Name-change controversy points to need for national dialogue

Thirty-one years since SA held its first democratic elections, its people still struggle to talk to each other — even though on special sporting days, especially those involving the Springboks, they insist to the world that they are one nation. The latest controversy following the proposed renaming of Graaff-Reinet as Robert Sobukwe, East London as KuGompo City, Aberdeen to Xamdeboo and Adendorp to Bishop Limba has once against exposed the faultlines threatening the post-colonial and post-apartheid SA project. Listening to the ongoing debates, it is clear that the issue is not really about whether liberation struggle hero Robert Sobukwe is worthy of the honour or whether KuGompu City is the most suitable name for a city whose residents mostly call it eMonti.

Fundamentally the debate is about our divided history and what the names we give to our cities, towns, buildings and streets represent for different national groups. In other words, they are about how we see ourselves as South Africans living in a democratic and non-racial state that has a long and bitter history of racial divisions, oppression and discrimination. Hence every time, name changes are proposed, we get polarised mostly along the racial lines imposed on us by the Union of SA and the successive apartheid regimes that came after it.

To avoid having the same conflict playing itself over and again in future, we genuinely need a national conversation of what type of a country we ultimately want to live in. Now many may say we had that conversation when we negotiated the current constitutional dispensation in the early to the mid-1990s. But the reality is that much of that conversation happened between political parties, business leaders and other elites. Over the past few years, the talk of holding a national dialogue has gained momentum in certain circles as something that would lead SA to a new social compact, seeing that the 1994 pact that ended apartheid appears to have reached its sell-by date.