ICYMI – Gee: A party to celebrate a mistake

2025/07/22 Leave a comment

More on ill-advised naming decisions:

…Sankofa Square is the obscure new name for Yonge-Dundas Square, the one-acre public space at the corner of Yonge and Dundas streets, right across from the Eaton Centre. Sankofa Day, its organizers tell us, is another name for the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition.

In 2021, the city government decided to erase the name Dundas from the square bearing his name. It was a time when statues were being toppled and historical figures cancelled in the name of social justice. 

Henry Dundas was a leading British statesman of the Georgian era. His critics say he was responsible for delaying the end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. His defenders say he was a sincere opponent of slavery who orchestrated a tactical delay in parliament to pave the way for eventual abolition.

City councillors brushed aside these complexities and voted to rename the square, though not the street (which would be too expensive). Various new names were kicked around. One suggestion was Lightfoot Square, after the iconic singer who played many times at Massey Hall around the corner. But, no, that would have been too easy.

Instead, the city struck a committee: the Recognition Review Community Advisory Committee, in fact. After what the group that runs the square calls “two years of careful work,” it announced its choice. Yonge-Dundas Square would become Sankofa Square. 

Torontonians were understandably bewildered. They still are. What or who is Sankofa? The square’s website explains that “Sankofa (SAHN-koh-fah) is a Twi word from the Akan Tribe of Ghana that loosely translates to, ‘go back and get it.’” The phrase “encourages learning from the past to inform the future.”

A-ha. Not surprisingly, the name has failed to catch on. Does anybody ever say, “Meet you at Sankofa Square?”

The name has no connection to Toronto or its history. Worse, after the name came out, critics pointed out that the Akan people themselves once kept and traded slaves. Awkward….

Source: A party to celebrate a mistake

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Chris Selley: Toronto’s Dundas debacle proves education matters, even in a pandemic

2024/06/22 Leave a comment

Valid points:

…On the latter point, especially with a world of information a mouse click away, I am very sympathetic. You can know history’s names and dates and understand nothing about it, for example, or you can draw a blank on the names and dates but have a very firm grasp of history’s overall arc and its relevance for today.

And on that point, this week, Ontario offered up a case study to show where crappy education, especially in history, can lead us. Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow’s executive committee, the last step before city council, approved plans to rename the city’s Yonge-Dundas Square — think Times Square but even more antiseptic and soulless — as Sankofa Square.

Sankofa is a Ghanaian term referring “to the act of reflecting on and reclaiming teachings from the past, enabling us to move forward together,” CBC reports. The rebranding is framed as a sort of recompense for the city having named it previously after Henry Dundas, an 18th-century abolitionist politician who, among other feats, managed to invalidate all slave contracts on Scottish soil.

But Dundas disagreed with other abolitionists on whether it was best as a practical, political matter to try to abolish slavery immediately or incrementally. And that was enough to get him cancelled in Toronto, just as Egerton Ryerson was cancelled before him on the spurious charge that he helped design an abusive residential-school system for Indigenous children.

Councillors exhibited sub-zero levels of Sankofa in debating the matter, it must be said. Coun. Chris Moisie accused one anti-renaming deputant of being a racist. Non-Black councillor Gord Perks complained that the opponents just don’t understand anti-Black racism.

Well nor does Toronto City Council, if it’s stripping an abolitionist’s name from a public square as an apology for slavery.

Education matters. It separates us from the apes and grounds us in a basic shared understanding of how the world works, and worked in the past, and it informs debate on how it should work in the future. By rights, the COVID nightmare should have produced a call to arms: Let’s get serious about education again. Some, however, seem prepared to use it to speed up a race to the bottom.

Source: Chris Selley: Toronto’s Dundas debacle proves education matters, even in a pandemic

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