A Rose By Any Other Name . . . Would Apparently Anger Some White South Africans
A couple of weeks back I wrote about controversy over the renaming of the South African town of Louis Trichardt. It seemed obvious to me that a country that had so long seen the majority population trampled under the foot of the white minority ought to have the fairly fundamental right to reclaim the naming rights of the country’s towns, cities, and institutions. Some members of the formerly privileged population disagree.
The naming controversy is back in the news. This time the issue is the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s (SABC’s) running of ads referring to “Tshwane,” an African name meaning “We Are All One,” and by which the municipality (but not the city proper) of Pretoria has also been known for some time now, as Africa’s leading capital.
The complainants in this case are from AfriForum, which represents itself as a civil rights organization for minorities, which means for South Africa’s whites, that is affiliated with the equally white-dominated union “Solidarity.” (Enjoy, if that is the word, their website here.) Color me dubious about AfriForum, a group that grabbed the mantel of protector of civil rights only well after the demise of one of the least-civil rights oriented governments in modern history finally gave way to multi-racial democracy. The AfriForum staff is all white, and among their many complaints with the current dispensation are as follows: “Specific problem areas, e.g. the government’s growing obsession with race, political interference in sport, race-based welfare subsidies, crime and the ill-considered changing of some place names will receive attention.”
Let’s forget the irony of white South Africans of a certain age lamenting an obsession with race for a moment. Let’s instead keep in mind that the race obsession of arguably the most race-obsessed regime in human history necessitated serious attempts at transformation in sport, in welfare policies, and in the rest of South African life, and that crime is a function of poverty as much as anything, and that poverty was pretty much built into the apartheid system. As for the “ill-considered changing of some place names,” this is only a viable complaint if you sincerely believe that an overwhelmingly African country ought to continue on with names imposed by a white master class, indeed that whites are entitled to prevail when it comes to place naming. That is, suffice it to say, a peculiar (and rather self-serving) rationalization.
AfriForum might seem more sympathetic if it appeared to be trying to cross racial lines in a country so historically beset by racial division overwhelmingly fomented by the white minority. Instead it just comes across as ranging between shrill and tone deaf. AfriForum is not racist, per se, from what I can tell, but its commitment to civil rights seems selective and at times nearly parodic.
August 5th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
[…] I have previously discussed the controversy over changing names of municipalities, streets, and the like in South Africa. These debates tend to be so contentious because they operate at the nexus of history, identity, ethnicity, and mythology, a potent brew anywhere, but particularly pungent in post-Apartheid South Africa. […]
October 19th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
I find the renaming proposals offensive for a number of reasons.
First of all many settlements in South Africa have different names in different languages, for example Cape Town is Kaapstad in Afrikaans and iKapa in Xhosa and I see nothing wrong with this, it is only natural. However what is being done is not to give official recognition also to Black African names, but to try and erase Afrikaans names. There is a big difference. The process seen to be targetted at Afrikaans place names in particular, rather than English ones.
Naturally such an issue is emotive when people feel their identity, language, history and culture are under attack. If names of ‘European’ origin are unacceptable and have to be eliminated, then South Africans of a ‘European’ cultural background (not necessarily white) are entitled to wonder whether they are wanted anymore in South Africa.
It should be remembered that apartheid ended after white South Africans voted by two to one to reject it and accept majority rule. Too often this is forgotten and it is imagined that they are a uniformly unreconstructed group of apartheid racists. It was accepted that there would have to be major changes after such an unjust system. On the other hand white South Africans were to be accepted as still part of South Africa rather than simply foreign ’settlers’. After all, they had been in the country for more than 300 years and the Afrikaans language and nation had come into being here.
The extreme ‘Africanists’ and other Black nationalists did not accept this and only considered Black Africans to be ‘true’ Africans. They did not want equality, they wanted the country fot themselves alone and the whites out. This is seen to be the spirit of the renaming campaign in opposition to inclusion or reconciliation.
If one goes to more ‘enlightened’ parts of the world it is usual to find that minority languages and cultures are respected. You see for example that Basque place names appear next to the Spanish ones in the Basque country, Welsh and English are used in Wales etc. This is what South Africa should aim for, rather than a policy of obliteration.
As for crime I believe it is simplistic and facile to say that crime is a function of poverty, bordering on the apologetic. South Africa is far from the poorest country in the world, yet it is one of the worst plagued by violent crime. Similarly, though poverty is being reduced (though not fast enough), crime still increases. We read also that while five or ten years ago most juvenile criminals were arrested for aquisitive crime, the majority today are guilty of assault, murder and rape.
We are not talking simply about crime which poverty stricken people resort to in order to survive, the crime that most traumatises South Africans is violence for the sake of violence, sadistic crime, murder, torture and rape. We have the awful situation where a very large percentage of South African women (and mainly Black women) are raped, in which rape has become endemic. Where children and even babies are raped. Where people are murdered seemingly for no reason at all, or for the most trivial reasons. Where people are tortured, for example with electric irons. There is a culture of a minority of the population that places no value in human life. It should also be noted that Black people are the main victims of these crimes and they too are angry about them, though the foreign media pays more attention to white victims either because they tend to be more articulate or the foreign media identifies with them more.
October 20th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
Ed –
Thanks for weighing in. I find your comments clear and intelligently stated even if, ultimately, wrong.
Very few of the naming controversies have involved changing the names of places that were simply Afrikaans names. But what is it issue — and I would maintain rightfully so — is the matter of places named after individuals who established or maintained white supremacy. Welcome to democracy, my friend. A very strong historical case can be made for NOT honoring Louis Trichardt with a city name, or, for that matter, Cecil Rhodes with a university. It’s unfortunate that Afrikaner Nationalism created what it did, but now those same Afrikaners have to face that historical legacy. I’m hardly of the mindset that Afrikaans=evil, and Afrikaner history is far richer than most of the world would recognize. Nonetheless, a defining, perhaps the defining, aspect of that history and tradition is a ruthless white supremacy that hit its apex/nadir with Apartheid.
And let’s stop the nonsense about the white South Africans who in 1994 voted to end Apartheid. It’s a very self-congratulatory argument inasmuch as during the actual years of Apartheid white South Africans supported the National Party at rates of over 80%. In fact, the only serious challenge to the NP came after the attempts to implement the Tricameral Parliament in 1984. Where did those votes go? Not to the Progressives, but rather to the Conseravtive Party, which became the official opposition and which was to the right of the Nats on the issue of race (The Nats still maintained 79% support even as PW Botha and the Securocrats unleashed their Total Strategy). It’s all well and good that white South Africans could see the writing on the wall in 1994. Would that they had pushed for change before then. Instead they did not, and yet want to get credit for their verligte views after benefitting from a verkrampte mindset for more than forty years. I call nonsense on that ahistorical view of the world and I encourage my readers to do the same.
Finally, on the issue of crime, I do not believe that I have ever posed a monocaual answer to this question. So you could, for the sake of intellectual integrity, cease arguing with straw men. But no serious person, and certainly no pwerson I am inclined to take seriously, can deny that poverty plays a role in criminality. And a long legacy of Apartheid does not help. There is little evidence that many of your other assertions are true in terms of “crime for the sake of crime.” This is a complex issue that does not warrant the facile answers that you, not I, seem to embrace.
Despite my criticisms, I thank you for reading and hope that you continue to do so.
Cheers –
dc
May 14th, 2008 at 9:10 am
Hi there
I am the editor/publisher of The Potjie Pot magazine and would love to publish your articles that I found in your blog. Please advise if we may do so and if we can give the credit to you or your website. Thanks