From Kaiserstraße to Barabara ya Bandarini. What Swahili street names can tell us about the past.

“Many streets in Iringa municipality and indeed in many towns in Tanzania have no street names, and many buildings have no unique identification number” (Mugerezi, 2002, 84). PO boxes serve in fact as postal addresses and Tanzanians, asked where they live, will most probably not name a street but a ward. These few examples show that in Tanzania street names do not have the important primary function, i.e. orientation, that they have in contemporary western societies. Yet they do have – as in western societies – what Elisabeth Fuchshuber-Weiß calls a secondary function, i.e. the memory function (1996, 1468-1469). The purpose of my article is to show how Tanzanian street names, thanks to their memory function, contribute to preserving the community’s cultural memory and, along with history and archaeology, offer a reading of a town’s historical landscape. In particular, I will focus on the town of Bagamoyo, which is located some 70 km north of Dar es Salaam. Within the current socio-political Tanzanian context, Bagamoyo is a rather unimportant town, with ca. 30,000 inhabitants. Yet in the last three decades of the 19th century it was the most important caravan terminal and seaport on what is now the Tanzanian coast, and for some years it was the capital of German East Africa. From local informants and tourist information material it was possible to collect nearly 30 street names. In the article, these names are analysed from a linguistic point of view and the naming motives given by local informants are presented. In the main part of the article the naming motives related to the caravan trade and German colonization will be compared with historical and archaeological sources. Here it can be shown that some of the names actually preserve memories which had otherwise been lost in the community’s memory and/or contemporary written sources.