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Staphorst argues that examining one restored indigenous name exposes the weakness of my case. In fact, such examples strengthen it. Indigenous names often describe geography, migration, clan memory or sacred association.
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I do not usually reply to criticism of my work. There is always the risk of turning a public argument into a private duel. But I ask your indulgence in this case. The critique in question is measured in tone and is serious in intent, and it deserves a clear answer.
I began my original article by stating that the matter goes beyond the changing of names. It concerns how we understand the country – its past, its ownership, and its moral centre. Luan Staphorst’s essay “South African name changes, exceptionalism and the fallacy of the colonial-indigenous binary” misreads both my position and the tradition from which it arises. To describe the struggle over place names as colonial versus indigenous is not to indulge in a crude or static binary. It is to recognise a historical asymmetry of power that can be verified in law, land records, and blood.
Colonialism in southern Africa was not a cultural misunderstanding. It was a legal, military and intellectual system that reorganised land, language and sovereignty. To speak of indigeneity in that context is not to pretend that identity never changes. It is to acknowledge that there were settled peoples, political orders and systems of meaning before conquest, and that these were subordinated by force.
On one point I agree with Staphorst. The !Xam and Khoe endured brutal conquest by Europeans and a gentler but still real form of domination by expanding amaXhosa polities. I call the latter gentler not to excuse it, but to distinguish its character. It was often resolved through intermarriage and absorption rather than extermination. Horace once wrote that conquered Greece took captive her savage conqueror. In much the same way, Khoe-!Xam influence reshaped Xhosa language and cosmology. Many beliefs thought purely Xhosa bear Khoe roots. In my forthcoming novel Multitudes, to be published this year by Kwela Books, I examine how Rharhabe’s crossing of iNciba (the Kei River) involved both bloody conflict and incorporation. The second house of amaXhosa, amaRharhabe, emerged through that process of conquest and absorption of Khoe-!Xam people.
But to acknowledge complexity is not to erase hierarchy. Staphorst suggests that my argument assumes identity is fixed. It does not. Identity is layered, contested and always in motion. What remains constant, however, is the fact of dispossession and its institutional continuity – from conquest, to segregation, to apartheid spatial planning. To trace that continuity is not to indulge in essentialism or determinism; it is to take history seriously. When I argue that colonial naming reflects conquest, I am identifying a structure of power, not denying historical nuance.
I firmly disagree with the suggestion that colonial conquest cannot be treated as binary. Of course conquest involves shifting alliances and internal rivalries. But at the level of sovereignty it is binary in a plain sense: One authority displaces another. Land tenure systems are rewritten. Jurisdiction changes hands. A new regime maps and names the terrain. One needs not romanticise precolonial Africa to recognise that European rule represented a rupture in indigenous sovereignty. For the sake of calm discussion I will not rehearse here the racial ideology that accompanied that rupture.
When a river or town is named after a British monarch or governor, this is not a natural evolution of language. It is a declaration of authority. It tells us who ruled and who narrated. Domination works on the mind as well as the body. Normalised colonial toponyms train a society to read its own landscape through imperial biography. That is why I described Xhosa expansion over Khoe-!Xam lands as gentler. The mountains and rivers of the Eastern Cape largely kept their Khoe-!Xam names even after conquest by amaXhosa. Dutch and British conquest was more thorough. It sought to overwrite as backward everything indigenous. And that is the rub.
Staphorst argues that examining one restored indigenous name exposes the weakness of my case. In fact, such examples strengthen it. Indigenous names often describe geography, migration, clan memory or sacred association. Even when they arose from conflict among African polities, they did so within an African framework of meaning. Colonial names usually commemorate distant figures or metropolitan references. The difference is not between purity and impurity. It is between authority that grows from the soil and authority imposed on it by racial colonial brute force.
Hence I quoted Robert Sobukwe and African nationalism as he conceived it as a recovery of agency. A country whose map memorialises foreign conquest remains symbolically annexed. Sovereignty is not only constitutional; it is also linguistic. That does not mean that Afrikaner or British descendants have no place in South African history. It means only that public symbols should not ignore the trauma of those who were dispossessed. As the proverb has it, the tree remembers what the axe forgets. It is nigh time descendants of European descent are cognisant of and sensitive to that.
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A colonial city may become home to generations of black citizens. Its name can still carry the memory of imposed authority. History settles into language whether we acknowledge it or not.
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Another confusion in the critique is the collapse of hybridity into equality. Identities do hybridise. Colonial societies generate creole languages and mixed inheritances. But hybridity does not cancel hegemony. A colonial city may become home to generations of black citizens. Its name can still carry the memory of imposed authority. History settles into language whether we acknowledge it or not.
The issue, then, is not whether identity changes. It is whether we are honest about how and why it does so. For what purpose are we changing it? Reconciliation? To perpetuate colonial and racial trauma, or to erase its power over us and our history? To examine place names is to examine the sediment of history embedded in speech. Whose story is made central? Whose presence appears original? Whose memory is pushed aside?
Colonialism was not one episode among many. It was a global system that reordered economies and imaginations alike. To equate colonial naming with precolonial territorial disputes is to ignore differences of scale and consequence.
Finally, to say that the colonial-indigenous distinction “obfuscates”, is to misunderstand how historical analysis works. Every serious study relies on structuring concepts – feudalism, capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism. These do not simplify reality; they make power visible. The colonial-indigenous distinction is not melodrama. It is a way of tracing how authority was seized and inscribed.
If a particular renaming is ill-considered or poorly researched, let us argue that plainly. But to dismiss the broader critique as crude binary thinking is to avoid the central question: Who had the power to name, and what did that naming achieve?
Until that question is answered directly, the claim that renaming “obfuscates”, serves mainly to obscure discomfort with indigenisation itself. We rarely heard objections when Johannesburg’s DF Malan Drive became Beyers Naudé Drive in 2001. Objections seem to arise more sharply when colonial memory and apartheid memory are asked to yield.
See also:
South African name changes, exceptionalism and the fallacy of the colonial-indigenous binary