White South Africans say the name Pretoria is part of a proud history
Posted on 05/29/2005 12:26:47 PM PDT by RWR8189
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White South Africans say the name Pretoria is part of a proud history
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Pretoria was named after a settler and folk hero from the Afrikaner group, which went on to create the apartheid system. It is now expected to take the name Tshwane, after a black tribal leader who ruled long before white colonisation. The name also means "we are the same" in the Tswana language.
Ironically, South Africa's last apartheid President FW de Klerk has argued that Pretoria remains a proud name because of its anti-colonial association - with the Dutch Boer struggle against British rule.
But Pretoria's renaming is part of a national drive to make South African cities sound more African, which its proponents say fits with a continent-wide trend in the post-colonial era.
They point to the renaming of the Zimbabwean capital Salisbury as Harare, and the rebirth of Mozambique's capital, originally named after Portuguese trader Lourenco Marques, as Maputo.
Foreign tongues
The trend, of course, extends beyond post-colonial Africa.
In some cases, cities are renamed to assert local pronunciation over foreign.
The Burmese government has decreed the capital there should be known as Yangon - and not as Rangoon, as spelled by the British after they annexed the city in 1852.
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 Are we Indians so insecure in our independence that we still need to prove to ourselves that we are free?  Shashi Tharoor
Indian author and diplomat |
Until then, it had been largely referred to in the wider world as Peking - said to reflect Cantonese pronunciation, as heard by foreigners in Hong Kong.
Mao's decree also reflected a political struggle. During China's 1928-49 civil war, the Kuomintang party had decided that the city, which was in the hands of its enemies, the communists, should be known as Beiping or "Northern Peace" and not as Beijing, the "Northern Capital".
Renaming cities has been one way in which India has sought to reclaim national identity since throwing off British colonial rule in 1947.
The British colonial capital, Calcutta, was renamed Kolkata in 1999, following the renaming of Bombay as Mumbai and Madras as Chennai in the mid-1990s.
Popular lore has it that the names Bombay and Madras originate from the language of early Portuguese colonisers.
 Many Indian cities got names the British found easy to pronounce
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But their renaming was not without controversy. Opinion polls at the time suggested local people were divided over the renaming.
"The weather will be just as sultry in Chennai as it used to be in Madras. But are we Indians so insecure in our independence that we still need to prove to ourselves that we are free?" asked Indian writer and UN diplomat Shashi Tharoor in a newspaper column in 2002.
Other commentators suggested it was a populist measure by local politicians.
After a city name has been changed, it may take time for international as well as local usage to adapt. Official bodies and media organisations often wait for a new name to establish legitimacy before they begin using it themselves.
Modernisation
The renaming of cities can also reflect their boom or decline. The Japanese port city of Edo (literally "Door to the Bay") was renamed Tokyo ("Eastern Capital") in 1868, when the city became the formal capital.
The renaming marked the end of the rule of shoguns in Japan, and the formal restoration of power to the emperor.
But it also marked the modernisation of Japan - a modernisation which had been set in train in 1854 when US Commodore Matthew Perry forced open Japanese ports, ending more than two centuries of Japanese isolation.
Edo had long been the de facto commercial capital of Japan - a bustling, rough, working city. Its recognition as such was symbolic of Japan's embrace of commerce and trade which was to see it emerge as a world power within decades.
Sometimes cities can even mark changing civilisations. The Turkish city now known as Istanbul has been through many reincarnations.
It was founded as the Greek city of Byzantium, becoming Constantinople under the Romans, and then conquered by the Ottomans to be reborn as Istanbul.
'Too German'
The history of St Petersburg reflects political twists in Russia's past.
It was founded in 1703 on the marshlands next to the river Neva on the order of Peter the Great, who wanted to match the splendour of European ports. He named it after his patron saint, Peter.
 The city known today as Istanbul has been the jewel in several crowns
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The city's inhabitants voted to revert to the name St Petersburg in a referendum in 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union - but there was significant dissent.
Some argued that the name Leningrad should be retained in honour of the hundreds of thousands of residents who perished during the 29-month-long German siege of the city in World War II, during which an estimated 800,000 people are feared to have died.
Yet other cities' names can reflect a cult of personality.
In 1993, Turkmenistan's main port was renamed Turkmenbashi in honour of President Saparmyrat Niyazov.
The name means "leader of all Turkmen", and is the title Mr Niyazov took when he went from being communist leader of Soviet Turkmenistan to the independent country's president for life.
An oil refinery, airports, numerous towns, farms and even a meteorite which landed in the republic in 1998 have all been named after Mr Niyazov.
Changing the name of a city will not alleviate poverty or corruption in government,
Howabout they name the place Constantinople?
And things have been going so well up there, it makes sense SA should imitate them.
Things aren't exactly going well in SA either. They shouldn't be wasting time and money on renaming cities there (and make no mistake, it will cost them tons of cash having to remake everything from stationery to traffic signs) when the nation is falling apart.
In addition, the proposed name change is going to incite more racial animosity on both sides. When I was reading about this on the BBC web site a few days ago, I looked at a "man on the street" sidebar they had put up about it. Every single black person was for the name change, and every singe white person was against it.
I thought "Pretoria" was from the latin root "praetor," a magistrate in ancient Rome. Now I come to find out that it is actually named after Andries Pretorius, victor over the Zulus at Blood River. Maybe the South Africans could satisfy both camps if they just added the "a" before the "e" and claimed the latin derivation ...
so do:
1. killing or driving off all of the white africans
2. total breakdown of law and social infrastructure
3. escalating tribalism and tribal warfare
4. going from net exporter to net importer
5. going so far into debt that it becomes a running joke
6. rule by thug
7. ever increasing incidence of lethal disease
8. mass starvation
9. genocide
10. screaming that it is all the fault of the colonialists/whites when the appallingly predictable comes inevitably to pass.
what a charming argument in favor of "going native".
Kiev to Kyiv, Gorkiy to Nizhniy Novgorod, Leningrad to Peterburg, Sverdlovsk to Ekaterinburg, MOCKBA to Struwwelpeterburg, what's the dif? ;-)
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