Bulletin de l'IFAN (Série B, Sc. Hum.), LIX, 1-2, 2019
While critical research on place names (toponyms) has burgeoned in the last decades, it has gener... more While critical research on place names (toponyms) has burgeoned in the last decades, it has generally overlooked the exact scope and significance of colonial toponymic legacies in African contexts, as well as their relations to endogenous systems of place-naming. In expanding on Dakar’s street names since the early colonial period, this article develops a qualitative analysis of such relations, based on a rich variety of primary and secondary sources, visual evidence and work in situ. Site-related and regional pre-colonial toponymic practices are discussed to highlight key differences with colonial models – namely the very conceptualizing of space and place, what places are to be named, how, by whom, and for what. Street-renaming since independence has in this regard only affected the most superficial component of the colonial legacy, while leaving untouched the deeper logics and key principles of colonial street-naming. For all that, official toponymy does not exhaust more today than in the past the diversity of alternative place-naming dynamics. We mention some of them that tend to rework Dakar’s namescape and to reinvent new meanings to its inherited toponyms.
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