As SA commemorated the Sharpville Massacre this Thursday, many at Robert Sobukwe’s hometown were up in arms over a seemingly trivial issue: the Pan-African Congress leader’s given name. Born into a working class family in Graaff-Reinet, Sobukwe’s early life was the standard township hardscrabble.
Despite these travails, he completed school, ultimately enrolling at the South African Native College at Fort Hare in 1947. Two years later he became the institution’s Students Representative Council’s first president before going on to become a teacher, lecturer, and a founding member of the PAC. It was in this capacity that he earned the sobriquet ‘The Prof,’ owing to his reputed oratorical and intellectual aptitude and also where on 21 March 1960, he wound up an active participant in the tragic Defiance Campaign.
Aimed at showing a finger at apartheid’s cumbersome pass laws, the campaign was planned as a peaceful revolt. Sobukwe figured it would be simple enough: protesters would simply not carry their passes or would present them to authorities, thus purposely opening themselves up to arrest. What he had not foreseen was how hard the police would come down on this pacifist action. When the dust had settled they’d fired indiscriminately at the dispersing crowd, leaving 180 injured and 69 dead. For his role, Sobukwe was handed a three year prison sentence and which, following the so-called ‘Sobukwe Clause,’ saw him sent to Robben Island for a further six years.
Upon his release in 1969, he was banished to Kimberly where he died nine years later due to complications from lung cancer on March 1978.
He was buried in Graff-Reinet yet over four decades later, his name has been the talk of the town. This follows news that ‘the Gem of the Whole Karoo’ might soon be undergoing a name change. Late last year the Eastern Cape Department of Sport Recreation Art and Culture proposed ‘that the names of four towns in this province be changed,’ reported BusinessTech. These are: Graaff-Reinet’s name be changed to Robert Sobukwe or Fred Hufkie;
Adendorp to Kwa Mseki Bishop Limba;
Aberdeen to Camdeboo and
Nieu-Bethesda to Kwa Noheleni.
As a result, subsequent public hearings earlier this year were met with both severe resistance, some support, and a lot of unanswered questions. Chief amongst these is what yardstick informs the province’s Provincial Geographical Names Committee (PGNC) in choosing which names to propose to change. From listings, to road signage, businesses rebranding; christening a town all anew doesn’t come cheap. In fact, from a purely monetary point of view the people who are likely falling over themselves because they stand to gain from the windfall are tender bidders. Surely, goes a popular argument, SA would be better served if these funds were diverted to worthy causes, say the millions who are struggling well beyond the bread poverty line.
It conjures up the former minister of the arts, Nathi Mthethwa’s incredulous idea to put up a R22m flagpole. Due to the public outcry, his plan died amid the negative sentiment. How about the government’s plans to sponsor Tottenham Hotspur to the tune of R900million? That’s nearly a billion bokke. Makes one wonder if some of these guys aren’t living is some parallel Scandinavian universe, where the trains run, the people work and there’s virtually zero inequality. But I digress….
Port Elizabeth was officially changed to Gqeberha in 2021. Ironically, despite an overwhelming argument to simply change the name to eBhayi, a name that had been used by both African and Afrikaans-speaking (die Baai) people throughout the country. Instead, the powers that be went for the hard-to-pronounce Gqeberha, denoting the Xhosa name of the Baakens River that flows through the city. I doubt any person outside of the place had ever even heard of it and swathes of the population still grimace when having to nail down the first syllable ‘gqe,’ leaving one to wonder how the poor Brit or Japanese tourist gets on with it.
But of course, this isn’t just about money or pronounciation. There is the delicate matter of decolonisation and all that which is a legitimate aspiration. Common logic dictates that these symbols of colonialism, apartheid and white supremacy should be removed but is that objective only realizable through the complete obliteration of the history of others? Also, some of these proposed name changes have no reference to subjugation or figures of oppression.
Nieu-Bethesda comes from a Biblical scripture, John 5:2-4. Kwa Mseki Bishop Limba (the proposed name for Adendorp) is the founding Bishop of the Bantu Church of Christ. But surely there are members of other religious denominations or sects who may feel isolated by this. First thing that came to this writer’s mind is: might the PGNC be populated by members of the church. This all pales in comparison to the name Nieu-Bethesdans might soon be slapped with. Google had no answers to what the name means but it sounds like a common Xhosa word for ‘hell’ (kwahele) but perhaps that’s how the local African folk define their material conditions in the town. Who knows?
You’d remember the #RhodesMustFall movement at the University of Cape Town which captured the world’s attention and quickly spread to university campuses across the world. Its proponents went so far as demanding that the university’s name be changed and would often refer to it simply as ‘the university currently known as Rhodes’ in their wait for change. Given the figure after whom the institution is named – Cecil John Rhodes – the students’ gripe is more than fair. But what we must ask is what will come in its place? That essentially ought to be the most crucial part of the debate.
It would be counterintuitive to replace one divisive name with another that merely foments further division. At the rate that the PGNC is going pretty soon the country’s map may look like a completely different country in the coming two decades. The current modus operandi suggests that the entire Karoo, all our neighbouring towns and Colesberg itself will have disappeared. One cannot see places like Britstown, Hanover, Noupoort, Cradock and virtually every other town or village that hasn’t yet been renamed surviving the onslaught.
Despite the massive sentiment against the changing the names of both Grahamstown and Port Elizabeth, government still went ahead and did it anyway. This then raises the question: are these consultations and public hearings merely a formality to give the impression of a government that listens to its people but nonetheless decides to act contrary to their wishes?