Place renaming, jurisdictional integration, and political representation: lessons from South Africa

Stefan Chavez-Norgaard

Planning Perspectives, 2024, vol. 39, issue 5, 1007-1028

Abstract: Since South Africa’s 1994 transition from apartheid to democracy, the African National Congress (ANC) has advanced place renaming alongside jurisdictional rescaling. This confluence allows scholars to examine the political-economic, symbolic, and mnemonic dimensions of territorial inscription. The ANC’s wall-to-wall system of local and district municipalities aimed to rectify the inequality-exacerbating geography of apartheid and create more robust and redistributive localities. Concomitantly, jurisdictional toponyms celebrate anti-apartheid struggle heroes and cut across prior fault-lines of white and Black, haves and have-nots. Based on fieldwork in the Mahikeng Local Municipality (formerly two cities, Mmabatho and Mafikeng, in the Bophuthatswana ‘Bantustan’), I find that new local-government and district-level jurisdictions can indeed integrate prior fault-lines. Yet the process of subnational restructuring also created new inequalities, for instance across municipal categories and between traditional and municipal councils. Residents’ perceptions of local changes are differentiated: some employ new place and jurisdictional names and find State efforts admirable; others see State efforts as merely symbolic changes justifying corruption, opacity, and state-capture; and still others applaud State efforts but see limited results, blaming broader world systems of racial-capitalist urbanization. This research reveals how place-naming and jurisdictional reformulation are worthwhile steps towards rectifying apartheid-era inequalities, but require grassroots popular-democratic decision-making.

Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1080/02665433.2024.2324010

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