Municipality had its new name before meetings
The vice-chairperson of the Eastern Cape Provincial Geographic Names Committee (ECPGNC), Zukile Jodwana, says the three processes conducted by the Makana Municipality between 2007 and 2013 were to do with the renaming of the municipality and had nothing to do with the renaming of the city (“Group’s objection seeks to maintain the status quo”, September 11).
The municipality was already named Makana in about 2000.
Why would we have been having processes about the name of the municipality more than 10 years later?
Those processes were triggered by the statement by the then Makana mayor, Phumelelo Kate, that “the name Grahamstown must go” and the opening sentence of a notice issued by the municipality shortly afterwards which announced, “The Makana Municipality has embarked on a programme to determine whether the name of Grahamstown should be changed”.
Processes that followed were conducted jointly with the ECPGNC whose chairperson was a member of the naming task team.
Jodwana knows that the outcomes of those three processes were not in favour of changing the name of the city.
They proved that Grahamstonians wanted to keep Grahamstown Grahamstown.
It is true that Keep Grahamstown Grahamstown (KGG) refused to be part of the most recent “process” conducted by the ECPGNC in early 2016 and we refused for very good reason.
We told the ECGPNC that it could not continue to have processes until it got the predetermined outcome it was looking for.
Unlike the previous three processes, which were proper processes with public meetings in all municipal wards, the ECPGNC’s “process” was no process at all.
The Supreme Court of Appeal has defined what constitutes a proper public consultation process and a single meeting attended by fewer than 100 persons from one section of the community fails the test miserably, as Jodwana well knows.
The KGG did not refuse to be part of the SA Geographical Names Council’s ( SAGNC’s) meeting with objectors in February, as Jodwana alleges.
We actively engaged with the SAGNC about the arrangements and helped to publicise the meeting.
But our expectations proved correct: the bias of the SAGNC chairperson, Johnny Mohlala, was blatantly obvi- ous and the meeting was nothing more than a sham to make it look as if the SAGNC was taking the objections seriously.
Jodwana claims, as we have heard before, that all legal requirements were strictly adhered to by the ECPGNC and the SAGNC in recommending that the name Grahamstown should be changed.
As in the case of the renaming of Queenstown and other Eastern Cape towns, virtually every legal requirement has been flouted, including the publication of an [allegedly] defective notice in the Government Gazette.
Grahamstown is still Grahamstown and will remain Grahamstown. If Jodwana really believes that the name change, if it happens, will survive a court challenge, he is only fooling himself.
The KGG has consistently and constructively based its submissions on the foundational value of reconciliation as enshrined in our nation’s constitution. This is best served by retaining the name Grahamstown alongside that of Makana/Makhanda as the name of the municipality.
The ECGPNC’s determination to change the name of Grahamstown as well as every other colonial name throughout the province, is naked retribution in the name of transformation, the very opposite of reconciliation.
J C McConnachie and S Ndumo,
joint co-ordinators, KGG
Zukile Jodwana states that geographical place naming “was a deliberate process undertaken by our colonisers to ensure that they imposed their hegemony on those they conquered”.
If the purpose of renaming Grahamstown is to right the perceived sins of the colonisers, why then rename Grahamstown Makhanda?
The Xhosa are not indigenous to SA and imposed their hegemony on the Khoi.
Colonisers who arrived overland are surely as culpable as those who arrived from overseas.
If Colonel John Graham, who selected the site for the town and drew up the preliminary plans for it, is not a suitable person by reasons of his being an interloper, then by the same token neither is Makhanda. So, if we are to set matters right, the town must receive a Khoi name.
But why stop at names? The language in which Jodwana eloquently expresses himself is the product of those same colonisers, as is the very newspaper in which his views were published – and the list goes on and on.