Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses commemorative street naming in Maputo during the colonial and the post-independence socialist periods to examine the practice of urban space in mapping historical events and creating alternative memory narratives.

Paper long abstract:

Built urban spaces, with monuments, streets and public spaces, are the materiality of the historic past in the present. In Maputo, they have also been the anchor of colonialism and of the nation in a narrative of historical time. This paper discusses commemorative street naming in Maputo during the colonial and the post-independence socialist periods as a vehicle for bringing the past into the present and symbolically legitimate and institutionalize the colonial and revolutionary socialism ideologies. My aim is to go beyond a geographical and theoretical construction of the city and politics of naming, to discuss, influenced by de Certeau's use of spatial practices, the experience of urban space as a "text" in a readable city. In Maputo, as in other cities, street names merge the past they commemorate with ordinary settings of daily life in socially contested processes and are part of structures of power and everyday conditions of social life. But how does a walker articulate this mapping of historical events, creating his/her own organicity of memory in the city? What is the epistemological value that specific trajectories "speak?" The mapping of city names in Maputo creates a practice of space that appropriates and manipulates places and memory. Yet walking through officially manipulated spaces allows for a selection of narratives and fragmentation of the space traversed; thus creating new links between memorial episodes and omitting parts of the intended historical and ideological mapping.