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Change Your Life! |
Apartheid made Tshwane Pretoria and Egoli J’burg |
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August 22, 2000
JOHANNESBURG (AP) - Apartheid is gone, but South African maps are still filled with tributes to white men once hailed as heroes by the country's minority rulers. In the new South Africa, there is a move to change the map - to drop the geographic homage to a racist past and to adopt or restore African names to reflect pride in the heritage and history of the country's indigenous people. The administrative capital, Pretoria, is named after Andries Pretorius, a leader in the Boers' great trek into the interior of the country. It's unclear just which Johannes lent his name to Johannesburg, but it is certain he was white. Durban is named after a British governor, Benjamin D'Urban. South Africans, the government argues, ought not to have to live in cities named after the people responsible for their racial oppression. Even in many places where names appear to be African, the old white regime horribly mangled the spellings, says Langa Mathenjwa, chairman of the South African Geographical Names Council. For instance, Umbogintwini, a small town near Durban. It's a gibberish rendering of the proper name - Ezimbokodweni, "place of rocks" in Zulu. "It's not (just) a matter of having new names, it's a matter of restoring names that were abolished by apartheid rulers," Mathenjwa says. "We do have indigenous names for these places." The council, an advisory body created by Parliament to consider the issue, has drafted a proposal that would allow metropolitan areas to change their names by restoring African ones abolished by apartheid or picking new African names. Greater Pretoria could be renamed Tshwane and metropolitan Johannesburg could become an area known as Egoli, the Zulu word for "city of gold." The idea annoys some South Africans, who consider it a waste of time and money, and infuriates many conservative whites from the old order. "We see no reason why the old names should be changed," says Gen. Constand Viljoen, leader of the right-wing Freedom Front, a small party of mainly Afrikaans speakers. "There is no way that you can change history. If you do so, you do so at your own peril. By changing place names, you are trying to obliterate history." Viljoen says African names can be accommodated in the naming of new places, monuments and streets. However, James Selfe, of the opposition Democratic Party whose members are predominantly white, says he has no objection to changing place names that have negative associations with the colonial or apartheid eras. "City councils should be able to change their names, if that's what they want," he says. But he adds that other considerations have to be looked at, including the fact that many towns have invested large sums of money in marketing themselves as tourist destinations with their current names. Under the council's proposal, cities such as Johannesburg and Pretoria would keep their names. But the name for the metropolitan area - city and suburbs - would change. In Cape Town, the urban council decided two months ago to keep its current name for the metropolitan area as well. Renaming metropolitan areas would be just the next step in a wider effort by the governing African National Congress to consign the names of apartheid to the dustbin of history. The country has already done away with its apartheid-era provincial names, in some cases replacing them with African names. The province surrounding Johannesburg and Pretoria, the country's economic hub, was called Transvaal before the end of apartheid in 1994. Now it is Gauteng, which means "place of gold" in Sotho. Eastern Transvaal became Mpumalanga, Ndebele for "the place where the sun rises." Under the proposal for cities, local municipal councils will submit proposed new names to the Geographical Names Council. It will check the spelling and make sure there are no duplications before sending the proposal to each province's minister of local government for final approval. Michael Sutcliffe, chairman of the demarcation board in charge of defining boundaries for South Africa's redesigned metropolitan areas, says cities should not rush into changing names and should seek names that are "uniting and uplifting." Reaching that goal could be a challenge in a country with 11 official languages and a history of painful divisiveness. So far, though, there haven't been any signs of friction among the country's tribes over picking names. African names under consideration for an area generally are from the language of the tribe historically linked to that place. Others are original place names and some are widely used nicknames that are obvious replacements. The Greater Pretoria Metro Facilitation Committee has decided to propose the name Tshwane - a word with several meanings, including "We are the same." The word has roots in Pedi, Sotho and Setswana, three of South Africa's official languages. Greater Johannesburg has been flirting with changing its name to Egoli, already a popular nickname for the city that sprouted around gold mines. That decision, however, has been postponed.
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