A petition to rename roads honoring British colonial figures has gathered thousands of names.
Speke Road, for example, is named after the British explorer John Hanning Speke, the first European to reach Nyanza, one of the great African lakes in 1858 and who re-named it after Britain’s Queen Victoria.
Africa is still home to cities that still hold on to names given by colonial administrations., Makubuya points out.
“Take Nigeria’s Port Harcourt for example — the city of more than 3 million people got its current name in 1913 from Frederick Lugard — Lugard just felt like honoring Lewis Vernon Harcourt who was then secretary of state for the colonies by naming a whole Nigerian city after this one man.
How else can one explain why Africa’s largest freshwater lake is still named after the British monarch Queen Victoria?”
