South Africa

Changing the names of places, infrastructure, and institutions in South Africa tends to be a flashpoint for controversy, as I’ve discussed in this forum on several occasions. A recent story from the Daily News gets at what some might see as the lighter side of the shifting nomenclature phenomenon:

The name eThekwini is to be consigned to history, but Durban will live on. That is the word from Mayor Obed Mlaba.

But he is on a mission to change the current “eThekwini” name for the whole metropolitan area because the name is embarrassing.

Mlaba said the meaning of eThekwini, which refers to the testicles of a bull and was the traditional name given to the shape of Durban bay, had caused him a fair amount of international embarrassment.

Mlaba was speaking after the tabling of the long-awaited policy document that will govern the roll-out of the second phase of street, building and natural landmark renaming.

Senior council officials are confident eThekwini will give way to the proposed new name, KwaKhangela, by the end of the year. Mlaba however reiterated that the city’s name, Durban, would remain.

“If you unpack what eThekwini means, it just doesn’t sound right. A lot of people overseas have asked: ‘What does eThekwini mean?’.

Then you start saying, ‘Well, you see, ummm, please pass me the milk for my tea’ because you are not proud to unpack what it means,” Mlaba said.

“But also, KwaKhangela is the name the royal King Shaka gave to this region when his military training ground was where the University of KwaZulu-Natal is now situated. It means ‘watch out (for any attackers)’, so as a military person he saw this part of the world being very strategic,” he said.

And although tight lipped on when the new name may be adopted, Mlaba said the change would “come out” of the policy document adopted on Tuesday.

Opposition parties were concerned that the ruling ANC planned to do away with the name “Durban”, but Mlaba said that had never been the intention. Durban was the name of the city, while KwaKhangela referred to the metropolitan municipal area.

I find the compromise aspect of some of these naming debates fascinating and laudable. But I suppose it’s the bull testicles you’ll remember from this particular episode.

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. 

About a year-and-a-half ago I tried to wrestle with some of these issues with regard to both naming but also urban identity in South Africa. Given that there is once again momentum to officially change Pretoria’s name to Tshwane, I’d like to revisit some of those thoughts:

One time when I was staying at a hostel in Cape Town in 1999 I overheard a young woman . . . dismissing South African cities as not being African at all, but rather too European. It was a pretentious thing to say from someone who, come to find out, had spent all of three total weeks in Africa, but felt fully comfortable pontificating at length about the fundamental nature of Africanness, urbanness, and African urbanness.

That said, I guess I get a sense of what she was saying without saying it — she had some sense of what is and is not African, and Cape Town did not seem to be it — too white, too cosmopolitan, not tribal enough. In sum, she revealed her own stereotypes about Africa, but couched them in dismissive platitudes. She had her images of what African cities should be, some exotic idea fixe, and when Cape Town fell short of her Heart of Darkness view of Africa, it was Cape Town’s failure, not hers. And of course what better way to solidify one’s credentials as a fan of all things Africa than to blithely dismiss one of the world’s truly great cities by referring to it as “too European”? Then again, I’m the sort of retrograde anachronist who LIKES London, so I am contemptible to begin with.

I could not help but think of that vexing conversation when I spent all day wandering Pretoria, or Tshwane (”We are all one”), as it is also known now. Pretoria was the bastion of Afrikanerdom. It was the heart of Paul Kruger’s Zuid Afrikansche Republiek, later the Transvaal, and Pretoria was the administrative capital of the country, and still is. So it is shocking to wander Pretoria’s streets and look around and think, much like that young woman who so fetishized Africanness, “this is an African city.” I don’t think I meant it in the same way that she did, and a little part of me lamented that white South Africans seem to have forsaken the city that still is in many ways the emotional heart of Afrikanerdom. It is here in Pretoria that the Vortrekker monument Still draws crowds and evokes tears, as it did on Friday when, sadly, too many white South Africans chose to honor the covenant of the past rather than reconciliation with it. Maybe Pretoria is now a “more African” city than it must have been in 1965 if one adheres to a color by numbers view of African cities. And if this transformation is so, it is, on balance, a good thing. But it says a good deal about too many South African whites that it has become this sort of city not because of the demographics, but rather because of white abandonment. To be sure, whites still work in the city, but they come in during the day, park in protected environments, work during the day, and drive to their posh homes in the suburbs at night.

That said, it is nice to see the bombastic statue of Paul Kruger serving largely as a place on which pigeons shit and African children play, blithely unaware of its symbolic past, save perhaps when bothered, verkrampte Afrikaners wait for these cildren to move when they make the pilgrimage into the city to get their photo of their great founder of the Boer republic. I took a picture today of two young black children playing on one of the four Boers that serve as part of the foundation for the sturdy base. I hope it comes out. The picture, that is, not the pigeon shit.

The controversy over what Pretoria or Tshwane will officially be called hits the heart of what it means to be a South African in the new century. The past is past, to be sure, but it is not merely history. And fundamentally, these questions are as much about the past as they are about the present. The past seems capturable, containable, controllable in ways that the present, with its messiness and contingency and infinite possibility (which is itself both exciting and scary), does not.  For those South Africans reluctant to embrace change, whether Pretoria is Tshwane is less about what the city means now than what it once meant, and if what it once meant is so easy to eradicate, that has profound implications for a small slice of white South Africans and their identity in what is at times a frightening new nation.

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.

One of the mandates of the New South Africa was to try to Africanize many of the names of places and institutions. After all, in that predominantly African country, why would the new, non-racial democracy want to perpetuate the names of the heroes of the white regime, the very people who had disfranchised Africans, who had perpetuated segregation and brought it to its apogee with apartheid? South Africa has eleven official languages and one of the goals after 1994 became to give each of them greater representation.

And so slowly but surely names changed. The very structure of the country shifted with the transformation of the four old provinces to nine new ones, some with names such as “Limpopo” and “Mpumalanga.” Universities and schools and public facilities changed names, often to honor liberation heroes, at other times simply to symbolllically transform those facilities into something more indigenous. Pretoria took on the name Tshwane, though many in the country still refer to it by its old name.

The process of revisiting nomenclature has not always been an easy one. Language and names are powerful cultural forces. When a movement emerged to change the name of Rhodes University, the “Oxford on the Veld,” arguably the most Anglophile institution in all of South Africa, the backlash was fast and fierce. The titular foundation of the school, based on that most emblematic of colonial settlers, Cecil John Rhodes, endured. Rhodes University’s problematic name lives on where so many others gave way.

So it is not entirely surprising that naming continues to be a source of controversy. In June 2003 Arts and Culture Minister Pallo Jordan ordered The northern Limpopo town of Louis Trichardt to change its name to Makhado. A group of businessmen brought a case against the name change. In an earlier decision they lost, but today the Supreme Court of Appeal reversed the decisions of lower courts. Makhado is once again Louis Trichardt.  

So who was Louis Trichardt? He was a Boer leader of the Voortrekkers, the intrepid Boers who left the Cape Colony to stake out their own claim to South Africa’s frontier. The Great Trek of the 1830s is at the center of the great founding myth of Afrikanerdom and Trichardt is one of the apodictic figures in that mythology. The myth of the Trek fueled the myth of Afrikaners as a chosen people. And of course a central aspect of this mythology is the white supremacy that came to characterize to much of Afrikaner society, especially in the political realm.

Trichardt, whose expedition took him all the way to Delgoa Bay (what is now Maputo, Mozambique), died of malaria along with nearly two dozen other members of his expedition. His name lived on largely because he was the only major Great Trek leader to have kept a diary.

I am not one to deny a people their history, their legends, even their blemishes. But given the role that the Great Trek played in establishing Afrikaner nationalism, and given the role that Afrikaner nationalism played in establishing apartheid, I’m not sure that the New South Africa has any responsibility to continue to commemorate those whose legacy served to perpetuate, refine, and perfect the highest stage of white supremacy. Louis Trichardt died deep in the heart of Africa. Perhaps it is time that the town named after him let that name die as well.