Paper short abstract:

This paper explores non-indexed place names in Zanzibar, particularly names of daladala stops, as living repositories of past histories sustained through everyday practices. It highlights how these names shape and are shaped by social processes beyond national symbolism and state-level politics.

Paper long abstract:

In response to the methodological challenge of writing histories of the everyday, this paper proposes non-indexed place names as repertoires that allow us to understand the past through its traces in the present and take into account “the physical and metaphysical worlds in which the subjects and objects of our inquiries thrive(d)” (Ochonu 2015: 289).

In urban Zanzibar, place names often hold stories and relations, at times even moral judgements related to past activities in a certain place. The names of daladala (public minibuses) stops present a particularly interesting case as there is no state authority in Zanzibar that regulates the naming of the stops. Their names are not found on maps; they have emerged out of situated historical circumstances and are sustained through ongoing everyday naming practices. The fact that there has been little to no state intervention into the practice of naming daladala stops in Zanzibar, opens up observations of social processes that reach beyond national symbolism and state-level identity politics.

This paper traces such present histories along two examples and thus contributes to the call for extending “the scope of critical urban toponymy by moving beyond the archive and the map to consider the daily “life” of [place] names” (Rose-Redwood et al. 2018: 16). Ultimately, the names and the histories they hold (may they refer to material objects, plants, moral discourses, spirit worlds or famous personalities) are intrinsically related to the places they denote, forming a unique assemblage that I argue is worth exploring ethnographically.