Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
The City of Toronto has voted to rename Yonge-Dundas Square "Sankofa Square".
This because Dundas is accused of having played a role in the slave trade. Though this is disputed by some.
The new name has its origins in Ghana with the Akan people.
Ironically the Akan are said to have sold fellow Africans as slaves to the Europeans.
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Sometimes you can be pleased with an outcome even if you disagree with the reason or process.
"Sankofa square" is actually a better name than Dundas square. For starters, Dundas Square - or, more properly, Yonge-Dundas Square - feels like a placeholder name that just stuck. The square itself was only created about twenty years ago.
Even Dundas street isn't the street's original name. The section fronting the square was Wilton Street (and Crookshank street before that) until the early 20th century. Individual wards of the city imposed their own street grid that didn't meet up across boundaries so, at the beginning of the automobile era, the City Frankensteined a few of them together, connecting the missing joints with doglegs to form arterial roads. One of these was the resulting Dundas Street as we know it today. Nobody is alive that remembers Dundas street being named "Wilton Street", and the street goes on for many kilometers containing thousands of addresses, so for pragmatic reasons it makes sense to delay the renaming indefinitely and, as niwell points out, renaming Dundas Square is a useful compromise to buy time until the movement dies out.
"Sankofa square" is also a better-sounding name than Dundas square. It rolls off the tongue of native English speakers, and is easy for people from other languages to pronounce as well. Unfortunately, this is not true of a lot of local Indigenous place names. Recently, the city opened a recreation centre called Ethennonnhawahstihnen' Community Centre. I had to type several variations on google before the autocomplete picked it up and I was directed to a site - that's not useful. It's also a welcome departure from naming squares after people, and including both their first and last names. One of Toronto's problems is that it doesn't have a lot of unique names. Everything is "York-this" or "Queen's-that". I'm not criticizing this because these names evoke the British colonial past, I'm criticizing this because having repetitive names that cover large swathes of an increasingly dense and important city is very bush league and sometimes even confusing.
I like how the committee chose a metaphysical concept, rather than a person, and how forward looking it is. Towards the end of the 21st century, almost 2 in 5 people on earth will be African. The cultures of sub-Saharan Africa will be much more prominent everywhere. The name Sanfoka Square won't seem odd to our grandchildren, and even if it's just the name of a square, the symbolism could have cemented ties to sub-Saharan Africa earlier on in some way that I we can't anticipate.
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