ON THIS DAY
FEBRUARY 27
1803 The Great Fire of Bombay, India, starts in a pub.
1827 The first Mardi Gras celebration takes place in New Orleans. Mardi Gras, meaning Fat Tuesday, refers to events of the Carnival celebration, beginning on or after the Christian feast of the Epiphany (Three Kings’ Day) and culminating on the day before Ash Wednesday (Shrove Tuesday). The name reflects the practice of the last night of eating rich, fatty foods before the ritual fasting of Lent.
1902 Australian soldiers Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant and Peter Handcock are executed in Pretoria after being convicted of war crimes. 1942 An Allied strike force is decisively defeated by the Japanese Navy when they lose 13 warships in the Java Sea.
1990 Black Tot Day takes place in the Royal New Zealand Navy with the ending of the traditional rum ration that the Royal Navy started in 1740. Other navies which abandoned the practice were the Royal Australian Navy in 1921, the Royal Navy in 1970, and the Royal Canadian Navy in 1972.
1991 US President George HW Bush announces that ‘Kuwait is liberated’, ending the first Gulf War.
2004 Shoko Asahara, leader of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo, is sentenced to death for the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin gas attack that killed 13 people.
2004 The bombing of a Superferry, which leaves 116 people dead in the Philippines, is the country’s worst terrorist attack.
2010 An earthquake strikes central Chile, killing 525 people. It triggered a tsunami which struck Hawaii shortly after, caused significant damage in Japan and in San Diego.
2014 Chaos erupts after the Swedish Public Employment Service mistakenly invites 61 000 people to a job interview in Stockholm.
2018 Famous actress Barbra Streisand says she had cloned her dog – twice.
2019 The smallest baby boy ever born goes home from a Tokyo hospital. At birth he weighed a mere 268g.
2020 The Dow Jones Index suffers its biggest points fall in history, closing down 1 190.95 points in New York amid concerns about Covid-19. | THE HISTORIAN
IT’S only 1 062km between Tweebuffelsmeteenskootmorsdoodgeskietfontein and Gqeberha, according to Google.
It should take you just over 13-and-a-half-hours to drive from the one to the other. Yet, this week, you’d have been forgiven for thinking it would be faster to get to Mars.
Tweebuffelsmeteenskootmorsdoodgeskietfontein is a farm in North West Province about 20km east of Lichtenburg. It’s famous for being the longest place name in South Africa. It’s probably one of the most difficult to get your tongue around for people who don’t speak Afrikaans.
Gqeberha was the name of the river that runs through Port Elizabeth, until Arts and Culture Minister Nathi Mthethwa gazetted it as the new name of Port Elizabeth, along with a host of other new names for towns in the Eastern Cape – and all equally resplendent with Xhosa clicks.
Changing names is symbolism, nothing more and nothing less. As it was in 1948, when South Africa witnessed the first of what would be a wholesale raft of name changes – of institutions, buildings and places.
The outrage on social media over the latest changes has been fierce, especially by South Africans who still can’t be bothered to learn how to properly pronounce names, but instead unilaterally anglicise them.
Critics have asked what the point of changing names is, when the places formerly known as PE, Uitenhage, King Williamstown, Maclear and Berlin, are largely, if not entirely, dysfunctional. It’s a typical South African misdirection. The two issues aren’t related.
Granted. Changing the names won’t make them better managed. Only holding the officials and elected representatives to account will, but railing against a name change because Gqeberha is supposedly more of a tongue twister than Tweebuffelsmeteenskootmorsdoodgeskietfontein, speaks volumes about the complainant – and none of it’s good.
Maybe if we all band together to finally pronounce these names properly, we can find the common ground to fight against things that really affect us – municipalities being run into the ground and state capture to begin with.