The rash naming of places, towns and many other public spaces by some influential politicians today could have serious economic costs in the future if we are not careful.
I tried to discipline myself away from entering the place-naming debate on these pages until I had this dreadful dream. In it, my almost-two-year-old daughter, Nolitha, and her friends are singing and protesting in Grahamstown, with placards on hand — “#Fictitious hero Makana must fall”.
The protest is against the misnaming of the municipality in this university town now known as Makana municipality.
About eight or nine years ago, I was warned by one of my grandmothers that this fellow Makana did not exist.
Inebriated by some dodgy literature, I concluded that my grandmother must be wrong. After all a municipality is named after this fellow.
She told me the real guy was Makhanda kaNxele. I went to double-check with other resource material and found that the real fellow is indeed Makhanda.
This year will be 195 years since the heroic Makhanda drowned trying to escape from Robben Island. Makhanda was a warrior but I will not belabour the point about who he really was; suffice it to say that he was not Makana.
Going back to this “#Fictitious hero Makana must fall”. It may sound like a petty issue, but at the rate things are going, one day future generations will wage a struggle calling for the proper naming of places.
Although there are costs to changing the branding and so on, for me the biggest economic cost would be the miseducation of our children.
This Makana fellow is deep in our literature and the people who try to justify the misnaming often refer to him as Makhandas, also spelt Makana.
I think I have a sense of what Makhanda means, but what Makana is supposed to mean beats me. Makhanda, depending on your Nguni translation, could literally mean someone who hammers something, or head in isiZulu.
A colleague from the Sunday Times joked the other day that a former ANC president, Alfred Xuma, is not Alfred “Bitini” Xuma but Alfred “Bathini” Xuma.
If we don’t get these things right, we are at risk of bequeathing incorrect history to our children.
But the Makana issue is a demonstration of the dark age in which we are living. People get excited, wake up radical and push for the change of names, but incorrectly so.
People want to get credit for changing the names of institutions and places without necessarily checking the meaning of these names and their relevance in the naming a project after them.
Take some of the academic and health institutions that are named after struggle icons. As veritable as the works of these leaders may be, sometimes one gets a sense that their names should have been engraved and would have had better meaning elsewhere, rather than the places they now occupy in history.
The late struggle icon Albertina Sisulu’s name would be well suited to a health facility in keeping with the medical health responsibilities she had to take from a young age to her adult life as a professional. Perhaps I’m subjective.
The name of O R Tambo International Airport makes a certain amount of sense as this veritable leader was a diplomat of note, a globetrotter who travelled the world to foster a better South Africa.
This is not to mean that other leaders do not deserve to have institutions named after them.
But I think there is a need to be creative with the naming process.
When one reads Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in SA, you get a sense of the type of journalist he was. Perhaps his name would be well suited to a formidable journalism school or a research centre of excellence.
It is the duty of those in power to use their naming powers in a relevant manner and their failure to do so could result in the next generation finding no relevance in their meanings.
At worst, when there is no relevance there is a risk that the next generation could call for the removal of their names, not because of their unimportance in society but their irrelevance.
That would have been a serious waste of economic resources.
Phakamisa Ndzamela is a finance writer for Business Day
Host of hidden dangers in naming and renaming
I tried to discipline myself away from entering the place-naming debate on these pages until I had this dreadful dream. In it, my almost-two-year-old daughter, Nolitha, and her friends are singing and protesting in Grahamstown, with placards on hand — “#Fictitious hero Makana must fall”.
The protest is against the misnaming of the municipality in this university town now known as Makana municipality.
About eight or nine years ago, I was warned by one of my grandmothers that this fellow Makana did not exist.
Inebriated by some dodgy literature, I concluded that my grandmother must be wrong. After all a municipality is named after this fellow.
She told me the real guy was Makhanda kaNxele. I went to double-check with other resource material and found that the real fellow is indeed Makhanda.
This year will be 195 years since the heroic Makhanda drowned trying to escape from Robben Island. Makhanda was a warrior but I will not belabour the point about who he really was; suffice it to say that he was not Makana.
Going back to this “#Fictitious hero Makana must fall”. It may sound like a petty issue, but at the rate things are going, one day future generations will wage a struggle calling for the proper naming of places.
Although there are costs to changing the branding and so on, for me the biggest economic cost would be the miseducation of our children.
This Makana fellow is deep in our literature and the people who try to justify the misnaming often refer to him as Makhandas, also spelt Makana.
I think I have a sense of what Makhanda means, but what Makana is supposed to mean beats me. Makhanda, depending on your Nguni translation, could literally mean someone who hammers something, or head in isiZulu.
A colleague from the Sunday Times joked the other day that a former ANC president, Alfred Xuma, is not Alfred “Bitini” Xuma but Alfred “Bathini” Xuma.
If we don’t get these things right, we are at risk of bequeathing incorrect history to our children.
But the Makana issue is a demonstration of the dark age in which we are living. People get excited, wake up radical and push for the change of names, but incorrectly so.
People want to get credit for changing the names of institutions and places without necessarily checking the meaning of these names and their relevance in the naming a project after them.
Take some of the academic and health institutions that are named after struggle icons. As veritable as the works of these leaders may be, sometimes one gets a sense that their names should have been engraved and would have had better meaning elsewhere, rather than the places they now occupy in history.
The late struggle icon Albertina Sisulu’s name would be well suited to a health facility in keeping with the medical health responsibilities she had to take from a young age to her adult life as a professional. Perhaps I’m subjective.
The name of O R Tambo International Airport makes a certain amount of sense as this veritable leader was a diplomat of note, a globetrotter who travelled the world to foster a better South Africa.
This is not to mean that other leaders do not deserve to have institutions named after them.
But I think there is a need to be creative with the naming process.
When one reads Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in SA, you get a sense of the type of journalist he was. Perhaps his name would be well suited to a formidable journalism school or a research centre of excellence.
It is the duty of those in power to use their naming powers in a relevant manner and their failure to do so could result in the next generation finding no relevance in their meanings.
At worst, when there is no relevance there is a risk that the next generation could call for the removal of their names, not because of their unimportance in society but their irrelevance.
That would have been a serious waste of economic resources.
Phakamisa Ndzamela is a finance writer for Business Day
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