Uthini Magqebz? The initial shock and slow joy of the new place name

I was surprised, but ultimately thrilled to learn this week that my old home town of Port Elizabeth had been renamed to Gqeberha.

This is in keeping with the renaming of place names across our continent ever since the liberation from colonialism.

The renaming of places is itself a form of liberation – perhaps in more of a psychological than a material sense.

Naming has great power. It comes with a host of cultural values and attitudes. Ideally, place names would be organic; they should spring from their environment, granted by the people who live in the place, with reference to local features, or perhaps inhabitants.

Naming is also a declaration of ownership, which makes it such a fraught, political act. The first thing an invader, explorer or coloniser will do upon occupying new lands – sometimes the only thing – will be to name the place.

After that, might come the process of establishing dominance, so that the imposed name “sticks”, as it were.

This has been the norm across Africa, and indeed everywhere that colonisers and conquerors have exerted their power and exploited the people and places they discovered. It is high time this damage be undone.

As someone descended from coloniser stock, I cannot fully grasp the pain that must come with having the place of your birth carry a name imposed by an invader, in a foreign tongue, or honouring a foreign person.

It’s logical that renaming a place is a deeply insulting act. It comes either from an attempt to subjugate a people by demonstrating your power to reshape spatial identity, or else it’s a type of ignorance.

Pragmatism and reconciliation have seen many of our country’s colonial and apartheid place names survive long beyond their sell-by dates – certainly long after the advent of democracy.

It is therefore difficult to make a case for retaining any of these names. There will be some cost to making new road signs, curious foreigners will be confused for a while and clumsy white tongues will initially battle with pronunciation.

However, none of these are worthwhile reasons to deny the people of a country the right to name their places in a way that reflects their own culture, history and habitation of the land of their birth.

Gqeberha is merely the latest in a long line of South African places renamed since the establishment of Gauteng province began the process. The Eastern Transvaal became Mpumalanga, Pietersburg became Pholokwane, Grahamstown is now Makhanda…

The sky did not fall when this happened and once the initial shock dissipated, those new names came to feel more comfortable, more natural… They just fit better.

Today, if someone speaks about visiting Verwoerdburg, or Rhodesia, or being from “the PWV”, we quite rightly look at them funny. Those names seem like something from another time; relics, historical flotsam cast away by a culture with no further use for them.

That is not even to mention the offence which some of these terms now carry, glorifying the racist exploiters and genocidaires that infect our region’s history.

These names are indeed relics, remnants of a dark and toxic time. That they have survived this long is perhaps because we have had more important things to do in our ongoing nation-building project.

But inevitably, their time has come. Already, as I sit in my lounge, joyfully bellowing “Gqeberha! Gqeberah! Gqeberha!” at no one in particular, the appellation Port Elizabeth sounds impossibly quaint, outdated and even obliviously racist.

So I will continue my glacial progress in isiXhosa pronunciation and embrace the new name. Despite the initial grumpiness from some pale reactionaries, I know everybody else will accept it eventually too.

And thus we remake a nation. By reshaping an exploitive economy, claiming the right to rule ourselves democratically and, yes, by naming our places in a way that reflects the culture of the people who live here.

Hagen Engler.

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