South Africa and the United States Also Have “Singapore”Migration and Memory Behind the Place Name

South Africa and the United States Also Have “Singapore”

Migration and Memory Behind the Place Name

Source: 南非与美国也有Singapore 地名背后的迁徙与记忆

https://zb.sg/g/e5UN?utm_source=android-share&utm_medium=app

2025-08-21

Translated by ChatGPT 

Author: Liu Wenzong

Lianhe Zaobao

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On the map, “Singapore” is far more than the tropical island nation before our eyes. Across the hemisphere, on the grasslands of South Africa and the sand dunes of Michigan in the United States, the same name is quietly engraved. The three Singapores are like fragments scattered at the edges of the global map, telling stories of migrants’ longing, history’s loss, and nature’s ruthlessness.

If you search for “Singapore” on a map, almost all results point to the tropical island we know well. But if you zoom the map out—across the equator, over the Atlantic Ocean, deep into dunes and uninhabited wilderness—you will be surprised to discover that there are actually two other places in the world marked as Singapore.

One lies in Limpopo Province, South Africa, an overgrown old farm with remnants of colonial-era boundaries; the other is on the shore of Lake Michigan in the United States, once a thriving town of sawmills and dreams of a great port, now long swallowed by sand dunes, its ruins unrecognizable, leaving only a name buried in the folds of the map by the wind.

They are all called Singapore, yet they have no geographical connection—like fragments of words scattered at the corners of the earth, inadvertently preserved by wind, memory, and cartography. They were once attempts by humans to name the world, but now each has sunk into dunes, wilderness, and barren maps, leaving only a name that faintly echoes in different contexts.

There is no real storyline connecting the three Singapores. But perhaps, precisely because they are unrelated, at this 60th anniversary of nationhood, they allow us to imagine another way of seeing ourselves—about naming and forgetting, about how humans resist time’s erosion through place names, about the possibility of marking coordinates of emotion in foreign lands. Sometimes when we call a place Singapore, it is not to commemorate a nation, but to ensure that a certain feeling does not go nameless.

South Africa’s Singapore

A Place Name of Private Longing

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In 2023, Nyi Nyi Thet, a writer from the Singapore current affairs website Mothership, unexpectedly discovered through a map search that the African continent also concealed a place called Singapore.

It is located in the Mogalakwena district of Limpopo Province in northern South Africa, near the Mogalakwena nature reserve. On Google Maps, the name Singapore hangs there in isolation, clearly and coldly marked, like a silent relic. But on the ground, it is wild grass and blowing dust—no airport, no shops, no settlements, not even a formal road leading to it. No inhabitants, no voices, only the faint boundaries of an old farm, like smudges at the edge of a map, gently erased by time yet never completely disappearing.

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Nyi Nyi Thet spent months tracing the origins of this silent place name. Aside from the map marker and vague mentions in some local histories of South Africa, Singapore left almost no trace in the present. The only clue surfaced in land registry records from the 1950s: the land was once owned by a man named R.F. Binnie.

He was not without background. Binnie’s name had also appeared in mid-20th century English newspapers in Singapore—as a golfer active on local courses, later emigrating to South Africa. Here a faint thread emerges: perhaps the land named Singapore was not an arbitrary colonial mapping, but a projection of private memory—a way for an emigrant to reset a familiar name on a distant continent, to anchor emotions tied to his homeland.

Further digging revealed tender details: Binnie’s wife once wrote serialized columns for the Singapore Free Press, recording her daily life on their African farm—shadows of trees in the sunlight, wandering cattle, steam rising from rice in the kitchen. The writing was simple, yet imbued with a quiet nostalgia, like whispering the outline of another Singapore across the African plains.

Perhaps that is why the land was named Singapore. Not to commemorate a nation, but to remember a way of life, a personal journey—the fragrance of rice, the play of light and shadow, the rhythm of seasons and memories. These were what truly deserved to remain on the map as “home.”

Naming is both a subtle colonial act and a deeply hidden prayer. In foreign lands, we plant a familiar name to anchor memory in strange soil—hoping not to forget ourselves, and yearning that the place that once belonged to us might remember us in some distant echo.

Today, the land once called Singapore has been renamed Mohlareng—meaning “a place full of trees” in Zulu (Bongani). Trees have grown again, the wind sweeps the land, and years have buried personal names and letters. Yet the old name on the map stubbornly remains, like a grain of sand rolling between history and geography, never completely disappearing.

America’s Singapore

A Dream Port Buried by Sand Dunes

If South Africa’s Singapore is a trace of a private memory, then Singapore by Lake Michigan is a public geographic tragedy—its disappearance not caused by war or depopulation, but by deforestation, sand erosion, and a transnational demand for resources. It was a town swallowed by nature’s counterattack, a story of disappearance intertwined with ecological imbalance, urban expansion, and global trade.

Singapore, Michigan, lay in Allegan County between Saugatuck and Douglas, beside Lake Michigan, on the sandy ground where the Kalamazoo River flows into the lake.

In 1836, a New York land speculator, Oshea Wilder, established a settlement there named Singapore, hoping to develop this lakeside wilderness into a port city rivaling Chicago and Milwaukee.

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This was no mere fantasy. In the mid-19th century, the town briefly prospered, with two sawmills, three mills, hotels, a bank, and general stores, and even Michigan’s first school.

As a key hub of the local timber industry, Singapore was not only a busy port city but also shipped vast quantities of lumber via Lake Michigan to Chicago, Detroit, and other Midwestern cities, becoming an essential link supporting the region’s rapid urbanization.

Disaster struck silently in the autumn of 1871. That year, the American Midwest was ravaged by epic fires: the Great Chicago Fire, the Peshtigo Fire (the deadliest forest fire in history), and blazes in Manistee and Muskegon, Michigan.

To rebuild these devastated cities, enormous amounts of lumber were urgently needed. The forests around Singapore were swiftly and ruthlessly cut down. Without the protection of trees, the bare land could not resist the gales off Lake Michigan. Winds carried sand that soon engulfed the town.

The dunes advanced, swallowing streets, houses, and lives inch by inch. In less than four years, Singapore was completely buried. By 1875, the once-thriving town had become a ghost town, erased from maps and administrative divisions.

Yet memory persisted. A local story tells of a resident who refused to leave, allowing the sands to slowly cover his house. At first, he could enter through the front door; later, only through a second-floor window; until finally, when the dunes buried the roof, he left—becoming the town’s last guardian.

Today, Singapore, Michigan, no longer exists. But the name lingers quietly—on the sign of the Singapore Yacht Club, in records preserved by historical societies—silently recounting a past buried in sand.

In August 2024, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, in his first National Day Rally, cited the story of Singapore, Michigan, swallowed by sand. As an alumnus of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, he was deeply familiar with its history.

The Prime Minister drew a lesson: no matter how prosperous a city once was, if it loses respect for nature and neglects ecological protection, it will ultimately be swallowed by time and nature, vanishing without trace, like that port town buried by dunes.

This is not only a lament for America’s Singapore, but also a warning for our own. Modernization is irreversible, globalization unstoppable, but only by safeguarding the foundations of ecology can a city’s prosperity endure, rather than turn to dust in history. The winds and sands will come; how we choose to respond will decide our destiny.

Our Singapore

The Ship Sailing Forward in the Sea Breeze

In 60 years, Singapore has grown from a small port at the tip of the Malay Peninsula into a multicultural international metropolis, like a ship keeping balance in waves, steadily sailing ahead.

People think place names are fixed anchors. Yet from Limpopo in Africa to Michigan in America, those places once called Singapore remind us: Singapore is never a static symbol, but a flowing emotion and memory.

It can be a family’s homesickness, a vanished town’s warning, or a national promise of resilience and integration.

This National Day, those names buried by wind and sand remind us: today’s prosperity did not come easily. Only by holding fast to our original purpose amid change can we continue writing a future chapter of hope and coexistence.