Introduction: Place names in Africa: Colonial urban legacies, entangled histories

Enframing the collective volume, this chapter elaborates on the distinctiveness of this volume and its contribution to recent critical place-names studies in terms of aims, scope, geography and methodology. It also provides an indept historiographic analysis in the field of toponymy against the background of (post-)colonial urban environments in Africa. Implying on a variety of toponymic inter-crossings between time spans, spatialities, scales and (post-)colonial legacies, the advantage of using the relational analytic approach of the ‘entangled’ in this context is brought into light.