Credit: Alamy

There is a town, surrounded by hills and standing in the Southern African nation of Botswana, that bears an interesting quirk.

With a population of less than 50,000, it is by no means a major urban centre in an economic or political sense, but what it does have is an interesting name. This is the town of Kanye, which is home to a constituency called Kanye West.

It is even served by Kanye Airport.

Kanye West the rapper, or Ye, has, it should almost go without saying, become an intensely controversial figure in recent years. For all the good music he’s made throughout his career, his brand has become toxic owing to his racist public outbursts. Given that, it seems quite a statement for people to name their town after him.

But that’s not actually what happened here. It is not, in fact, the case that the people of this Botswanan town were so into Kanye that they decided to name their home after him. The entire thing seems to just have been a coincidence.

Kanye is positioned a little more than 50 miles outside of Botswana’s capital city of Gaborone, and it serves as the traditional capital of a tribe of people known as the Ngwaketse. They are believed to have settled there towards the end of the 18th century.

Kanye the town, then, existed long before Kanye the rapper was even born. So the more pertinent question, if anything, is if the rapper was named after the town?

The name Kanye has been used within a variety of African cultures, with meanings such as “next in line,” “let’s give,” and “only one.” But whether or not Ye’s parents were naming their son with reference to any of these uses of the term is unclear.

There is certainly no indication that they were naming him after Kanye, the town in Botswana, nor its Kanye West constituency.