The lobby opposed to name-changes is deceitful

The name-change process is also a service delivery matter. Those who delay it are just as bad as those who delay the delivery of houses, roads, water and electricity.

By Madibeng Kgwete: posted on 04 August 2007

In the letter, “We need more service than we need names” (The Star, 04 September 2007), Howard Drakes suggests that government must stop worrying about changing names and concentrate on “addressing service delivery backlogs (housing, roads, water and electricity), job creation, youth development, education, crime, etc”.

A few paragraphs down the same article, Drakes contradicts himself thus: “The issue of name changes is ultimately a political one. It is a matter of how we write and remember history. The history books in this case, however, are being written by the hands of the elite, on both sides of the name-change divide”.

Drakes ignores the fact that the sensitive name-change process is also a service delivery matter and that those who delay it are just as bad as those who delay the delivery of houses, roads, water and electricity. Non-delivery in the changing of apartheid and colonial names is no better than non-delivery of any other service.

Much as they need houses, roads, water and electricity, the poor people of our country also have pride and identity. The notion that all of poor people’s needs are material is nothing but deceit. And there should be no excuse for putting the name-change process on hold, for this process seeks to reclaim the rich culture of the natives.

Of the importance of culture, Franz Fanon wrote in his essay, Reciprocal Bases of National Culture and the Fight for Freedom, that, “in the colonial [one can also add apartheid] situation, dynamism is replaced fairly quickly by a substantification of the attitudes of the colonising power. The area of culture is then marked off by fences and signposts”.

Fanon went further thus: “While the mass of the people maintain intact traditions which are completely different from those of the colonial situation … the intellectual throws himself in frenzied fashion into the frantic acquisition of the culture of the occupying power and takes every opportunity of unfavourably criticising his own national culture”.

Consciously or otherwise, the lobby opposed to name-changes in South Africa is working tirelessly – ostensibly in the name of better service delivery and saving taxpayers’ money – to shift focus from the need to change what Fanon correctly described as the “culture of the occupying power”.

Those opposed to name-changes must read Fanon, for he correctly observes that: “The struggle for freedom, which aims at a fundamentally different set of relations between men, cannot leave intact either the form or the content of the people's culture. After the conflict, there is not only the disappearance of colonialism but also the disappearance of the colonised man”.

In South Africa ’s case, the scars the people bear from colonial and apartheid battles are slowly disappearing, but the “colonised man” will live on for as long as he resides in a country that can easily be mistaken for a European outpost because of its foreign names and culture.

What we should be worried about is the fact that the name-change process is currently focusing too much on the naming of places after recent historical figures. We must ask ourselves: Are we forgetting our pre-colonial history? Are we underplaying the role of our heroic tribal kings who fought gun-wielding European occupiers with bows and arrows? Have we forgotten our ancestral roots?