They got the wrong guy
Toronto’s plan to rename a major street missed the obvious target
The City of Toronto is planning to rename Dundas Street, but here we focus on Yonge Street, named after a slave smuggler and disgraced governor of Cape. Our question is: Why was Sir George Yonge — a notorious slave trade sympathizer — not at the top of the list for re-naming Toronto streets?
The iconic Yonge Street in Toronto was named after a British aristocrat whose incompetence earned him the nickname “The Lofty Twaddler.” Sir George Yonge ultimately ended his career in disgrace over his involvement a scheme to smuggle 800 slaves into the Cape of southern Africa for personal profit. [McCall Theal, G., History of South Africa (1795–1834), Swan Sonnenschein, London, 1891, p. 59]
Ironically, it was the Secretary of State Henry Dundas who had him fired for that, after receiving reports that Yonge took bribes in exchange for allowing the illegal import of 800 slaves from Mozambique.
Writer Nick Dall describes these events in an op-ed piece in the Globe and Mail. He notes that Yonge had previously drawn Dundas’s scorn for other corrupt practices, which had prompted an earlier but unsuccessful attempt to get Yonge fired. Dundas wrote at that time:
His conduct … has in such a variety of particulars been so wild and extravagant as to render it impossible to continue him in that government without exposing this country to the imputation of being indifferent to the concerns of that most important settlement.
The King declined to act on Dundas’s first complaint, but another opportunity soon arose. A friend of Dundas’s at the Cape sent him reports of a secret scheme by Yonge to allow a local merchant to smuggle slaves from Mozambique into the colony, in exchange for payment of £5000 (with inflation, more than £700,000 in 2023) [McCall Theal].
Dundas decided that Yonge had to go. He went directly to King George III and insisted that Yonge be fired. The Marquess Wellesley did the same. This time, the king obliged.
You can read more about Sir George Yonge, and Henry Dundas’s condemnation of his corruption and incompetence, in Nick Dall’s pithy column in The Globe and Mail:
Opinion: Why is Canada’s longest street named after a monument to mediocrity? — The Globe and Mail
Nick Dall is the co-author of Rogues’ Gallery: An Irreverent History of Corruption in South Africa, from the VOC to the ANC, in which “he lifts the lid on 350 years of fiendish corruption in South Africa.”
