Maps and street signs

On my second day in Swaziland I slept in late, jet lagged. By afternoon I was up, and got bored of kicking around the house. So I decided to make my way into town and drop by work. I’d been there the day before, and had plotted it out on my tourist map.
Finding my way to the office was pretty straightforward, but when I got to work everyone seemed surprised to see me. They asked how I’d gotten there. When I told them I’d walked, using a map, they exclaimed, “Aren’t you clever!” I smiled and blushed, mildly confused. Those who know me well know I’m rarely praised for my navigation skills.
One woman asked to see the map, and looked at it for a long time, turning it this way and that. “Where do you live?” I asked her, pointing to the map. She said she wasn’t quite sure. “We don’t use maps very much in Swaziland,” she explained.
A few days later I got a bit confused finding my way home from work. My map lay, forgotten, on my bed. The light was just starting to fade, and I began to panic. The warnings I had gotten about walking after dark were playing like mantras in my head. So I pulled out my phone and called Thwala, the cab driver the other Canadian girls had recommended.
I heaved a sigh of relief when he pulled up minutes later, and climbed in.
“Where do you live?” he asked as we drove off.
“Wilmer Park,” I answered.
“Wilmer Park?”
“Yes, Wilmer Park. A neighbourhood on the south end of the city.”
“Where is it?”
“Ummm... Not really sure. I was lost. That’s why I called you.”
“I don’t know Wilmer Park.”
“Oh. Uh, do you know Southern Distributor Road?”
“No.”
“Railway Avenue?”
“No.”
We drove around town for about twenty minutes before we finally found my neighbourhood.
Later I found out that poor Thwala had the same experience with all the Canadian girls, none of whom were quite able to figure out how to explain where they lived. Most streets in the suburbs don’t even have names, and if they do nobody knows them. Swazis navigate by landmarks rather than signs. Maps are just squiggles on a piece of paper. Their knowledge of the city’s layout is based on experience, not on a set of symbols.
I remember discussing oral cultures in anthropology classes back in my UBC days. I never quite understood how a culture can still be considered oral when the population is totally literate. Most of the countries I’ve travelled to before have a rich literary tradition going back centuries. Even if many of their citizens can’t read, the culture is still dependant on the written word. Swaziland has a very high literacy rate (much higher than India’s) but is still in some ways a very oral culture. I guess the total disregard for street names is just one example of that.
A few days later an invitation to tender in the newspaper caught my attention. The city of Matsapha was looking for someone to put in street signage. Ha. What a waste of time and money that’ll be!