The desire to rename our country’s streets and public spaces after liberators and humanitarians is an understandable one. There is an inherent, homegrown logic to it, much as there is in deciding to dry a freshly bathed Chihuahua by putting it in the microwave for 10 minutes.
Of course it goes without saying that the signs have failed to keep up with the times. It is still possible, in many parts of South Africa, for blacks to ask whites for directions, and to be told with straight faces that they need to double back to Jimmy Kruger Way, keep going past PW Botha Boulevard until they find the friendly prospect of Hendrik Verwoerd Avenue. Had Oswald Pirow — the man after whom one of Cape Town’s main highways is still named — and the Luftwaffe had their way, our disoriented drivers would no doubt have enjoyed the sights, smells and anti-tank barriers of Adolf Hitler Lane.
That these names remain suggests that the civil servants in charge of this transformation have precisely the depth of general knowledge and critical insight that the architects of Bantu education wanted them to have: an ironic case of an historical obscenity being safeguarded by an educational obscenity.
But there is hope. Last week the Cape Town city fathers made an announcement — a man rode up the backwater’s only cobbled street on a mule, blowing a seaweed vuvuzela — in which they suggested that, for a couple of weeks, they would be opening the debate to the place’s citizens.
In parts less culturally be-clogged and be-grachted and be-zolled — Johannesburg, perhaps — such an edict would no doubt have sent the locals flooding into the streets to wave placards bearing the names of those who are now central to that city’s aspirations: Sol Kerzner, Victoria Beckham and whoever composes the Love Pomes and Sex Tips for e.tv’s late-night sms porn racket. But Cape Town has heard it all before, and frankly it can’t be arsed anymore.
It was the Dutch who brought with them the bauble of street names that future generations of two-pit politicos found so irresistible; but for the citizens, the disillusionment would have started hard and fast. Establishing a Heerengracht and a Buitengracht, and running canals all over the new town, through which a vibrant zoo of bacilli romped, added a certain plague-ridden, toe-jammy hint of Holland to the Cape. But any delusions of continental grandeur would almost certainly have been diluted by the sorts of street names that spring up like mushrooms in a sailor’s sock wherever commerce meets the sea.
Modern maps give no hint at past indiscretions, but it is almost certain that 17th-century Cape Town was a warren of insalubrious names and places. From the brothels down on Vrotvingertjestraat, where pimp Piemp Poggenpoel handed out flyers promising ‘vernietentieten” to anyone able to pull five hairs out of his wife’s beard, to the lethal eateries on the banks of the Vreetenpoepenkakkenrukkenvrekken Gracht, seagulls skimming the festering surface where cheese wheels drifted among the bloating forms of last night’s diners.
Three centuries later, squalor had become hallucination, as the nationalists retreated to bosberade, smoked Mandrax at their log bar, and saw a Lavender Hill where there was only a scrubby plain, a Lotus River where no flowers grew and no water flowed, and an Ocean View where their was neither an ocean nor a view. (Indeed, one has to consider that the reforms of the De Klerk regime were the result of a weekend getaway in the Drakensberg for senior National Party officials, a four-hour session of smoking buttons accidentally leading to fevered babbling being captured in Hansard by a stoned stenographer, typing on all fours as Sokkie Wat Pomp blared on the turntable.)
At last, another occupation has come — even though it is a legitimate one, Cape Town has seen too many to ever really believe in such ideas as permanence and belonging — and with it will come new symbols and names. Some will be fitting and noble, others will be nothing more than sordid patronage. But the Dutch colonised deep and well, because at no point will anyone ask whether or not street names and signs are fitting tributes to the liberator, or why it is that statues end up as nothing but toilets for pigeons, or street signs landmarks for drug dealers.
Which is precisely the trouble. When you graft a memory on to an urban space, you condemn it to being reduced to the same grimy, banal and forgettable state that defines the modern city.