The EFF wants to rename the Kruger National Park. Is the motive a genuine desire to remove the reminders of a brutal past? Or is the party, seeking relevance, simply doing what the Libs of TikTok do in the US by pushing people’s buttons and triggering rage?
If the latter, then AfriForum and others have reliably helped the red berets succeed. Never mind that the proposed name change may hurt the economic prospects of people who might otherwise be party supporters, it’s the performance — from both sides — that counts as “politics”.
There are a few corrugations on this road, not least of all tourist confusion, and the actual cost of changing the name ... someone will have to supply all those expensive new road signs, for example.
The saga also dispenses with some of the detail. Paul Kruger, president of an agrarian white republic, may have started the ball rolling by stomping on those of his constituents opposed to a game reserve where their right to slaughter animals was outlawed, but the South African War necessarily diverted his attention.
It was left to that hatchet man of the British Empire, Lord Alfred Milner, to get the park back on track once the shooting stopped (and one buffalo note says Kruger would have probably preferred to see the land burn rather than have it run by a former British soldier).
That was James Stevenson-Hamilton, the park’s lionised (sorry) chief warden for 44 years.
The EFF wants the park to be renamed Skukuza, which incidentally is what the Tsonga people, who were pushed off their land to make way for the animals, called Stevenson-Hamilton.
The word apparently means “to turn upside down”, or slightly less offensively, “sweep”. And so here we are. Meanwhile, how about some Skukuza rands? Anyone?
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