Broadly speaking, the debate about changing place names goes like this: it needs to be done to better fit our reality and to redress historical erasures and impositions; or it is an attempt to deny history, a way for politicians to deflect attention from their failures, and a waste of money that could be better spent on real needs.
As with all such cultural and societal complexities, simplification does us no favours. Several name changes have just been effected by minister Gayton McKenzie’s department of sports, arts, culture & banning-stuff-that-might-annoy-Israel. There has been a slew of predictable responses, and the usual polarisation. Given that this is South Africa, the polarisation tends to occur along racial lines. But we need to understand that two or more things can be true at the same time.
There can be an honest, heartfelt desire to want to rub out even a little of the colonial footprint that is everywhere stamped on our country, to want to bring some of the history of the historically marginalised to the fore. And at the same time there can be self-serving politicians and grifters, from across the spectrum, pouncing on the opportunity to cause some deflective trouble.
You might have sympathy for those who feel erasing their history is not really an ethical way to resurrect and integrate narratives that have been historically marginalised. Are those who feel this way proposing other solutions, though?
Take Graaff-Reinet, as it was known until this month. Though it’s only one of several places that were renamed in the current tranche — to Robert Sobukwe Town — it’s one that has sparked the most dissent.
If you check the history section of the Wikipedia entry for Graaff-Reinet, it’s about 450 words. Not one word of that “history” mentions anyone but white people. Key words include Dutch East India Company, Cape Colony, the Netherlands, Britain, Second Boer War. Founded 1786. Named after the then governor of the Cape of Good Hope, Cornelis Jacob van de Graaff, and his wife.
The history also includes the fact that “in 1901, a number of captured Boer rebels were tried in the town for crimes ranging from high treason, murder, attempted murder, arson and robbery. Nine were sentenced to death. A monument stands in the town to commemorate these fallen Boers.”
Can we really blame people for wanting to rename a town whose history doesn’t acknowledge their existence? OK, Wikipedia history, which I hope is not the same as the history in textbooks.
At least we’re not naming towns after living politicians, like they’re doing in the US. There have been rumours that Cape Town will become Gayton-on-Sea, but that’s apparently not happening. Yet.
In Washington, President Donald Trump has renamed the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to “The Donald J Trump and the John F Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts”, and the US Institute of Peace headquarters to the ”Donald J Trump United States Institute of Peace”. Sad, to quote the great man himself.
“His picture has been splashed all over the White House,” The New York Times tells us, “on multistorey banners on the side of federal buildings, on annual passes to national parks and maybe even soon on a one-dollar coin. His name has been etched on federal investment accounts, special visas and a discount drug programme and, if he has his way, on Washington Dulles International Airport, Penn Station in New York and the future stadium of the Washington Commanders.”
Renaming South African places might strike some as an attempt to erase the history of certain people, but at least those towns will still exist in official histories. The Trumpist rewriting of history is much more aggressive.
Earlier this year, National Park Service workers in the US prised off 34 panels that highlighted the lives of people enslaved by George Washington in the 1790s, ostensibly to comply with “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, a presidential executive order designed to reframe the national narrative. Arguably, the majority of South African name changes are intended to add to the trove of our history, rather than destroy it.
Corné Mulder, the leader of the FF Plus, whose logo is an ostrich with its head in the sand, called on people to “just ignore” the name change. Quoted in Daily Maverick, he said: “Graaff-Reinet will always be Graaff-Reinet — and not Robert Sobukwe Town — to the FF Plus. The party therefore calls on the people of Graaff-Reinet, the broader Eastern Cape and the rest of South Africa to ignore the name change.
“This not only proves that limited public funds are being spent on misguided priorities, but it is also a blatant example of cultural imperialism in which Afrikaner cultural history is annihilated under the pretext of so-called social cohesion.”
(As an aside, the FF plus what? This is possibly an unconscious admission that they’ll tack any old cause onto their manifesto, depending on how the political winds blow.)
It is a gut-wrenching thing, admittedly, to have a signifier of your life suddenly obliterated
It is a gut-wrenching thing, admittedly, to have a signifier of your life suddenly obliterated. For me, the knowledge that I was born in Woodstock, the same place my mother was born, and where my grandfather bought his house for £50, somehow centres me in my South African existence.
And let’s be frank, holding on to a South African identity can be a convoluted process for different demographics. Of course, when my grandfather started living in Woodstock it was already on its second name change, having started out as Papendorp and later been dubbed New Brighton. If Donald Hodgkiss’s Woodstock Glass, a book about glass manufacturing there in the late 1800s, is to be believed, patrons of the New Brighton Hotel and the Woodstock Hotel vied for the suburb’s naming rights in 1867. The rest is history, albeit not exactly a rich history.
Speaking of history, by contrast to the Graaff-Reinet Wikipedia page, Woodstock’s history section starts: “The area was inhabited by Khoikhoi until the arrival of the Dutch in the 1600s.” It also includes the detail: “Woodstock managed to remain integrated during apartheid and survived being declared a ‘whites only’ area with the attendant forced removals and demolition of houses, as happened in nearby District Six. As a ‘grey’ area, many coloured and black people started to move into Woodstock during the 1970s and 1980s.”
It’s not much, but unlike with Graaff-Reinet, at least Wikipedia acknowledges Woodstock’s place in a contested history. Deciding if a place’s name change is justified should require a forensically rounded analysis of the name in question. But our histories need to be exposed and given equal visibility and standing if we’re going to achieve even an approximation of social unity.
Since this is South Africa, there are some unexpected turns to the Robert Sobukwe Town process. A 2024 Stellenbosch University study shows that residents across demographics opposed the name change. According to Newsday, the research consisted of interviews with 367 respondents in the town, of whom 54% identified as coloured, 27.2% as black and 18.8% as white, which presumably reflects the diversity of the community.
Typically, the report notes, people’s perspectives on name changes mirror our racial divisions, “with black respondents saying name changes reaffirm their identity and integrate historically marginalised narratives, and white respondents arguing that it erases history”.
In the then Graaff-Reinet, 83% of respondents indicated they didn’t want a name change, though black respondents (13%) were the most undecided on the issue.
Reclaiming history is never going to be a statistics game, though. Renaming a place brings new meaning to it, but it also, inevitably, erases meaning. Ultimately, someone is going to have to make a sacrifice. Renaming can be violent, or it can be reparative. What it can’t be is exclusionary. In South Africa, we are going to have to find a way to make new names belong to everyone, rather than being tokens in an endless game of who owns history.
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