos Island (downtown Lagos), Nigeria (photo courtesy of Bamidele Olaoluwa Emmanuel via Wikimedia).

Both women inhabited their respective streets which were/are also located at important nodes of passage on the island, connecting the hub of the colonial expatriate quarter with the indigenous quarters.

Interestingly, one of the two feminine anthroponyms that have been recorded in the streets of the CBD (the hub of British colonial activity) of Harare, Zimbabwe, also refers to a pre-/early-colonial anti-British heroine, namely, Mbuya Nehanda Street (Mamvura et al., 2018) (see Figure 2). But unlike in Nigeria, these names were historical, at a central location, and passed persistently throughout the ages ‒ Nehanda’s memory has been newly evoked by the post-independence Zimbabwean state for a peripheral street of the CBD. As a nation-building construct by the ZANU political party as part of a wider toponymic de-colonization (similarly to the name of the country itself, i.e. ex-Rhodesia) ‒ this is, however, almost the only feminine street anthroponym in this old colonial centre of the capital city.³ Colonial masculine cultures were inherited therefore by the male-dominated post-colonial states, and historical memory was adjusted and modified accordingly to fit their version and vision (Mamvura et al., 2018). This is true even in African countries where, similarly to Zimbabwe, there is no place-naming policy. In other words: ‘Contemporary institutional sexism in Africa is partially a product of Arabo-Islamic and Euro-Christian/ colonial gender-biased systems that sustained, and were sustained by, the exclusion of women from the public sphere’ (Njoh et al., 2018: 117).

Figure 2.

The signpost of Mbuya Nehanda Street, Harare CBD, Zimbabwe (author’s photo).

Inadequate urban planning legislation and vision currently advocated by most of sub-Saharan Africa’s states

The toponymic marginalization of women from the linguistic landscapes of sub-Saharan African cities is one facet of a wider problem regarding these cities’ management and administration. Beyond gender issues, including sexual harassment against women and girls in the continent’s public urban environments and other forms of discrimination (Izumi, 2007; Skalli, 2014; UN-Women, 2019), there are other complementary issues that call for a reconfiguration of the current urban planning policies. Prominent among them is the urgent need to redesign inclusionary planning policies and adequate legislation to meet realities on the ground concerning settlement forms of the urban poor, ethnic minorities and migrant groups in the booming and multicultural urban environments of Africa today. The gender-biased toponymic exclusion, similarly to the municipal authorities’ wider disregard of the linguistic presence and expressions of ethnic minorities and migrant groups in the city, is therefore only a facet in a more comprehensive reality of inadequate planning.

In the recent urban planning literature that concerns cities in the global South in general and in sub-Saharan Africa in particular, two main reasons are assigned to the creation of the harsh and neglected urban realities as a consequence of inadequate planning policies.

The first reason is that the urban and rural planning curricula of many of Africa’s planning schools (where such schools exist at all) are outdated, similarly to the post-colonial planning legislation. Many Town and Country Planning Acts are rooted in European colonial policies of urban segregation, exclusion and eviction, which were irrelevant even in the colonial era as some of these masterplans were based on Eurocentric concepts such as new towns and garden cities (Watson and Agbola, 2013). As pointed out by the South African urban planner Vanessa Watson (2009), over the last three decades urban places globally have changed significantly in terms of society, economy and spatial environments. Yet the planning systems, particularly in the global South, have changed too slowly if at all. Aside from the frequently top-down racialized anti-poor/migrant/women agenda of these outdated and de-contextualized systems, the very persistence of such systems requires explanation in itself (see also Diaw et al., 2002). The second reason is the preoccupation of urbanists, policy managers and elite members in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa with fixed ideals of order, orderliness and conformity which are characteristic of Western modernity (Kamete, 2009; Llobera, 1988). This pursuit has not only tended to exclude certain local practices of livelihood or to initiate a hostile battle for their permanent eradication backed by professionalized planning bureaucracies; it has also contributed to the proliferation of the actually existing urban informality, poverty and fragility. Visionary dreams about the desired city only intensify the unbridgeable discrepancy between the elite desires and the enduring contextual realities of the subcontinent’s urban spaces. As noticed by Kamete and Lindell (2010), most of the urban authorities do not admit to the multiple failures of local government and unsuitable governance systems, nor do they admit that informality has for decades been cushioning the poor against their vagaries. Indeed, the neglect of these authorities of the multicultural (linguistic) landscapes, ethnic (linguistic) divergence and gender-biased street naming in their cities is only a side-effect.

Within the proliferating informality, however, the majority of self-employed workers in a large number of small-scale enterprises and service activities outside of the formal economy are women. Women in Africa have limited access to substantial resources such as land, education, technology and credit, and must consider aspects of household maintenance and childcare as well. They are also often operating in a hostile environment, condemned as ‘illegal traders’ by law-enforcing agents (Fapohunda, 2012; Yusuff, 2013). Research on their contribution to the shaping of the urban spatialities they occupy in terms of informal toponymy is non-existent. We have documented so far one such contribution of an informal feminine toponymy in Dakar, though indirect and somewhat ironic: in a city area that comprises numbered streets which carry hardly any meaning for its residents, a Senegalese advertising company took advantage at a street intersection. In fact throughout the city, this advertising poster for ginger candy was posted prominently at street intersections, in a visual play with the actresses (see Figure 3). Maritchou (right) and Eva (left) are co-wives in a weekly TV broadcast that criticizes polygamy by exposing in theatrical form its inherent intrigues. The two characters are at a ‘marital crossroads’, since they learnt that their common husband has an affair with yet another woman. Maritchou wants to leave, and Eva tries to bring her back home. Being widely posted at intersections, the adverts acted as playful orientation clues for many Dakarois: ‘When you get to the crossroads, go with Eva’, or ‘follow Maritchou’, instead of mentioning left/right directions or street names/numbers.⁴

Figure 3.

The advertising poster (ginger candy) of Maritchou and Eva, Dakar, Senegal (photo courtesy of Abderrahmane Ngaïdé).

The toponymic microcosmos of Bindura

In many ways, our site-specific study of the namescape of Bindura, a secondary city in Zimbabwe, is symptomatic of the gender-biased toponymic scenario in urban sub-Saharan Africa more generally. The microcosmos of Bindura also encapsulates the issues featured in the three influential factors previously mentioned. So far, no critical studies have been done to systematically analyse the role of street names as subtle forms of gendering the linguistic landscape in Bindura. This case study integrates reading against the grain in the city’s toponymic inscriptions in order to reveal the unequal power relations and socio-political tensions, together with historical and feminist discourse. It involves work in situ that necessitates an intimate knowledge of the city, relevant languages and qualitative methodology (e.g. street names survey and typology, interviews with municipality members and city residents and visual documentation). A remark should be made here that though scant, research that deals directly or rather in passing with toponymy in Zimbabwe exists. It normally focuses on issues such as capitalist modernization, colonial settlement and state formation, liberation struggle and national political independence, acts of renaming and official commemorations (Chung, 2006; Garlake, 1982; Lyons, 2004; Mlambo, 2014; Mushati, 2013; Pfukwa, 2012).⁵ These issues, however, are not the focus of this study, which strives to enhance the gender-biased discourse of Africa’s urban contexts, and its many nuances and concerns.

A brief history of Bindura through a glimpse of related toponymy

Bindura is located in the north-eastern part of Zimbabwe, approximately 90 km from Harare, the capital city. According to the latest population census in 2012, the area covers around 2200 km² and has a population of about 157,000. Lying in an agricultural area surrounded by nickel and gold mines, the city constitutes the administrative capital of Mashonaland Central Province. However, the (British) colonial ‘re-tribalizing’ practice of naming places along tribal lines, such as, in Zimbabwe, ‘Mashonaland’ or ‘Matebeleland’, continues to evoke protests. This is because it virtually suggests that the first territory stands for the Shona exclusively, while the second territory stands for the Ndebele exclusively. Policy makers, activists and the general citizenry in the country call for the renaming of these provinces to more neutral names that reflect the realities on the ground, as people of different ethnicities and races can be found all over the country regardless of the name of the province.

The abundance of the mineral deposits has always made the area targeted by European fortune seekers and settlers, particularly by the British in the late nineteenth-century. In the 1890s they invaded this area and pegged The Prince of Wales Mine, while mining on the Kimberley Reefs began in 1901, and by 1912 the Hay Mine was opened (Bindura Municipality, 2018). Indeed, ‘Kimberley Reefs’ was the initial name that was given to the area by British settlers, an exonym transferred from an area in South Africa where Cecil John Rhodes (1853‒1902) began his entrepreneurial mining, making a fortune from it.⁶ Kimberley in South Africa is equally rich in mineral deposits, especially diamonds that were said to be picked up in their finest quality from the surface. Likewise, ex-Kimberley Reefs or present-day Bindura is also known for its gold, nickel and other minerals that are easily accessible (Pikirayi, 2001).

With a lasting impression of British expatriates on this area ‒ e.g. 47 out of 54 street and road names in the Hospital Area of Bindura are in English or are derived from English, the architecture and even most of the ways people conduct themselves have a loud ring of the British ways ‒ they established a settlement near ‘Pindura Hill’ in 1913. The settlement name ‘Bindura’ was derived thus from the Shona name of the hill Pindura. The Shona name implies that there were a lot of wild animals in the area, and it is an abbreviated form of the full phrase Pindura mhuka, meaning ‘turn the game’.⁷ According to interviews with Bindura Municipality officials (July 2018), the first village management board was set up in 1913 to administer the settlement’s affairs, replaced by the town management board in 1929. Road councils were then set up for the administration of transport in the commercial areas. Consequently, the area is still under two councils: Bindura Municipality, overseeing the urban areas; and Bindura Rural District Council, which runs the rural areas.

The introduction of the colonial city in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), the colonial economy of cash crop production and mineral exploitation and segregationist colonial governance policies constituted a turning point in the history of the region. Though the region had a consolidated pre-colonial urban tradition during the medieval Munhumutapa dynasty and empire (Great Zimbabwe, Khami and Dhlodhlo) (Munzwa and Jonga, 2010), there was no chronological continuity between this city-state tradition and the British colonial period of about four centuries later. As the pioneers of colonization were white males who established racial segregation and brought with them a patriarchal system that excluded active public participation and the visibility of women, most of the colonial place names given by them were commemorative of other white male heroes. Generic examples for such toponyms in Zimbabwe include ‘Kimberley’, which celebrates Lord Kimberley of Britain (John Wodehouse, the 1st Earl of Kimberley) (Roberts, 1976); or in several cities, Jameson Avenue, which memorializes Sir Leander Starr Jameson who was the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony (1904‒1908) and Administrative Secretary of Matebeleland. This toponymic ambiance stretched well into the post-independence period, when gender-biased policies for commemorative street names by the Zimbabwean government continued to honour male War of Liberation heroes. Streets named after Robert Mugabe, Josiah Tongogara and Jason Moyo are common in Zimbabwe’s cityscapes. As poignantly argued by the Nigerian geographer Akin Mabogunje (2015), while the colonial era may have ended, its legacies of authoritarian management, citizen marginalization and sexist policies remains firmly in place.

During the past two decades, the Chinese presence in Bindura/Zimbabwe has grown, especially after the land reform (from the year 2000 onwards and still ongoing), which saw economic sanctions being imposed on the Zimbabwean government by Western countries. These sanctions led the government to intensify its engagement with China. Zimbabwe and China had been allies during the War of Liberation, especially in the case of ZANLA/ZANU. Most of the Chinese residents are taking up farms, mines and related industries that were left by the British. The Chinese presence is becoming so evident that there are places now known as kumaChina – translated to ‘the place of the Chinese’. Migrants from (particularly southern) African countries and other parts of Zimbabwe have moved to Bindura to be farm labourers, or partake in the artisanal gold mining that is currently widespread in the town. Bindura is thus interesting because it has a fairly multicultural and multilingual population, including migrants from other African countries, Asia and Europe living side by side.

Bindura’s street names: fieldwork and analysis

A database of 157 street names in Bindura was compiled from both primary and secondary sources – from council records (minutes of town planning), maps and gazetteers. Here, only those streets that have official names were taken into account (excluding toponyms of extra-legal quarters and other informal ones, and excluding numerical names which did not seem to offer much for the focus of the research). The street names were grouped in a typology of five categories, that is: commemorative (79 streets), botanic (60), directional (10), wildlife (7) and metonymic (after businesses in their vicinity, 1 street). Of these categories, and we are aware that some names could be classified under more than one category, the first one of commemorative names is of our interest. It was noted, however, that of the 157 streets that have been surveyed, none bear feminine names.

In addition, interviews with purposively selected 35 participants who are associated with, or involved in, the naming process were undertaken (e.g. of the Municipality staff, National Archivers, the Surveyor General, councillors and community leaders); and in situ visits were also conducted to obtain informed assertions on the etymology, naming practices and uses of street names in Bindura. Some visual evidence of the street signage was collected as well. This combination of qualitative methods was needed in order to faithfully evaluate the city’s panorama of street names, as unlike other (particularly Western) countries, Zimbabwe does not have a policy on place naming. Moreover, not only that there is a lack of documentation on Bindura’s street names or naming processes, but its council officials also do not have up-to-date maps except for torn ones that are hardly readable. In fact, these officials have no documents to show how and when the streets were named, and eight out of the 10 officials that were interviewed did not know the sources and meanings of the names. On the material level, street signage is very poor as well. In the formal suburbs of Chiwaridzo, Chipindura, Claver Hill, Green Hill, parts of Chipadze and parts of Aerodrome there are no signposts showing the names of the streets. This scenario is a catalyst in the creation of unofficial namescapes, as people end up giving streets names of their own because they do not know the official names. As for streets that have signs, most of the signs are neglected, in a state of disrepair and mostly unreadable. Their metal plaques are generally ridden with rust.

Most of the street names in Bindura are commemorative in nature. As this dominant category was introduced during the colonial period (from the late nineteenth century to 1979), it still echoes colonial white heroes, colonial remarkable events (for the ‘white’ memory), or places from metropolitan United Kingdom (Table 1). Exemplary of this category is Figure 4, which shows a signpost of the generic toponym ‘Centenary Avenue’, in disrepair. It is located in an erstwhile colonial low-density suburb of the city, with its name corresponding to the British tradition of celebrating centenaries in the UK. More specifically and according to interview respondents from the municipality, ‘Centenary Avenue’ commemorates the centenary celebrations of Birmingham in the UK, for achieving a city status (see also Kennedy, 2004).

Table 1.

Exemplary commemorative street naming in Bindura, Zimbabwe, during colonial times (the 1880s to 1979) (author’s study). Table showing exemplary commemorative street names from Bindura, Zimbabwe, during colonial times, with further thematic typology (author’s study).

Commemorated	Examples	Comments
People or heroes	Anthony Avenue	Sir Anthony Duff (1920‒2000) was the Deputy Governor for Rhodesia (1973‒1979) and played a key role in the negotiations for Rhodesia’s independence. He was also the M15 Security Services’ Director General in 1985. He also participated in WWII and served as a diplomat in several African countries.
	Hay Road	Named after George Hay Rattray, who pegged Hay Mine in 1908, and who later sold it to Hay Gold Mining Company in July 1910.
	Jameson Avenue	After Leander Starr Jameson, one of the British colonial pioneers, and the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony (1904‒1908).
	Kimberley Avenue	Named after Lord Kimberley (John Wodehouse, 1st Earl of Kimberley, Great Britain).
	Leon Avenue	B. Samuel Leon (b. 1888) was a wealthy businessman who came to Rhodesia in 1908 and tried his luck in a number of businesses including farming, mining and the property market.
	Lincoln Road	It could be named after Abraham Lincoln, America’s president (4 March 1861–14 April 1865) or rather Lincoln, a place in the UK (no formal documentation regarding this toponym).
	MacKendrick Avenue	P.A.L. MacKendrick was a British attorney, notary and conveyancer based in the main street, at Farmers Hall.
	Selous Avenue	The Selous Scouts were an arm of the Rhodesian Army (special forces regiment) which operated from 1973 to 1980. It was named after the British explorer, Frederick Courtney Selous (1851‒1917).
Events	Centenary Avenue	A generic metropolitan toponym which celebrates centenaries in the United Kingdom.
Places	Bath Road	Named after the city of Bath in the UK.
	Cambridge Avenue	Named after the county town Cambridge in the UK.
	Cardiff Road	Named after Cardiff, the capital of Wales in the UK.
	Coventry Road	Named after the city of Coventry in the UK.
	Oxford Road	Named after the city of Oxford in the UK.
	Atherstone Road	Named after the small industrial and market town and civil parish in the English county of Warwickshire.

Figure 4.

The signpost of Centenary Avenue, Bindura, Zimbabwe (author’s photo).

In this colonial meta-narrative, Women (of any colour) did not get any recognition. It might be expected though that toponymic de-colonization of women might be achieved following Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980. That is, that the new ZANU PF government in its nationalist ideology and rhetoric would commemorate women who participated in the War of Liberation. This, however, was not the case. The whole of Aerodrome suburb in Bindura has its streets named after male war heroes without exception. Figure 5, for instance, shows the signpost of ‘Magamba Street’ (i.e. ‘heroes’ in Shona, as different from ‘heroines’) in Aerodrome, commemorating the war heroes. The silence of women is vociferous here, also because this situation contradicts a rich corpus of war narratives that have documented the participation of women in it and the challenges they faced (e.g. Chung, 2006; Lyons, 2004; Staunton, 1990). This discriminatory toponymy also echoes general patriarchal beliefs prevalent in the wider society that leave women out of decision making, business and finance. On their part, most of Bindura’s female residents who were interviewed expressed their will for this situation to be changed towards a higher degree of gender equity in general, and a more inclusive gendered toponymy in particular. These residents also emphasized that they feel they do not belong to the public place, nor identify with it, but are rather just left out. One of them even shared her sweeping opinion, connecting, through a gendered lens, the remote past with the near past, not skipping the troubling present:

They do not recognize us women, it is as if we do not exist. But that is not true, we equally participate and contribute [. . .] even in the old days [. . .] look there were the likes of queen Lozikeyi Dlodlo who was a mighty woman, she was the wife of Lobengula or is it Mzilikazi, umm I am forgetting but she was powerful and at some point had to lead the people because her husband had ran away from the people. There was a war with the whites in the 1890s, when they were coming here for the first time. There was also queen Loziba, the wife of Mzilikazi. She was known as Queen Loziba okaPhahlana Thebe, uuu, that one was a warrior that one! Even during the war, many women participated, starting with Mbuya Nehanda as an example and then the other some who are currently still alive [. . .] the likes of Mai Mujuru, Oppah Muchinguri, Fay Chung, etc. But we do not see any of these women honoured. It’s as if they were not there, they are taken away and erased from the history. That is the same way we feel, we are not wanted in a men’s world. We do not belong in our own country. See how women are harassed in public places [. . .] just walking in the streets as a woman you are called names, ummm, it is bad I tell you! (Zuvalinyenga’s personal interview, July 2018)

Figure 5.

The signpost of Magamba Street, Bindura, Zimbabwe (author’s photo).

It has also been noted that most of Bindura’s street names are in either English, Shona or Ndebele and none appear in the languages of the migrant communities from the southern African region, or in one of the other cosmopolitan languages that are spoken today in the city. There are also no bilingual signs. Inter-country minority languages are marginalized as well, a situation that contradicts the national Constitution of Zimbabwe, which recognizes 16 official languages. This situation also contradicts public pronouncements by government officials (a Gender Commission was established in view of the 1995 UN Beijing conference) that they are striving for gender equity and an inclusive society.

The findings of this study clearly show that place-naming practices with reference to street names in Bindura discriminate against women. Of all the streets that have names, none bear the name of a woman. Despite the fact that both women and men took part in the shaping of the country’s history, participated in the liberation struggle, have right to the city in the Lefebvrian sense, and are actively producing the city at present ‒ Bindura’s public space has been rendered ‘no place for women’.

Conclusions and recommendations

This article is focused on a relatively untreated topic in critical place-name studies, that is, the gender-biased toponymic inscriptions in urban environments. It is also focused on a relatively unvisited geographic region within this literature, that is, sub-Saharan Africa.

The article first evaluates the problematic of the scarcity of female anthroponyms in sub-Saharan Africa cities and its extent in comparison to cities beyond this region, and then points to three prominent factors which take a heavy share in shaping the gendered namescapes apparent in the subcontinent’s cities today. Exemplary for the article’s main arguments is the case study of Bindura, Zimbabwe, which provides a qualitative analysis on the extent, character and socio-political implications of this problem. The article shows how the often taken-for-granted, mundane and seemingly banal toponymic inscriptions in the form of street signage, street names and street naming processes can in the long term be evidence of the marginalization of and discrimination against women. Its contribution therefore lies in evoking gender-equality thought within the context of the planning, the production and the management of urban settlements of the region (and beyond).

Against this backdrop, a first priority is the necessity of updating colonial-era legislation, traditions of governmentality and general exclusive and segregationist attitudes to the urban sphere by the post-colonial state and municipal authorities in order to meet common features of life and spatial habits in African cities. On the symbolic level, state and municipal repression as cast into the toponymic inscriptions should be exchanged for more inclusive and participatory visions respecting the multicultural, multi-ethnic and multilinguistic urban realities in the vibrant cities of the subcontinent, paying attention to women’s substantial contribution to the designing of urban life at past and present. And, on a less symbolic and more applicable level, such a toponymic de-colonization in terms of gender should be accompanied by complementary programs and innovative interventions aimed at tackling the more general problem of the simultaneous and multiscaled side-lining of women in other spheres of life. These include poverty and access to economic resources, education and training, health, violence, power and decision making, presence in public and private spheres and indiscriminatory institutional mechanisms. Indeed, pursuing a toponymic landscape reform would only constitute a minor facet in the slow and uneven progress which has been achieved so far in sub-Saharan Africa, and which necessitates a much more determined leadership and increasing investment in gender equality and women’s rights.

There is also a need to further explore the topic of gender-biased street names and naming processes within the field of critical place-name studies and urban studies more generally. Developing a collection of case studies on this topic from multilateral sites in both the global North and South would be essential for gaining a more accurate appreciation on the scope of this phenomenon on a global scale, its characteristics and main causes. A comparative analysis then ideally draws comprehensive conclusions out of the variegated backgrounds of historical, political and social circumstances. With theory informing practice, the conclusions should be targeted at designing more egalitarian and sensitive urban management policy in this regard, to be applicable at inter- and intra-state levels in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond.

Footnotes

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Dorcas Zuvalinyenga

Liora Bigon

Notes

Author biographies

Dorcas Zuvalinyenga is a PhD candidate at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research is an interdisciplinary study in linguistic landscapes and socio-onomastics focusing on identity, power relations and communication in place-naming practices. She received her Bachelor of Arts Honours in English and Master of Arts in English from the University of Zimbabwe. She tutored at the same university for a couple of years before moving to Bindura University of Science Education where she lectures in the Department of Languages and Communication. She is also a member of the International Council of Onomastic Sciences (ICOS).

Liora Bigon is an urban (planning) historian. A Senior Staff Member in HIT ‒ Holon Institute of Technology, she specializes in (post-) colonial urban history and planning cultures in sub-Saharan Africa, with an emphasis on West Africa. She has published widely in these fields, including articles, books and edited collections. Among the latter are: Garden Cities and Colonial Planning in Africa and Palestine (Manchester University Press, 2014, ed. with Y. Katz); French Colonial Dakar (Manchester University Press, 2016); Gridded Worlds: An Urban Anthology (ed. with R. Rose-Redwood, Springer, 2018); and Grid Planning in the Urban Design Practices of Senegal (with E. Ross, Springer, 2020).

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