The History of South Africa:
A Twice-Told Tale

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The main problem, according to Snail, is what he calls the poison of a system known as Bantu education, which the apartheid government imposed during the apartheid era in order to prevent Africans from taking many math, science and technical courses that might lead them into competition with whites for jobs. The point, says Snail, paraphrasing the words of a former South African prime minister, Hendrik Verwoerd, was to keep blacks from being educated to a point where they would “yearn to graze in the greener pastures, which are reserved for whites. This poison is still being passed on,” he declares.

Some of the most passionately impatient voices involved in South Africa’s historical debate are coming from other Africans. History professor Moloantoa Lelimo is executive director of the Lesotho School Headmasters Association. Lesotho bills itself as the only country in sub-Saharan Africa never to have been defeated militarily, though they were colonized by the British. Lesotho achieved independence in 1966.

“The process of decolonization has just begun in South Africa,” Lelimo told his overwhelmingly white audience at the SASHT gathering. “The norms, values and character of South Africa are still dominated by the oppressors of yesterday,” he added as the whites sat in stony silence. Later, Lelimo said he was disappointed by the conference. “I went, thinking there would be many black people to listen to me and was shocked to find only whites. Blacks were not there. This speaks to the question of how safe [South African] democracy is. These people don’t see the danger coming their way. Black South Africans must maximize their chances now, not wait until catastrophe strikes. I have fear they don’t see the gravity of the situation.”

Naming Heroes
On a recent visit to Cape Town, internationally acclaimed Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o echoed the warnings of Lelimo and others about codifying the history of South Africa’s nonwhite majority. “South Africa holds a special place in the African imagination,” said Ngugi, who has championed African literature in African languages. As he traveled through South Africa, Ngugi said he was saddened by the absence of recognition of African heroes. “No street or town is named for Steve Biko, one of the founders of the Black Consciousness Movement,” he said, adding, “The town where Biko was born is called Ginsberg, just outside a place called King Williamstown. The memories of South African intellectuals like Biko and Robert Sobukwe, founder of the Pan Africanist Congress, are buried under European memory in South Africa. And this runs the risk that they will not be remembered.”

“Other cities the Europeans renamed,” Ngugi continued, “include East London and Queenstown. I even came across an area called Uncle Tom’s in Soweto. And then there is the town of Berlin, named after the very place where whites met in the 19th century to carve up African lands among themselves. Why is a free South Africa allowing the African identity and consciousness that existed before colonialism to be submerged under the legacy of the colonial masters of old?” Ngugi asked, adding, “South Africans should have no apologies about changing colonial names.”

The responsibility for changing the names of places with colonial identifications has fallen to a commission under the responsibility of Thomas Ntsewa. A lawyer by training, Ntsewa is the chairman of The Geographic Names Council, established in 1998 to review and change names being used for cities, towns, rivers and mountains.

“Whites are still very much attached to the past,” Ntsewa says. “That is why this process has to proceed even if they are offended. The fear of offending the minority is an offense to the majority,” he insists. “The whites gave places new names because they couldn’t pronounce words in the local languages,” Ntsewa said. “They also gave places offensive names like ‘Kaffirs’ Kraal.’ [Ed. Note: This might be translated as “A Nigger’s Village.”] We have to ensure that such names are removed,” Ntsewa believes.

Ntsewa and other black historians note that the European urge to re-name didn’t stop with places. Most black South Africans are known by European first names, the result of an apartheid government requirement that black students have them. “Our parents used to have to conjure up names for us,” Ntsewa says.

In addition, white employers would routinely and whimsically change even the surnames of black workers seeking the identity documents required under the apartheid government. Snail, for example, tells of how his grandfather was given his surname by a white employer, who thought the worker slow in following his orders. Because the apartheid government rigidly imposed identity document requirements on black workers, Snail’s family has been saddled with the name ever since. He is in the process of changing his surname to the family’s original African name.

The Geographic Names Council last year changed the name of Pietersburg, a major South African city named for an Afrikaner general, back to Polokwane, which means “a place of safety,” in the Ndebele and Sesotho languages. Whites marched in the streets to protest the change, and some vandalized new signs after the changes were made. Most of the name changes, Ntsewa says, are simply to return them to what they were before Europeans revised them. Many places have long had parallel names, he explains. Whites used theirs, and blacks used the old names.

The commission is now focusing on the Afrikaner heartland—the South African capital of Pretoria. While the metropolitan area has already been named for a Tswana word meaning “we are all the same” —Tswane—a decision on whether to rename the city itself is only now being considered.

Tswane mayor Smagaliso Mkhatshwa, a Catholic priest, recently fielded angry calls on a radio talk show over the subject. Many white callers objected to what they viewed as the unnecessary expense of a name change, insisting that the money could be better spent on services and the needs of poor
black people.

“When the ANC first came into power,” explains Mkhatshwa, “our focus was on providing services like water and electricity. We were not obsessed with name changes. But this is a natural process in the course of transformation.”

One white Afrikaner telephoned the radio program to express bitter opposition to changing Pretoria’s name. “There is a malevolent spirit in this process of changing the name of Pretoria,” the caller said. “This is the icon of the Afrikaner people. Now that [the nonwhite majority] are in the driver’s seat they should respect the contributions Afrikaners made to this country.”

Max Du Preez, a popular Afrikaner newspaper columnist widely regarded as a liberal, dedicated a newspaper essay to the issue. “The way Afrikaner names and symbols have been discarded has caused much anxiety,” he wrote. “Some say, and not without good reason, that Afrikaners should regard themselves as lucky for getting off so easily after decades of apartheid abuse. That is true. Only a handful of extremist Afrikaners would really want apartheid to be brought back. But,” Du Preez pointed out, the renaming movement has led to much bitterness. “Afrikaners,” he wrote, “feel they are unloved and unwanted.”

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission
One of South Africa’s first attempts to deal with its recent history occurred with the formation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Created shortly after the election of the new government, the commission, or TRC, as it was known, was tasked with unearthing the extent and details of human rights abuses in the apartheid era.

For a country that had done its best to keep such matters secret, South Africa underwent a kind of public shock treatment through months of public hearings where thousands of witnesses told dramatic, heart-wrenching stories of torture and murder.

Mary Burton, a TRC commissioner, says that when so much evidence of abuse was placed on the
public record, “it became impossible to deny the effects of apartheid and the mechanisms the government used to sustain that system.” The immediate aftermath, Burton says, “led to great outpourings of guilt and a greater determination to deal with these issues. But since then, many whites have fallen back into their daily routines of denial. They have put unpleasantries in the back of their minds.”

Next page: “The memories of South African intellectuals like Steve Biko and Robert Sobukwe are buried under European memory in South Africa. This runs the risk that they will not be remembered.”—Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Kenyan writer

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