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Identity is not a gift from empire, but an inheritance from ancestors. Once spoken again in its own language, that inheritance becomes an irreversible form of freedom.
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If the proposed change of town names in the Eastern Cape has shown us anything, it is that a struggle over names is never merely semantic. It is ontological. It goes to the heart of our historical inheritance. For those convinced that these towns were built by colonial fortitude upon an alleged tabula rasa, renaming feels like insult and erasure of their forefathers’ legacy. For those who know that these towns were built over sacred graves and dispossessed land, the continued celebration of colonial names, particularly those honouring conquest for white settlement, is an enduring insult and stain to the region’s historical inheritance.
Both reactions are often emotionally charged and insufficiently reasoned. It should be plain that a place called Nahoon today was known as Nxarhuni long before European arrival. Its present spelling reflects not origin, but convenience – the refusal of settlers to learn the indigenous language, and the preference that natives contort their tongues to European phonetics. That distortion is not neutral; it is historical evidence of European colonial domination.
When WEB du Bois described the “double consciousness” of the Negro in America, “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings”, he was identifying the interior fracture imposed by domination. A stolen name is among the earliest instruments of that fracture. It brands the mind before chains bind the body.
Under European colonialism, renaming was not incidental but systematic. The missionary baptism, the plantation ledger, the passbook, the colonial registry, the renaming of mountains and rivers – each functioned as a bureaucratic sacrament of dispossession. To be renamed was to be reclassified; to be reclassified was to be subordinated; to be subordinated was to be rendered legible to empire. African names, embedded in lineage and cosmology, were dismissed as pagan or primitive. In their place came Graaff, Somerset, Victoria – names presented as civilised, yet functioning as instruments of epistemic conquest.
Du Bois understood that domination operates first through categories, and chains merely enforce them. In The souls of black folk, he argued that the problem of the twentieth century was the colour line – a global regime fixing human beings into hierarchies of worth. European naming practices formed part of that architecture. They implied that African identity required European mediation to be respectable or intelligible. Recovering indigenous names therefore contests that grammar of hierarchy. It asserts self-definition as a moral and political right.
Steve Biko sharpened this insight within the apartheid context. Black Consciousness was fundamentally a project of psychological liberation. “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” Colonial naming was precisely such a weapon. By normalising European names as markers of legitimacy, it cultivated the quiet assumption that African heritage required erasure for entry into modernity. Reclaiming native names is thus an act of mental decolonisation. It affirms that these lands were lived landscapes long before European intrusion – long before cannon fire and racial arrogance sought to overwrite them.
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Robert Sobukwe extended this reasoning into sovereignty. African nationalism, for him, was the reclamation of historical agency, not chauvinism.
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Robert Sobukwe extended this reasoning into sovereignty. African nationalism, for him, was the reclamation of historical agency, not chauvinism. A nation stripped of its toponyms, its rivers renamed after governors and its cities after monarchs, is symbolically annexed even before economic exploitation begins. The persistence of names like “East London” in 2026 reflects an unresolved colonial reflex. KuGompo is not merely a label; it encodes geography and memory specific to this soil. Retaining colonial duplications reduces our geography to a monument of borrowed power and generates absurdities abroad: Having to clarify in Heathrow that one is from the “other” East London in South Africa is always embarrassing to me. Such linguistic inheritance subtly diminishes national self-possession.
James Baldwin, writing from the diaspora, understood the intimate violence embedded in naming. “People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.” The slave ship transported bodies and dislocated names. Enslaved Africans were assigned the surnames of their owners, severing genealogy and converting persons into property entries. In South Africa, the surnames borne by many farm labourers and coloured communities testify to this history. To carry the oppressor’s name is to live with the residue of conquest inscribed upon one’s identity. Reclaiming indigenous names – through ceremony, scholarship, or national or personal decision – is an act of historical re-entry as subject rather than cargo.
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Reclaiming indigenous names – through ceremony, scholarship, or national or personal decision – is an act of historical re-entry as subject rather than cargo.
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Critics dismiss such efforts as symbolic politics, arguing that economic redistribution must precede linguistic reform. This is a false dichotomy. Colonialism operated simultaneously as material plunder and symbolic domination. The plantation/farm and the catechism, the mine and the map, the rifle and the registry – these were coordinated instruments of dispossession. Psychological colonisation facilitated economic exploitation. A people persuaded of their inferiority will acquiesce to material loss. Reclaiming indigenous names is therefore not a distraction from structural reform, but a precondition for sustained collective dignity.
Indigenous names encode philosophies of being. Across African traditions, a name situates a person within ancestry, circumstance and communal expectation. To rename Nomsa as Elizabeth is not merely to alter phonetics; it is to sever relational cosmology and redirect identity toward Europe as measure. The indigenous name orients the subject toward community and lineage as sources of dignity.
Complexity remains. Many black South Africans inhabit layered identities in which European names have been domesticated or resignified. History cannot be undone by decree. The objective is not purification, but choice. Under colonial rule, renaming was compulsory. In freedom, the decision to retain or restore must be autonomous. What must be rejected is the unexamined assumption that European names are inherently superior or normative.
The recovery of indigenous names is thus an act of narrative correction. It disrupts the colonial archive in which Africa appears as empty space awaiting inscription. It affirms that African societies possessed languages, genealogies and systems of meaning long before conquest. Du Bois’s “kingdom of culture”, Biko’s black pride, Sobukwe’s sovereign Africa and Baldwin’s moral reckoning all converge here.
To name oneself is to assert existence on one’s own terms. For formerly colonised peoples, restoring indigenous names is not nostalgia; it is epistemic independence. It declares: We are not what conquest called us. We precede the registry. We survive the ledger. Our names carry worlds within them – worlds suppressed but never extinguished.
In reclaiming those names, the colonised repair the fracture of double consciousness, repossess symbolic terrain and re-enter history as agents rather than objects. Identity is not a gift from empire, but an inheritance from ancestors. Once spoken again in its own language, that inheritance becomes an irreversible form of freedom.
See also:
Conversations beyond the comfort zone | Etienne van Heerden Veldsoirée 2023
The importance of oral history in southern African historiography
Kommentaar
Disingenuous to say the least. Ntabeni is trying to manufacture overall meaning in the most speculative of ways, and moreover he elevates himself as the spokesperson for all black people. Typical strategy of nationalists to invent a past for the present.