1Every year, the South African Geographical Names Council (SAGNC) receives applications for geographical names to be approved by the Minister of Arts and Culture. Most of them are names for new entities such as post offices and property developments (both residential and industrial) or residential areas such as rural villages that have not been standardised before. Some of these names are new, while others are old names, such as that of a farm on which a suburb is being developed or the traditional name of a village now to be officially recognized for the first time. A smaller number of names are ones that are proposed to replace present official names. Beyond the jurisdiction of the SAGNC, but vaguely subject to government policies, are names of entities controlled by provincial and local authorities such as streets and squares. Outside any control are the names of the rapidly multiplying informal settlements, only a few of which (such as Crossroads in Cape Town) end up being approved and gazetted.

2Although it is common to hear complaints among whites that black government authorities are changing many place names– jokes circulate by word of mouth and on the Internet to this effect– it must be stressed that the number of changes made since 1994 is not very large, compared, for example, with Zimbabwe after independence, Czechoslovakia after World War II, or East European countries and republics of the former USSR after its dissolution. As recently as April 2007, Pomerania in Poland announced that it was planning to change another 200 Communist-era names.1 In fact, the African National Congress (ANC) and the national government have no formal policy on changing names, leaving it to provinces, local communities and government departments such as Water Affairs and Forestry to propose changes to the SAGNC, while municipalities do what they like about street names. Newspapers often report spokespersons as saying that more changes–as many as thousands–are in the pipeline, but so far, those officially gazetted can be described as a trickle.

3Lack of leadership and guidance, a lack of political sophistication, ignorance and conservatism have meant that people have not seen the need for changing or the opportunity to change names. For example, it was only after some local authorities saw what names others had chosen for themselves when they were established in 2000 that they realised they could have been more proactive. Only then did Boesmanland in the Northern Cape change to Khai-Ma, while others changed to the names of political figures, such as Frances Baard for Diamantveld. The ANC ward councillor for Motherwell in Port Elizabeth ridiculed criticism of NU addresses in townships in 2006, countering that the initials stood for ‘neighbouring unit’, whereas they are in fact an old apartheid term meaning ‘native unit’.2 Although the residents of Stinkwater chose the name Refentse (‘We have won’) for their post office in 2000, when the Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs, Thoko Didiza, presented title deeds to 2000 residents there in July 2004, she proudly announced, ‘Stinkwater should no longer be considered an informal settlement, but rather as Stinkwater township’.3 Attempts by provincial authorities in KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga to get municipalities actively involved in changing names had, by 2004, largely failed, as had the City of Tshwane municipality’s efforts to elicit suggestions from ward councillors and local residents for names for the 14 000 unnamed streets in the black townships.4

4Since the first application for a change of a political or cultural nature was submitted to the SAGNC in 1993, different kinds of renaming have taken place. An obvious change has been to replace personal names that are offensive to some people. They may be fairly distant historical figures, such as Commandant-General Piet Joubert (1831-1900), after whom Pietersburg was named, or recent figures, such as former prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd, after whom many entities were named, the most prominent being the Hendrik Verwoerd Dam and Verwoerdburg. Other names that have been replaced are non-personal names in European languages and Afrikaans, such as Library Gardens in Johannesburg and Blyderivier/Blyde River. A third category is names that are changed because their spelling is perceived to be inconsistent with the correct orthography of the source language. Umtata, for example, has become Mthatha.

5Various kinds of names have been chosen as substitutes. Some are, in turn, personal names, which may be of historical figures, such as Makhado for the former Louis Trichardt, after the leader of the Bavenda (d. 1897) who led them in their opposition to the Boers, or recent notables, such as KwaMandlenkosi, formerly Sidesaviwa, after a youth leader in Beaufort West, Chaka Mandlenkosi Kratchi, who died in a clash with police in 1985, and Beyers Naude Square, the erstwhile Library Gardens.

6When non-personal names are chosen, they are usually ones that preceded white settlement or were previously unrecorded. Pietersburg has been given the old name for that place, Polokwane (‘place of safety’). The Hendrik Verwoerd Dam is now the Gariep Dam, after the original Khoi name for the Orange River, and the Blyde River has had its original name in the Sepulane dialect of Sesotho sa Leboa, Motlatse (meaning the ‘full’ river) restored. When Verwoerdburg was to be replaced, a public referendum chose an almost-new name that was similar in style to the high-spirited or quirky names often chosen for new entities in South Africa: Centurion, the name given nine years before to a new local cricket stadium. A few name changes are translations into African languages of English or Afrikaans names. Naboomspruit (‘the stream by the euphorbia tree’) has simply become Mookgophong, ‘euphorbia’; and the local authority for Ixopo chose for its name Ubuhlebezwe, isiZulu for ‘the beauty of the land’, which was inspired by the famous opening words of Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton: ‘There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it’.5

7Geographical names are symbols, and symbols have played a large part in building a new, united nation since 1994.6 Yet strikingly, the government has never produced a statement of national policy on names, apart from a Cabinet decision not to allow the giving of names of living people to geographical entities, including streets–a decision that was never conveyed to the SAGNC and received only passing mention in newspapers. Instead, one can deduce the official view from policy statements referring to other national symbols or utterances of political and government officials that may be applied to names as well.

8Official statements on the national orders are a guide. In the ‘Call for Designers to Design New National Orders’ issued by the Chancery of Orders in the Presidency in 2003, designers were invited to ‘contribute to South Africa’s rich and diverse identity’.7 The website on the national orders, which were introduced in 2002 and 2003, states:

South Africa has taken many strides away from its past of exclusion and discrimination on the basis of sex, colour and creed. The country has been steadily moving forward in a direction that reasserts our humanity. In this march towards humanity, a new culture of human rights and a respect for the dignity of the human spirit have become characteristics of South Africa.

One of the symbolic moments of the exodus from the past was the raising of the new flag in 1994. This moment aptly affirmed the pride and dignity of an unfolding country and a celebration of humanity. Another was the unveiling of a new Coat of Arms on 27 April 2000 that embraced the collective historical essence of the people of the country. In so doing, a new aesthetic that takes consideration of Africa and her symbols became part of the new culture that informs a South African rebirth.
The new national orders have been conceived in the spirit of that rebirth.8

9Government statements emphasise the historical dimension of symbols. Thabo Mbeki set the tone in his famous speech on the making of the nation, ‘I am an African’, at the adoption of the new Constitution of the Republic of South Africa on 8 May 1996.9 He began his invocation of the ancestors of the peoples of the country with ‘the Khoi and the San, whose desolate souls haunt the great expanses of the beautiful Cape’. This is consonant with the resurrection of Khoi names such as Gariep, particularly noticeable among the names of local authorities adopted in 2000 and subsequently. Andile Xaba, a chief director in the Department of Arts and Culture, asserted in 2003, ‘South Africa’s heritage is one of the government’s major concerns, ’ and he drew attention to the government’s support for various historic sites and museums and the repatriation of the remains of Saartje Bartmann. He said that his new director general, Itumuleng Mosala, ‘sees the arts as vital for establishing social cohesion; he recognizes them as important rallying instruments in the building of a common nationhood’.10 This is the department of which Dr Pallo Jordan is now the minister, who has already had to handle some tricky proposals for name changes. He has approved the straightforward–political–change of Johannesburg International Airport to OR Tambo, but has put on hold the much more complicated request to change Pretoria to Tshwane, which involves controversial historical and linguistic claims as well as the national and international considerations that would be incurred in changing the name of the capital city.

10Most of the controversies over name changes have been about history, as might be expected from the contradictory statements on national orders: how can names equitably reflect the country’s ‘diverse identity’ and at the same time reflect a ‘collective historical essence’? A common debate is whether the Afrikaans or English name of a town should be replaced by the indigenous name for the place that existed before the town was built (and which has in many cases continued to be used informally). Whites, and particularly Afrikaners, argue that they established and built the town (ignoring the part played by black people in the building) and that the town itself has always had the name given by whites; blacks argue that there is nothing illogical about going back to the original name for the site.

11Academics point out that historical claims for an African name are often vitiated by uncertainty over the authenticity of the proposed name, such as Tshwane.11 Furthermore, African names were often preceded by Khoisan names which it may or may not be possible to identify. How far back in history should one go, and how accurate can one be? Whites come with their cold logic and adherence to facts, ridiculing, for example, the chair of an Eastern Cape provincial task team on place names set up in 2002 for claiming that Port Elizabeth was named after a British queen (Jenkins 2007: 187); but in the heat of campaigns to change names, angry blacks repudiate such arguments. The fact that the Elizabeth in question was actually the wife of a 19th-century governor of the Cape does not affect the outrage provoked by colonial names.

12One response of white people is to acknowledge that some names recall British or Voortrekker leaders who persecuted indigenous people, or events such as the Battle of Blood River, but argue that one cannot wipe out history. On the other hand, occasionally, a white person is prepared to acknowledge that these hurtful names should go. Peter Bruce, editor of Business Day, wrote an editorial in which he took up a conversation he had had with President Mbeki:

He [Mbeki] described how he had begun to take walking breaks around the country, to discover its many wonders on foot. He displayed a bewilderment, however, that so many of the places he visited were still named after people who chased black South Africans off their lands.
This is a passion of mine. I am embarrassed by the temerity with which the subject of name-changing is approached. There are probably only a handful of places in South Africa named after a white person who wasn’t a land-grabbing murderer. The fact that Grahamstown, Harrismith and, say, Durban, are still named after John Graham, Harry Smith and Benjamin d’Urban is appalling...
Does anyone seriously expect of black South Africans that they should reconcile themselves to the honour bestowed on these hoodlums? What kind of people would they be if they did?12

13Jasper, son of Oswald Pirow, the former cabinet member and Nazi sympathiser commemorated in Cape Town’s Oswald Pirow Drive, and Anna Boshoff, daughter of Hendrik Verwoerd, have both expressed themselves resigned to seeing their fathers’ names removed, since the world has changed, although it is a pity that specific contributions of theirs to the welfare of the nation, which certain names commemorated, should now be forgotten (Jenkins 2007: 114 and 127).

14Arguments that focus exclusively on the historical merits of a particular name are bound to lead to an impasse. It would be more helpful to look at the broader, synchronic picture of the pattern of names. Such an approach would show that in parts of the country there is a large discrepancy between population distribution and the cultural origin of names. For example, when the local authorities were established in 2000, all the towns that became the seats of the municipalities in the Free State had Afrikaans names,13 whereas 88 % of the population of the province was black.14 No wonder that all except one of the 25 municipalities chose a black name for themselves, ignoring the existing town names such as Koffiefontein. The Msunduzi city council reasoned that the Voortrekker and British street names of the city did not reflect the cultural composition of the residents and the crowds who fill the city centre every day. The council took a line that is worth considering as a norm for the whole country, saying that some names would have to go to allow for a more representative distribution of history, languages and cultures. It took the sensible decision to change innocuous names like Commercial Road (Jenkins 2007: 139). It is hard to see how whites could have objected to the justice of this decision, though they did.15

15Other proposed place name changes that are close to the hearts of black people, affecting their identity and pride, are those intended to correct spellings. The spelling of many names in indigenous languages does not conform to the current official orthographies of South African languages, for various reasons. They were usually first written by whites who could not distinguish the phonetic subtleties of the language, and in many cases before an orthography had been established. But even those written according to the recognized orthography of the time may have become outdated because of subsequent changes to the orthography. Whatever the reason, black people see the spellings as insulting, saying the names have been ‘abused’ or ‘corrupted’.

16This eventuality is foreseen in the United Nations Resolutions on the Standardization of Geographical Names, compiled for the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN), of which South Africa is a member. But the sum effect of the resolutions is ambiguous. They recommend that ‘the spelling of geographical names be as much as possible in accordance with the current orthographic practice of the country concerned, with due regard to dialect forms, ’ but, on the other hand, that ‘unnecessary changing of names be avoided.’ These opposing recommendations are to some extent reconciled by the recommended principle that the names authority should take into account the ‘elimination of objectionable names’.16

17The United Nations clauses are reflected in the Handbook on Geographical Names of the SAGNC.17 The country has a precedent for both changing spellings and retaining old spellings: after Afrikaans replaced Dutch as an official language in the 1920s, most Dutch spellings of town names were changed, but a few such as Stellenbosch and Volksrust were retained. Legalistically minded people who would like to see names managed in an orderly fashion according to worldwide principles may well deplore giving in to pressure, often from ill-informed hotheads, to change spellings, but one cannot help sympathising with lovers of African languages who hate to see ‘ugly’ spellings. Ezimbokodweni (river of round grinding stones) is so much more euphonious–and true to its meaning– than the colonial approximation, Umbogintwini. Since 1994 a few names in the Eastern Cape and Mpumalanga have been corrected, and KwaZulu-Natal has given notice that it will submit a substantial list, but even so a very large number of names will remain untouched.

18One of the reasons there has not been a greater rush to change spellings is that linguistic experts in the SAGNC and the language committees of the Pan South African Language Board (PanSALB) are aware that they disagree among themselves and that certain points regarding the orthographies of African languages have yet to be resolved. Orthographic aspects of names in African languages can be highly technical, beyond the ken of ordinary people. Among the 284 names that the local authorities chose in 2000 (which were never submitted to the SAGNC for vetting) were many that were patently wrongly spelled. Ironically, this time around, the mistakes were not the fault of the maligned missionaries and colonialists, but presumably of mother-tongue speakers, or, in the case of Khoi names, were the product of someone’s fantasy. Some were subsequently corrected, a prominent example being the municipality of Pietermaritzburg, the capital of KwaZulu-Natal, which was initially called Umsundusi but is now Msunduzi.

19Orthographic reform of geographical names has been poorly handled. When the SAGNC was established in 2000, UNGEGN submitted to it a draft set of toponymic guidelines for South African languages that had already been prepared, but administrative bungling and infighting between the SAGNC, PanSALB and the Department of Arts and Culture has led to a deplorable delay in converting this document into a standardised set of orthographic rules for geographical names, which by mid-2007 remained unresolved.

20Because existing names are in one particular language, and often commemorate a person, it can be argued that they do not ‘embrace the collective historical essence of the people of the country’, as the government statement on national orders envisages. But the same may be said for names chosen to replace them. The whole exercise is fraught with the potential to be divisive, and has led to some bitter public disputes.

21On May Day, 1 May 2007, a large public march was held through the streets of Durban by, among others, supporters of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), the Democratic Alliance (DA), and the African Christian Democratic Party, objecting to the way the eThekwini Municipality was changing names of streets and buildings. It had already changed 10 and published another 181 for comment. Among them were the change of Mangosuthu highway (named after Mangosuthu Buthelezi, leader of the IFP) to Griffiths Mxenge (a lawyer murdered by government agents on the highway) and the removal of Edwin Swales Drive. What upset so many was the lack of consultation and the choice of exclusively ANC heroes’ names.

22What also hurt was the contrast with what the Cape Town Municipality was doing about changes at the same time. The DA mayor of Cape Town, Helen Zille, explained in an interview that the council had first invited the public to identify names they would like changed. The next step would be to invite suggestions from the public, and these would then be put to a non-political panel for recommendation to the Council.18

23Most opposition political parties have at one time or another objected to name changes. The most prominent and sustained opposition comes from Afrikaner political and cultural organisations. Faced with the decline in status of the Afrikaans language and repeated rulings by the courts that Afrikaans-medium schools must offer English-medium instruction to pupils demanding to be admitted, Afrikaans people have latched on to the replacement of Afrikaans place names as tangible evidence that the government is contravening the requirement of the Constitution that all official languages must be treated equitably. Popular protest became increasingly vociferous in 2006 and 2007, epitomised by the huge success early in 2007 of the young singer Bok van Blerk’s song, De la Rey, about a Boer general of the South African Anglo-Boer War. Crowds at stadiums stood to attention, some holding the old Union flag, while he sang (in Afrikaans):

... At a gallop he comes, the Lion of The West Transvaal

Because my wife and my child are perishing in a concentration camp, and the Khakis’ reprisal is poured over a nation that will rise up again
General De la Rey
De la Rey, De la Rey
Will you come for the Boers?
We are ready19

24Commentators ascribe the frenzy to the mood of young Afrikaners, who are sick of carrying the guilt of apartheid, with which they had nothing to do: they want to throw off their colonial cringe and be proud to be Afrikaans again.20 Antjie Krog, Afrikaans writer and intellectual, gives as her opinion,

The song’s popularity says to me that, in general, Afrikaners want to become part of the building of a free country, but feel sidelined because of their past. They are trying to build a meaningful relationship with the rest of the country, but battle to deal with unexpressed guilt... As mediator, de la Rey brings a third option about. He becomes the surrogate father, not to lead to uprising, but to assist children to deal with their guilt in such a way that they can successfully integrate their past into a new society.21

25Moderate Afrikaner leaders are at pains to avoid the impression that their opposition to place name changes is sectional. Prominent spokespersons are Freedom Front Plus MP Pieter Mulder and Kallie Kriel, CEO of AfriForum, the civil rights think-tank of the white trade union, Solidarity. They argue that ANC authorities, by unilaterally proposing to change names such as Potchefstroom, Lydenburg and Pretoria, are contravening the principle that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, and they want to know why only Afrikaans names are targetted. These names, they say, are of great cultural and historical significance to the whole country. Kriel attacks what he euphemistically calls ‘racial awareness’ on the part of the government (to be seen in black economic empowerment legislation) by citing Section 9 (3) of the Constitution: ‘The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race’.22

26Senior ANC figures in government, such as President Mbeki, Mosiuoa Lekota (National Chairman of the ANC) and Pallo Jordan (Minister of Arts and Culture), have shown that they are sensitive to this criticism. Lekota and Jordan have held meetings on place names with Afrikaner business and cultural leaders at which they have given assurances, and when Mulder raised his complaint in Parliament in October 2006, the President assured him the government would look into it.23 Three months later, the Pretoria News reported, ‘AfriForum had offered the government a panel of 13 Afrikaner historians and academics to help deal with name changes, and threatened legal action against the government if the offer was refused’.24 Speaking in the debate on the President’s State of the Nation address to Parliament on 14 February 2007, Pallo Jordan reiterated that the changing of place names was not a threat to Afrikaner language or culture. Most changes, he said, were corrections to spelling or the ‘resurrection’ of names that had been removed by previous regimes. Afrikaans would be protected like all the other languages under the Constitution.25 He then kept his promise made earlier in the year to Afrikaners by issuing a public invitation for nominations for a new SAGNC in June 2007, a tacit admission that the current council had been moribund for 18 months.

27The ANC leader who has most unequivocally warned against the divisive potential of changing names is Nelson Mandela. He advised, for example, against changing Robben Island to Makana Island after an earlier prisoner held there, which the Black Consciousness Movement had advocated,26 and when the parliamentary Verwoerd Building in Cape Town was changed to 120 Plein Street in June 1994, he expressed his reservations to the Eastern Province Herald:

You see, Verwoerd’s grandson is in the movement [the ANC] now and his wife is in Parliament. However much they disliked apartheid, that is still their beloved grandfather and we can’t be insensitive and just single them out. But there are certainly going to be changes and some are going to upset part of the community.27

28Allister Sparks records that Mandela was opposed to his suggestion that the Hendrik Verwoerd Dam should be renamed Lake Luthuli, after Albert Luthuli: ‘Mandela was sensitive about replacing an Afrikaner politician’s name with that of an ANC politician’.28 Nevertheless, Mandela gave his blessing to the change of Stanger to KwaDukuza and Adderley Street in Cape Town to Nelson Mandela Avenue, and also accepted the naming of the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Municipality for Port Elizabeth. The Stanger and Adderley Street changes did not go through the correct procedures, and the street and municipality names contravened government policy that the names of living people should not be used. An application to change Stanger was only submitted to the SAGNC seven years after Mandela was a guest of honour at the renaming ceremony, while the attempt to change Adderley Street was withdrawn after a scandal involving the falsification of petitions that could have been avoided if Mandela had been more circumspect about lending his name to the idea.

29The way some authorities have changed, or attempted to change, names without following to the letter the requirements for consultation laid down by the SAGNC has greatly exacerbated the feeling of exclusion among non-ANC members of the public and groupings. While Kallie Kriel was not correct to say in a radio interview that in the changing of Afrikaans names there had been ‘no consultation whatsoever’,29 there has indisputably been very little in some cases, Pretoria being the best-known example. In the case of the change of Louis Trichardt to Makhado, the Hlanganani Concern Group, comprising Tsonga people, complained that consultation had not been wide enough and that Makhado was divisive because it reflected only the wishes of the Bavenda people, whereas Hlanganani wanted the name Soutpansberg. Subsequently, an organisation called the Louis Trichardt Chairpersons’ Association, representing 51 cultural and business groups in the town, including Hlanganani, Afrikaners and Indians, went to court to have the change reversed. The High Court rejected their application on the grounds that the Act was adequate in allowing a one-month period for objections after the new name had been gazetted (Jenkins 2007: 156), but on 29 March 2007 the Supreme Court of Appeal found that there had been insufficient prior consultation and ordered that the name Louis Trichardt should be restored.30

30Another town in Limpopo failed to implement a change of name in 2002 for similar reasons. The ANC mayor of Tzaneen announced that it was to be renamed Mark Shope, after a deceased ANC activist, the son of a current Limpopo MEC. The Pan Africanist Congress objected, and the Afrikaner Eenheidsbeweging appealed to the Minister of Arts and Culture, Dr Ngubane, reminding him of his own words during a speech in December 1999: ‘We all know too well how naming can be used to divide and segregate a country.’31 After mass protests, the mayor withdrew the proposal, admitting off the record that there had not been enough consultation.

31The cases of Louis Trichardt and Tzaneen are only two of the most high-profile cases of politicians attempting to force through changes in defiance of legal procedures and the wishes of other sections of the community. Other examples of shabby local shenanigans, such as the attempt by the mayor of Cape Town, Peter Marais, to bulldoze through changing the names of Adderley and Wale Streets in 2001, can be cited. Often petty politicians harness the name of Nelson Mandela so that they can bask in his reflected glory. Such disreputable behaviour does a disservice to people who believe that a just case can be made out for some changes, provided they are handled sensitively.

32Seeing that local, provincial and national government authorities are going to continue to change names, and that changes will not please everybody, the way to minimise division and ill-feeling is to make the process open and consultative. The principles which have to be observed at all levels of government are there, in the SAGNC Handbook, along with the clear statement that they have to apply in all cases. It is up to the Provincial Geographical Names Committees to see that local councils comply. In particular, adequate consultation must take place. In this respect, and particularly with reference to entities of national importance such as the capital city and international airports, the Geographical Names Council Act is not specific enough, and now that it has been in operation for a few years it needs to be revisited. But nothing can take away the fact that after consultation has taken place and panels of experts have given their advice, politicial decisions will still have to be taken. Minister Jordan admitted that after gazetting OR Tambo International Airport he received hundreds of objections, but he did not change his mind. Political leaders need to handle every case with wisdom and justice.

33Public utterances about the need to change names and counterarguments opposing changes can be vitriolic and explicitly sectional, or they can be couched in conciliatory language that needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. Among the first official changes made by the new government were those of some large dams, initiated by Kader Asmal, Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry, in November 1994. In announcing the changes, he said:

What we have avoided is a triumphalist approach–switching one political name for another. While the temptation was there to change the names to names of other figures in our history, we decided against it. There are people, indeed they are political saints, who would be, and are, less sensitive about such things, but the mass of the people of this land would rather have something different. But not necessarily the opposite.32

34After Asmal had left office, Water Affairs and Forestry took a literally triumphalist approach when it changed the Chelmsford Dam at Newcastle to Ntshingwayo Dam in August 2000, thereby replacing the name of the officer commanding the British troops at Isandlwana with the name of the Zulu leader who defeated him. The change illustrates the deviousness, or at the least disregard for precedents and procedures, that unfortunately characterises some changes. The original name of the dam was given to it because the standard Water Affairs naming system for dams was to use the name of the farm on the left bank of the river looking downstream, and in this case the farm name was ‘Chelmsford’.

35Tracy Hilterman and Adrian Koopman, in their analysis of letters to The Natal Witness about proposals to change street names in Pietermaritzburg, say that ‘many and varied have been the reasons given by PMB residents to explain their objections’; and they observe that ‘the vast majority of letters... have been negative or have pursued a wildly tangential argument. We suspect that this is because they find it difficult to specify and articulate their objections to the city council proposals’ (Hilterman and Koopman 2003: 9). This observation confirms the impression given by public utterances, letters to the press, contributions to phone-in radio programmes and private conversation that many whites simply have an irrational resistance to change. Moderate whites are at pains to be seen to be sympathetic to the wishes of black people to give places names reflecting their languages, history and culture. But one cannot help seeing that the modifications, restrictions, reservations and qualifications with which they concede the black people’s right have an element of sophistry that disguises their conservative opposition.

36Whites are sometimes heard to make a conciliatory offer by suggesting that black names should be given to new entities, leaving old names in place. Seeing that no new cities, towns and major urban thoroughfares are going to be built in a hurry, this approach would relegate new names to obscure features, and, of course, would leave in place names that are offensive to other people, or at any rate a predominance of Afrikaans and English names for major features.

37Whites strongly object to the costs of name changes, citing indisputable evidence, and this can be regarded as a valid objection. But they are not prepared to concede that there is any validity in the argument made by various cabinet ministers, members of the SAGNC and black politicians that national symbols such as the flag and geographical names are so symbolically important that costs are simply not a factor that should be taken into account when considering whether to introduce them–in the words of the newly appointed chairman of the SAGNC, John Sikhosana, in November 2005, ‘I want to state clearly that there is no way you can quantify our human dignity and our heritage. You cannot reduce it to a commercial commodity’.33 The solution to this disagreement is perhaps to limit the scale of changes.

38A typical, spurious argument against change was submitted to the SAGNC when Mpumalanga proposed changing the Slabojet River to the Mhlambanyatsi, an old name that was explained in the application form as siSwati for ‘where the buffalo used to cross the river’. The objection was that there are no longer buffalo in the vicinity of the river. If place names were to be excluded on these grounds, thousands of animal names would have to go.

39Whites also deny that certain names have a political dimension. Oppponents of the change of Jan Smuts Airport to Johannesburg International argued not only that Smuts was an internationally admired statesman but that his name was particularly appropriate for an airport because of his pioneering support of aviation. Verwoerd’s daughter argued that his name was given to the Hendrik Verwoerd Dam because he drove the initiative to build the dam, and Pirow’s son argued that Oswald Pirow Drive recognised his father’s service to the people of Cape Town.

40Word of mouth suggests that one of the reasons whites resist African names is that they are ignorant of African languages and have no idea how to pronounce them. Repeated urban legends about the scatological nature of new names indicate the fear that springs from whites’ ignorance (Jenkins 2007: 112-114). It would greatly ease the acceptance of new names if the authorities responsible for changes, such as the SAGNC, Provincial Geographical Names Committees and local authorities, ran educational campaigns to teach whites the meanings and pronunciations of new names.

41Other objections that are raised concern the confusion that name changes create: it is argued that people get lost and do not know what entities the new names refer to. This is a relatively trivial argument, for temporary inconvenience will pass. The inconvenience could have been alleviated by making pairs of old and new names officially parallel for some years, as Wales and New Zealand have done, but the SAGNC stubbornly and foolishly refused to follow their example (Jenkins 2007: 197). Only Pietermaritzburg has done that with its street names.

42In practice, people need not worry too much about confusion because it takes government departments a long time, sometimes years, to change signboards, letterheads etc. In many places old road signs remain in place. One wonders at the excuses. Delays by government departments at all levels bely the urgency proclaimed by hotheaded politicians, while whites seem to be deliberately ignoring the changes. Nine months after the changes to spellings in the Eastern Cape had been approved, journalists of The Herald could see little change. Referring to the delay in correcting the name of the capital city of the province, Mthatha, a government spokesperson told the newspaper ‘the delay was due to budgetary constraints’, while the principal of Bhisho (previously Bisho) High School said, ‘We have not had a chance to change the spelling of the name.’34

43Nhlanhla Maake came to the conclusion, after analysing letters to newspapers and feature articles about the change of Johannesburg International Airport to OR Tambo Airport, that there will never be consensus over changing names for political reasons, and surmised that people will just revert to the longstanding South African practice of retaining parallel, non-formal names when they do not agree with the official names.35

44A serious consideration, which South Africa would do well to consider, is the international implications of name changes. Off-the-record information from the Department of Arts and Culture indicates that one of the reasons why Pallo Jordan is holding back on Tshwane is that the diplomatic community has advised him to approach the change of the name of the capital city with caution. He himself has emphasized, through his spokesperson, Sandile Memela, that Pretoria has to be given special treatment because of its national significance as the capital city.36

45As for the effect of changes on tourism, only time will tell. The South African National Parks Board has agreed that it would be unwise to change the name of the Kruger National Park (Jenkins 2007: 130), and Robben Island has not been changed to Makana Island, but Mpumulanga has gone ahead and changed Blyde River, a popular tourist region, to Motlatse in spite of many objections from whites. However, nobody is forcing privately owned tourist establishments to change their names as well, which suggests that there is goodwill, or at least a laid-back attitude to place naming, behind the political posturing. Besides, Limpopo reports that tourists love the restored African names of its towns, from Polokwane to Bela Bela, and all over the country whites have rushed to give their country estates and guest lodges colourful, euphonious African names such as Matumi Golf Estate (a place name approved by the SAGNC in 1998, taken from the name of the African teak). Although whites grumble about pronouncing African names, they get by, as their acceptance of Gauteng, with varying degrees of success in pronouncing the G, has shown. Though whites displaced many Khoi and African names over 350 years, they also accommodated an enormous number, and that is the tradition that will count.

46One thing is for certain: modern South Africa is a quirky, paradoxical country, as two statements about name changes made in November 2007 illustrate. Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote, ‘We engage in the monumental red herring of a divisive name-changing exercise. And do our heroes and heroines come from only one political group? How many of the hungry and unemployed would put that hugely divisive exercise as their priority concern?’37 Kevin Woods, a white South African jailed for 18 years in Zimbabwe, 5 on death row, for assisting agents of South African apartheid forces sabotage the ANC in Zimbabwe, observed on his recent return to South Africa, ‘I just think this is an amazing country with so much potential. People have got to work together, forget about the little things like the street naming. So what? These okes won the war, that’s what happens. The street is still going to be the same.’38

47If the province of Limpopo can boast in its advertising that it chose a name made famous by arch-imperialist Rudyard Kipling, Ubuhlebezwe can take its name from translating Alan Paton, the residents of a rural village can call its post office Morola (meaning ‘to relieve a person carrying a heavy load’) to commemorate how their ancestors helped Louis Trichardt’s party cross a mountain, Verwoerdburg’s residents can ditch its name in favour of that of its cricket stadium, and the Western Cape can rename the provincial road through Darling Evita Bezuidenhout Boulevard (after the famous drag artist), the signs are that the country is on its way to what the website on national orders calls ‘the new culture that informs a South African rebirth’.