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

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.