The case for renaming my state capital, by Donu Kogbara

This thought-provoking and slightly edited article, which first appeared in a publication called NewAfrican, was written by my friend and former BBC boss Onyekachi Wambu, a distinguished London-based author and filmmaker. Why do we continue to cling to the colonial names bestowed on our towns and cities? We do this even when the officials after whom these names given later disgraced themselves. The issue around Port Harcourt is a classic test case. What would you do if one of your most important cities was named after a paedophile? Change the name, surely, or continue wearing it as a sordid badge of honour? I asked that same question in the November 2015 issue of New African (Harcourt must fall. – Free Online Library) about Port Harcourt, my birthplace, capital of Rivers State, and the important oil city of the Niger Delta. Remarkably, eleven years later, Port Harcourt is still there.

Now Kio Amachree, an Old Etonian, a Kalabari (an Ijaw subgroup) son of the Delta and indefatigable anti-corruption campaigner, has taken up the cause. Amachree has written repeatedly demanding that Rivers State remove the name of Lewis Vernon Harcourt, the British Colonial Secretary, after whom Frederick Lugard, British imperialist and first Governor General of modern Nigeria, named the new port in 1913. The history is almost comical in its colonial arrogance. Lugard wrote that, “in the absence of any convenient local name”, he wished to call it Port Harcourt. Yet local names existed. Indeed, Lugard’s own correspondence referred to Diobu or Iguocha. Harcourt, who never visited Nigeria, graciously replied that it gave him pleasure to have his name attached to the port. Some pleasure. More than a century later his name remains attached to one of Nigeria’s great cities. And who was Harcourt?…