Move on to other name changes

The announcement in June that arts and culture minister Nathi Mthethwa had approved the belated name change of Grahamstown to Makhanda was predictably greeted with a social media storm of outrage.

Equally predictable, the reaction reinforced the polarisation of SA society along racial and privilege lines.

Now that the move has been made, it is time to deal with other geographical names that should have been changed in the transition to democracy.

The slow pace of transformation of place names and the objections from minority groups to any limited attempt at name changes is a constant reminder that ours was a negotiated settlement in 1994 and not a revolutionary takeover.

After nearly a quarter of a century, the continued existence of colonial and apartheid place names is a daily reminder of the stalled transformation process in SA.

It speaks to the persistence of unequal power relations in society.

These names are evidence of a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of reconciliation upon which arts and culture policy during the Nelson Mandela presidency was based – essentially a onesided view of reconciliation in which blacks were expected to forgive whites for apartheid while allowing them to hang on to the privileges they had accumulated.

The initial attempts at transformation of place names were based on three main policy pillars: changing offensive place names, restoring the correct spelling of African place names that had become Anglicised or Afrikaans-ised, and changing place names that represented the history and values of colonialism and apartheid to reflect the democratic dispensation.

The former Northern Province succeeded in short order in changing the name of the province, and of a large number of towns and cities.

The Eastern Cape, in contrast, failed to change the name of the province, despite the best efforts of then premier Makhenkesi Stofile.

DeAnglicising and “deAfrikaans-ising” corrupted spellings of indigenous place names was more successful – as in Bhisho, Mthatha, Dutywa, Qumra and Centane.

However, the implementation of the third phase, despite some lengthy consultations, petered out through a combination of resistance, vested interest and official indifference.

Part of the problem is that provincial geographical place name structures intended to guide renaming processes, undertake consultations and make recommendations to the minister of arts and culture were inadequately capacitated.

The nature of the various consultation processes also led to dead ends as they became subsumed in a welter of service delivery and other complaints, allowing those opposing name changes to stall proceedings.

The absence of clear criteria and principles upon which name changes could be based further hampered consensus.

Changing place names is guided by the SA Geographical Names Act, but the legal framework, important as it is, is only one aspect.

It requires political will to intervene to redress imbalances in society and a willingness of citizens to embrace a different future.

Now that the tolofiya (prickly pear) of Grahamstown has been firmly grasped, let us renew efforts to change other names too.

Let the national department of arts and culture work with its provincial counterparts to develop a set of principles and criteria to guide a renewed consultation process and get on with it.

Those objecting to name changes appear to have failed to grasp that changing geographical names was an integral part of establishing colonial hegemony.

Transforming place names should, therefore, form part of decolonising society.

There is nothing sacrosanct about colonial and apartheid place names. Indeed, some colonial commentators were themselves critical of the process of wholesale replacement of indigenous place names.

In 1820 William Burchell wrote, “But the aboriginal [Khoikhoi] names ought, on no account, to be altered; they should, on the contrary, rather be sought for, and adopted, as being far more appropriate to Southern Africa, than a multitude of foolish names of modern imposition.”

Most settlers and colonial officials uncritically accepted the naming and renaming of towns and geographical features as an essential step in the creation of the colonial order.

Critics also display amnesia in remembering that the apartheid government itself was active in renaming places to suit its own ends.

Changing Roberts Heights to Voortrekkerhoogte and Sophiatown to Triomph are but two of the most wellknown examples.

Peter Raper, one-time head of the onomastic (the study of the origins and history of place names) research centre at the HSRC, explained in his Dictionary of South African Place Names that from 1939 a place names committee worked on standardising place names to the satisfaction of the government of the day.

This included changing indigenous names to make them easier for whites to pronounce (like changing Qumra from Komgha to Komga) and creating Afrikaans equivalents for “foreign” names (such as OosLondon).

The continued existence of so many untransformed place names is an affront to the dignity of the majority of the people of SA.

● Denver Webb is an historian and heads the strategic resource mobilisation office at Nelson Mandela University. He also serves on a ministerial task team for the transformation of the heritage landscape in SA.

Changing geographical names was an integral part of establishing colonial hegemony