A Tale of Two Brazzas: Intertwining (Post-)Colonial Namescapes

This article brings together and analyzes two toponyms: Brazzaville Street in Holon, Israel, and Quay of Brazza in Bordeaux, France. In the light of historical and contemporary developments at different points of time, geographies and socio-political contexts, the crisscrossing between both Brazza-related toponyms is useful in promoting a critical and more nuanced interpretation of space and nomenclature. In exploring the varied flows of power, ambiguities and tensions behind the two place names, and in bringing the Congo to the fore, the article also relates to geographies beyond Europe. This aspect of spatial intertwining contributes to the de-Eurocentrization of recent place names studies, which tend to be focused on Europe/the West and on nationalistic aspects. In addition, a variety of primary and secondary materials is employed, including visual and archival sources, and fieldwork.

of questioning and debating place naming that has few if any equivalents in the world. They have produced a distinctive and considerable corpus of critical research literature that continues to grow. Much of it revolves around historical geography and ideological aspects of (post-)Zionism, within Jewish society (e.g. Bar-Gal 1989Katz 1995Katz , 1999; and, against the background of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, around competing spatial challenges with relation to national identity, ethno-linguistics, and collective memories (Azaryahu and Kellerman 1999;Benvenisti 2000;Bigon and Dahamshy 2014;Shoval 2013). Nothing could be further from our Brazzaville Street! From time to time, Israeli place names are also debated in the mainstream press, with (mostly) passionate articles and polemical opinion columns in terms of local politics. Only rarely do some lighter pieces emerge in relation to toponymy. Examples that come to mind include a mayor who arbitrarily used his authority to name a street after his mistress; or technical mistakes in the transcription or transliteration of Hebrew, Arabic or Latin names. In this regard, we cannot help but mention that one of the letters in the Hebrew transcription of the suffix -ville in Brazzaville was missing on the Holon signpost until recently. 1 Yet, the most intriguing aspect of this very signpost was its geographic (dis)orientation: just beneath the toponym Brazzaville, a short Hebrew explanation stated that the city was "the capital of Congo in East Africa" (Figure 1).
Could it be that the Congo, formerly part of French Equatorial Africaactually located in the central western part of the continentand its capital Brazzaville were relocated eastwards, toward a distance of some two thousand kilometers? There are general confusions about the Congos of another kind. The same toponym is being used FIGURE 1 The street sign of Brazzaville Street, Holon, Israel. The sub-title reads: "Capital of Congo in East Africa" (photograph LB, April 2014) for two countries: the former French Congo (sometimes referred to as Congo-Brazzaville or Congo-Brazza to differentiate it from the "other" Congo); and the former Belgian Congo (renamed Congo at independence, then Zaire, and lately Democratic Republic of Congo, with Kinshasa, ex-Leopoldville (!), as capital). This toponym is also used for the river running between them (with Kinshasa and Brazzaville facing each other on opposite banks), so that people who are unfamiliar with African history and toponymic changes can easily be mistaken. For all that, we have no knowledge of any East African Congo.
Or could it be that nobody, until recently, ever noticed, and that we were among the firsts to read the signpost with amusement? This seems highly probable since Brazzaville Street is short and far from being busy, easy just to pass by at its junction with the main road, Ma'apilim Street. The latter toponym commemorates the "illegal" Jewish refugees who had tried to reach the shores of British Mandate Palestine mainly following World War II, and were treated harshly by the British regimethus, this toponym conforms to Israel's general toponymic climate. Ma'apilim Street leads to the nearby locally popular sitethe "Pillbox", a generic name for each of a series of round concrete guard posts built during the British Mandateused for picnics and barbecue by the neighborhood's residents. The neighborhood is considered relatively underprivileged in Holon, inhabited by Jews of eastern origin, newcomers of Russian origin, and a growing community of ultra-Orthodox Sephardi Jews. It also contains a few tens of informal structures whose occupiers have refused, since 1948, to be relocated in rehousing programs. These structures are situated to the foot of the hill of the Pillbox, right in front the Ma'apilim-Brazzaville corner ( Figure 2).
The indifference and disregard on the part of local residents to the mapping of Brazzaville during the past few decades of this street sign's life have coincided with the sense of geographic misplacement on the part of the municipal council that could after all perhaps be forgiven: the State of Israel had yet to exist in the Imperial period of the "scramble for Africa", the same period when Palestine itself was subjugated to the Ottoman Empire, later to be trusted to the British Mandate, its pillbox guard posts and rigid immigration policies. It might indeed be an innocent mistake in a country that has never exercised colonial power, at least not officially, and certainly not in Africa (Gregory 2004;Yiftachel 2010). However, following our report published in 2014 in a local newspaper about the mistakes in this sign, Holon's municipality replied to the newspaper that these would be corrected 2and indeed the signage has been recently changed (see Figure 2), together with a general renovation of the street signs in the entire vicinity (the blue iron plaques with the white script are a typical British-colonialism heritage).
The Quay of Brazza intrigued us for exactly opposite reasons to Holon: the intimate connection of Bordeaux with Africa from the times of the slave trade (Saugera 2012) and later the colonial era (Lozère 2007); and the sheer absence, here, of any tradition of debate on toponymic matters. A fluvial harbor, Bordeaux developed mainly on the left bank of river Garonne. Our Quay of Brazza is on the other side, a location that offers stunning views of the blond stone façades on the left bankespecially the Chartrons district, the once headquarter of Bordeaux's engagement in the Triangular Trade.
Between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, ships loaded in Bordeaux deported an estimated 150,000 enslaved Africans to the Americas. This is admittedly far behind Nantes, a city responsible for over 450,000 deportations. Nantes, however, decided in recent years to confront its slavery past and established a Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery that has become an iconic symbol of the city. For its part, the city council of Bordeaux sticks to the argument that Bordeaux built its prosperity less on the slave trade as such (i.e. the sale of slaves) than on straightforward two-way commerce with the Caribbeanwhich is perfectly true, just as true as the fact that the sugar, cocoa and other colonial commodities carried to Bordeaux were produced through slave labor.
DiversCités, a militant association that has since wound itself up, undertook in the early 2000s a documentary project leading to the identification of two dozen streets, most of them in the Chartrons, that are still named after people/families who built their wealth from the slave trade or slave labor (Pétrissans-Cavaillès 2004, 82-111). A campaign ensued to have the names changed or, at least, to install memorial plaques. It was met with political silence and a polite indifference shared by local academics, the local press, and the public. The campaign ended in April 2010, when, in a gallant last stand, DiversCités activists placed stickers bearing the inscription "négrier" (slaver) on the most contentious street signs. The Office of the Mayor dismissed the operation as "outrageous", and not a single street name was changed.
In contrast to the homogeneous alignment of buildings on the left bank, the right side of the Garonne has a suburban appearance, with its grassy shore, vacant lots, and the Quay of Brazza bordering railway wasteland. The geography of toponyms amazingly overlaps this material contrast, adding to it a symbolic dimension. Brazza, facing the dense network of slavery-related street names across the muddy river, evokes an anti-slavery campaigner who first sailed to Africa on an anti-slavery mission and then, as explorer and later governor-general of the French Congo, repeatedly continued to oppose slavery and its colonial avatarforced labor.
For sure, Brazza was no less a colonizer: his Friendship Treaty with Makoko Iloo (1880), who ruled over the Nkuna area that was to become Brazzaville, was just one of the many examples of African rulers placing themselves under the protection of the French flag in the late nineteenth century, without being in a position to apprehend the implications of what they signed. Yet Brazza turned out to be an unusual kind of governor-general (1886-1898), whose social and wage policies in French Congo (right bank of the river) contrasted heavily with the slavery-like conditions and extreme brutality of the concessionary regime that was implemented in its Belgian counterpart (left side). He was ultimately dismissed due to poor colony profits and journalist reports that branded him a "lax person" and a "negrophile." Concession holding companies were then introduced in French Congo too, and colonial exactions soon resembled those across the river. Brazza returned only once to the Congo, years later, to investigate cases of extreme colonial brutality. He was coldly received. His health deteriorated during the four-month mission and, on the way back to Bordeaux, he was hastily brought ashore in Dakar, Senegal. He died there, in September 1905, officially from dysentery, though his widow claimed he had been poisoned. Brazza received state funeral honors in Paris, but the National Assembly voted to suppress his potentially explosive report. The disillusioned widow consequently had his body exhumed and reburied in Algiers, with the epitaph: "A memory untainted by human blood." The reluctance of Bordeaux's politicians to confront their city's role in the history of slavery and colonial violence not only echoes the more expected lack of concern on part of Holonians, but also mirrors national endeavors to commemorate selectively the colonial past (Blanchard, Nicolas, and Lemaire 2005), such as the exhibition on Brazza originally inaugurated at the Archives nationales d'outre-mer (ANOM) in Aixen-Provence in winter 2007. 3 A century after his death, Brazza remains a distinguished character, one of the least controversial in French colonial history. Yet few Bordelais seem to know that the Quay of Brazza is named after him. During random interviews conducted in July and August 2017 right under a Quay of Brazza street sign (Figure 3), it appeared that more people connect the Brazza name with the city of Brazzaville (Brazza in its short and popular form) than with Brazza the explorer. 4 Surprising as this confusion may seem, it might be explained by the evolution of language use, against a backdrop of interiorized toponymic conventions. Contrary to Holon, where an explanation appeared necessary to (wrongly) locate Brazzaville in (East) Africa, the Bordeaux street sign shows no other information than the explorer's name (see Figure 3). The French wording "Quai de Brazza" could certainly be explicit enough in the early twentieth century, when Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza was widely referred to as de Brazza ("de" being a nobiliary particle), but language use has since changed, and the same person is at present best known only as Brazza. 5 In French toponymic usage, generic street names (i.e. street, quay, alley, etc.) are directly followed by the specific name when the latter is one of a person ("de Brazza"). When the specific name is that of a city or a country, it is normally preceded with a preposition like "de" or "du" (as in "Quai du Sénégal" or "Allée de Bristol", both in Bordeaux)and this widely accepted norm indeed suggests reading "Quai de Brazza" as a quay named after a geographical place called Brazza(ville).
Still on the Garonne's right bank, in both geographic and symbolic proximity to the Quay of Brazza, a street sign indicates a recently-established Toussaint Louverture Square. The place is actually not a square (not more than Congo is an East African country), it is rather a clearing within a tree-planted promenade, but it commemorates the rebel slave leader who initiated the Haitian Revolution. Toussaint, whose younger son lived and died in Bordeaux, already had a cul-de-sac named after him. He now has a statue in the center of this "square", which was donated to the city of Bordeaux by the Republic of Haiti.
By the way, Toussaint and Brazza were not far from enjoying the company of Nelson Mandela. A brand new bridge (2013) connecting the Quay of Brazza with the edge of the Chartrons was about to be named after the South African hero and reconciliation champion. For once, the regional daily asked its readers to propose names and that of Mandela came high on the list. Not too surprisingly, however, the city council decided to name the bridge in honor of former mayor Chaban-Delmas. A blameless figure in the French Resistance, Chaban's own brand of "reconciliation" (and durability as mayor) was grounded in enabling collaborationist acts with Nazi Germany by a number of local notables and businesses. In this, he too is relevant to our reading of the namescape, as very representative of a "tradition of political moderation" (as it is locally referred to) FIGURE 3 A perfectly correct street sign, yet more frequently associated with Brazza, the short name of Brazzaville, than with Brazza the explorer (photograph MB, August 2017) or, in other words, of the enduring taboos of Bordeaux regarding inconvenient chapters in its history (Bonin 2010, 13-19).
Visits to the city archives of both Holon and Bordeaux throw some light on the contexts in which Brazzaville Street and the Quay of Brazza were named. In Holon, the name Brazzaville was set in the heydays of Israel-Africa relations in the early 1960s, 6 which were also the age d'or of Franco-Israeli relations. 7 Holon was visited by the vice-president of Congo-Brazzaville in 1962; and established a twinning alliance with the port city of Tamatave (Toamasina) in Madagascar in the following year. The latter toponym also turned into a street name in the vicinity of Brazzaville Street. Tamatave Street had been designated as well to commemorate the ceremonious visit of the then mayor of Holon, Pinhas Ayalon (in office 1953-•1987, to this overseas city in 1963, and his hosting of a delegation from there in the same year ( Figure 4).
However, most African countries aligned themselves with the Arab Bloc and severed official diplomatic relations with Israel shortly before, during, or after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. The government of Congo-Brazzaville was one of the first to do so, in December 1972, also due to radical changes in regime and its attitude towards the West and Israel. This move provoked worries, surprise and criticism on the part of the Israeli media and public, and a feeling of great mistrust (Oded 2011, 125). 8 In response, Holon's residents of Brazzaville Street requested Ayalon, the "father of Holon", to change their street's name. Ayalon consulted with the Israeli Foreign Office, which examined the matter and decided that the street name should not be changed, opining that it was necessary to differentiate between the hostile attitude of the Congolese government and the friendship that exists between the Congolese and Israeli people. Oddly enough, in spite of the contextual debate that engaged the street's residents, the city's authorities and the governmental office, no one apparently considered to correct the geographical dissonance implied in a street sign that relocated Brazzaville from one part of the vast African continent to the other.
As for Tamatave Street, the municipality of Holon renamed it in 2005, regardless of the then state of Israel-Madagascar relations (Madagascar had cut ties with Israel in 1973 and restored them in 1994). The municipality, without consulting the city council, changed the name into Rehavam Ze'evi Streetafter a right-wing politician who had promoted a transfer of the Palestinian population. 9 This move resulted in a protest on the part of a leftist member of the city council, which yield no fruits; but here we enter into the more prevalent Israeli ambiance regarding commemorative street naming, implied earlier in this article.
In Bordeaux, the naming decision took place on 6 February 1906, in the aftermath of Brazza's state funeral. The city council named another quay on that very day and, no less odd than the geographic dissonance in Holon, it showed a remarkable sense of geographic harmony. The other quay was named after Hubert Prom, a pioneer in the trade, banking, and political networks of Bordeaux's influence in nineteenth century Senegal (Péhaut 2008). It is located in the dock area of Bacalan, which itself is an extension of the neighboring Chartrons on the left bankjust as the slavery and colonial eras were successive (and at times overlapping) stages in the same imperial history. The city council could have named Hubert Prom the right bank quay, and Brazza the left bank one. They chose the opposite. In so doing, they allowedmost certainly unintended our geographic imagination to wander across a dual namescape.
From a narrow technical standpoint, street names and street signage are intended to facilitate spatial orientation. Our Brazzaville Street in Holon is in this regard directed first and foremost at Holon's residents, not at the inhabitants of Congo. From the bottom up, we can only ask to what extent the location, or even the existence of Holon, nowadays troubles the urban majority of Brazzaville; and to what extent the working-class residents of Holon care whether Brazzaville is in east, west, north or south Africa. Technically, it makes no difference for the purpose of orienting oneself in Bordeaux whether the Quay of Brazza stems from an explorer or from an African city. In informal use, Brazza has indeed evolved into the popular name of a large area that spreads into the interior of the right bank, well beyond the river shore. The area was further nicknamed Brazzartville (i.e. "art city of Brazza"), 10 a designation that clearly evokes more the Congolese Brazzaville than Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza. The name Brazzartville emerged on the occasion of the 2014 session of Agora, Bordeaux's Biennial of Architecture, which held several events in and among the many artist squats and decrepit warehouses of the area ( Figure 5). These re-readings or re-imaginings of the Quay of Brazza, no less than the contrasted fortunes of Brazzaville and (ex-)Tamatave Streets in Holon, invite considering street names and signage as written texts in their own right, requiring the interpretive cooperation of readers to acquire meanings. In this textual perspective, the meaning of a name "stems not for its ʻmemorial contentʼ, but from the content the user attributes to the name, based on his or her own references" (Richard 2009, 5). For all that, street names are generally not "open works" in the strong sense of Umberto Eco, implying a deliberate intention to grasp the "full emotional and imaginative resources of the interpreter" (Eco 1989, 9). As a rule, street-namers and signage-writers value univocal meanings rather than poetry and suggestiveness. And yet there always remains room for interpretation, if only because toponymy and signage, beyond being signifiers of spatial orientation, also serve as supports or stimuli for mental mapping, geographical imaginations, and broader narratives. The privilege to stimulate and (dis)orient such cognitive processes is shared between the namers, whose name selection settles the namescape, and those who create the actual signage with or without a few further words of (dis)information. In the final instance, however, it is the street sign's reader who interconnects, assembles and re-assembles the names and other pieces here and there. As we hopefully have shown earlier, through the example of contrasted namescapes on the banks of river Garonne, ultimately the reader re-imagines the city according to his or her own sensibility, background, and motion. As with any written text, he or she always has the last word.

Conclusion
In this article, the histories and present-day policies with regard to two Brazza-related toponyms were brought together in a discursive and challenging way. The interconnection between the two different historical and socio-political contexts of Brazzaville Street in Holon, Israel, and Quay of Brazza in Bordeaux, Franceenabled a more nuanced and critical view on place naming processes by creating original and novel interpretations. In addition, against the background of Eurocentric tendencies in recent critical toponymic studies, which tend to deal with European/Western geographies and topics, centered on nationalism, revolutions and wars of independence, by tying France, Israel and the Congo together, this article provides a glimpse of nomenclature beyond Europe. We have therefore embraced the approach of "entangled histories" through an examination of the variety of interactions between variegated geographical and socio-political contexts, histories, and time spans in terms of nomenclature in a flexible way. Rather than concentrating on a single site-related toponymic process in an essentialist way, we have examined the two sites of Holon and Bordeaux in the light of "Brazza" inscriptions in an interactive way, intertwining between their different colonial and postcolonial heritages. This entanglement reflects not only urban practices, experiences and memories in situ, but it rather promotes a more inclusive and transnational interpretation of place naming. Foreign minister, 1956Foreign minister, -1966. The then presence of Israel in all sub-Saharan independent countries (with the sole exceptions of Somalia and Sudan) was no less grounded in strong ideological-humanistic considerations and a somewhat romantic fellow feeling. Israeli assistance in agriculture, security, and infrastructure development, was welcomed by the first generation of sub-Saharan leaders out of their affinities for a small country that successfully performed in many areas, partially similar to theirs; and their initial reluctance to rely too much on the former-colonizing nations (Oded 2011, 3-28). 7. Suresnes, near Paris, was the first city that signed a twinning agreement with Holon. The "ideal" phase of Franco-Israeli relations occurred between Egypt's nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956 and Algeria's independence in 1962, following which French foreign policy prioritized the development of economic relations with Arab countries. Franco-Israeli relations deteriorated at an accelerated pace at the time of the Arab-Israeli Wars of 1967 and 1973, in spite of the clear pro-Israeli attitude of the French public at that time (Rosman 2014, 88-125, 190-191).
Michel Ben Arrous is an architect and geographer, currently a researcher at the History Department of Bar-Ilan University. He has published extensively on the epistemology of territory, media and conflict, and the history of geographic ideas and fantasies. A former journalist in sub-Saharan Africa, he also coordinated research with CODESRIA in Dakar, Senegal. Correspondence to: Dr Liora Bigon, General Studies Department, Holon Institute of Technology (HIT); 52, Golomb St., Holon, 5810201, Israel. Email: liorab@hit.ac.il