The Northern Province is about to have its name changed. Recently released has been a short-list of four possible new names, the favourite being Limpopo. Such a name, with its derivation the Ndebele “iLimphopho”, meaning river of waterfalls, slides easier off the tongue than Northern Province, but is hardly justification for a process that is principally a way of wasting unseemly amounts of
money that might otherwise be spent on more pressing needs.
A somewhat puzzling justification for the name-change has been offered by the Northern Province premier, Ngoako Ramatlhodi, who argued that there are many Northern Provinces elsewhere in the world and which made our own one less “marketable”. With this absurdity Ramatlhodi’s renaming committee chairman, Edgar Mushwana, agreed and added that the new name will also “unite people”.
Like many other banal coinages of the advertising and public relations industry, “marketability” is cousin to verbal brutalities like “consumerisation” and “infrastructurability” and is as meaningless as the bland assurance that a new province name will “unite” anyone. It’s far more likely to confuse.
Anyway, Ramatlhodi might be interested to know that, apart from Northern Provinces, there are also 18 other Londons, 11 Manchesters, 19 Oxfords and five Romes in the world. Kimberleys total three, Worcesters another three. Even trusty old Bellville has two matches. Are these due for change too?
I don’t know how many other bodies are currently at work in similar exercises around the country, save for one in the Eastern Cape. Last week a rather entertaining remark was made by the head of that province’s renaming task team, Jongela Nojozi, who said Port Elizabeth had been named after “a British queen” and therefore its name was yet another colonial remnant due for replacement.
In fact Port Elizabeth is named after Elizabeth Donkin, wife of a Cape Colony governor. Since Port Elizabeth was already up and running when the current Queen Elizabeth ascended to the English throne, a contemporary naming tribute to Elizabeth I would have had to be made in the early 1600s, or about 50 years before Jan van Riebeeck arrived in the Cape. I do wish important people like Nojozi would check before they blather.
But, while on the subject of the Eastern Cape, it might interest Jongela to know his own Alexandria shares its name with 12 others in the world. There are seven other Aberdeens, two other Queenstowns.
Whatever the reasons, the eagerness for post-transformation “renaming” is of dubious cause. As well proved by the Cape Town street-renaming debacle, the motives behind these exercises are invariably stained by political ambitions. Apart from all other arguments forwarded in defence of the fashion, an almost invariable hostility is introduced when local proponents talk of expunging “colonial” reminders from the map, often further qualified as “hated colonialism”.
Here there is a foregone contradiction. When you are a South African politician speaking on a cellphone while riding around in a German car wearing a natty Armani suit-tie-and-matching-handkerchief and having your health seen to in a private clinic, it is sheer luxury to talk about wiping out despicable colonial residue. If we are going to expunge things colonial then surely among the first to go would be these hateful dregs, even though the results can be disheartening. The courageous refusal by traditional surgeons to employ wretched colonial antiseptic procedures writes off about 50 Eastern Cape penises a year.
As one of select colonial stock I find it annoying to hear today’s politicians imply — rather selectively — that much brought to this continent by my forebears is abhorrent. Still, it is very diverting to watch an array of Zimbabwe military officers ranting on about the loathsome British but all wearing British-style uniforms generously draped in Royal Fusiliers epaulettes, adorned with campaign ribbons that could have come right out of Burma. Robert Mugabe, himself, likes to wears a clutch of medals on that frightful Harrods-Cairo sack he insists on wearing.
This blatantly obvious side to the argument is sedulously sidestepped by commentators lest they affront or offend. But, as Shakespeare said in the wonderful discourse on virginity at the beginning of All’s Well That Ends Well: “There was never virgin got until virgin was first lost.” Nor is there ever colonialism shed without colonialism still welcome.
Blinder liberals like to believe that an accommodation of traditional and imported cultures and doctrines can happily be effected under the all-embracing fiat of “multiculturalism”, but ignore the equally all-embracing perils that accompany it. The trouble with multiculturalism is that as yet it’s too loosely defined and too often used as a political and social wastepaper basket. If you can’t understand it, throw it into multiculturalism. It saves a lot of politically correct legwork.
Very brave or very stupid be he who tries to segregate the acceptable from unacceptable in our colonial endowment. Wholesale name-changing is not the answer. By all means take the Strijdoms and Malans off the airports, the Verwoerds and Vorsters off the rylaans, but for pity’s sake leave the rest alone.
Archive: Previous columns by Robert Kirby