From Ventersdorp to Mahikeng, change is inevitable
VISITING a town whose name has changed twice since last you saw it ought to count for something – a plaque or at least a T-shirt.
Except to Russians. Russians have world bragging rights. Their former capital switched three times: St Petersburg to Petrograd in 1914 for sounding too German; to Leningrad in 1924, either in love of Lenin the liberator or fear of Lenin the dictator (or his successors, he had just died); then back to St Petersburg in 1991 in a punchy lesson about this funny habit the world has. It turns.
I knew Mahikeng as Mafeking before it spent 30 years as Mafikeng and I’ve just learnt with surprise that this might not be the end.
All those terms mean “Place of Stones”. Mafeking was christened colonially. Mafikeng was not what everyone now thinks, a post-1994 change. It came in 1980. One of the first acts of the technically independent apartheid state of Bophuthatswana was to spell its capital correctly, after a century of the English mispronunciation.
Name three, Mahikeng, was the ANC’s doing and I have just learnt, while walking those stony streets, is absolutely not straightforward.
Flashback to Mumbai 20 years ago. I started off carefully avoiding old colonial language. But within a day that was knocked out of me.
Half the time “Mumbai” would get your head bitten off, and a sharp snorted “Bombay”. It turned out that Mumbai was controversially nationalist, much-unloved in larney corners. Answer, for an innocent stranger: never use the city’s name.
Mahikeng has something similar. The “h” is not actually Tswana, it’s Serolong, the language of the Barolong who were the town’s original owners. They should have called it Place of the Hot Potato.
My hosts there were teachers, mainly, and taught me plenty. To some people this change was extremely right and I couldn’t quite muster the degree of ethnic crust required to ask: “Does that mean that you yourself are Morolong?”
To many others it’s a mistake. Most people, I gather, use the “f” naturally in speech although probably the “h” in writing. But some get worked up, in both directions.
One explanation was that it was the ANC “trying to deny that Lucas Mangope got some things right” and another was “people in the Cape interfering in things that have nothing to do with them”.
I loved one answer I got when asking if tensions ever burst out: “No, of course not, we are Tswanas, the most peaceful people. We don’t go beating each other up over things like that.”
Which is a superb sentiment, but perhaps a tad optimistic. A month or two ago our screens were nightly showing arson and wreckage in protest at the provincial government.
And this week in Ventersdorp I was firmly told that “the people” are even now proudly at war with “the council”.
Ask Ventersdorpers if there are echoes of the AWB era that made this town the most famous mascot of right-wingery and everybody chuckles in a heavens-no-that-was-centuries-ago way. It sure spreads the peaceful vibe.
But 30 seconds later, chuckles go off duty. They turn to local government and allegations of enrichment and the “9 300 box”, a new meter that they claim cheats them by using their electricity payments to stock their rates backlog.
On rights and wrongs and truths here, I’m at sea. But the feel was exactly like those Arab Spring days when the issue was presented as The People versus The Dictator. Except that this dictator, they’d voted for.