OPINION

Racism, under every rock

Andrew Donaldson on Tito Mboweni's suggestion that the name 'South Africa' is inappropriate

I SEE from his Facebook musings that the former Reserve Bank governor, Tito Mboweni, has been thinking again, and this time about a name change for the country. “South Africa”, he suggested, is wholly inappropriate as it was the name of the country that “oppressed us”. 

This is not the first time we have heard such stuff, here at the Mahogany Ridge. There has been, over the years, much chatter to the effect that South Africa is not so much a nation but a geographical location, a colonial assemblage, if you will, thrown together at the bottom of a continent by a few military types over a large map in a dusty tent in Potchefstroom more than a century ago.

Mboweni’s notions here are perhaps just as ancient. “Well,” he wrote last week, “I have been thinking about this for many years going back to my BC days. I was, by the way one of the first Azaso executives at Turfloop University. I was the ‘Correspondence Secretary’!!”

I know, I know. Two exclamation marks. It’s a crime. But then, in those long-forgotten days, the responsibilities that came with the position of correspondence secretary with the Azanian Students Organisation were not to be taken lightly. There was no such thing as e-mail even.

“We debated and talked ad nauseam about what the new liberated country should be named,” he continued. “Azania? No. That means land of the slaves (Africans enslaved by Arabs!) . . .  maybe the time has come for us to revisit this country name question. We have Lesotho (land of baSotho), Botswana (land of baTswana ), Swaziland (land of the Swazi people), Zambia, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, etc. 

“And we are just south of Africa? Why am I thinking like this? It’s the racism that is rearing its ugly head in ‘SOUTH AFRICA’. . .”

Well, that is the nature of the beast. Turn over the nearest rock, and there it is, racism, rearing away like an angry viper. But it didn’t take long before his comrades were pointing out to Mboweni that the name Azania had nothing to do with slavery, but was the name given to various parts of east Africa – from Somalia to supposedly Tanzania – by the ancient Greeks and Romans.

In that sense, I suppose, the former Azaso member was perhaps justified in being less than enamoured with Azania as a new name for the country. It’s a bit like France saying it now wants to be called Turkey.

More recently, Azania was the name of the fictional African island nation in Evelyn Waugh’s 1932 satirical novel, Black Mischief

It’s an intriguing tale. The country is governed by Emperor Seth, an Oxford-educated idealist who embarks on a modernisation drive, which all goes hopelessly wrong, thanks to a French-supported coup d’état. Seth is assassinated and Azania becomes a League of Nations mandate, and there is some unsavoury evidence of cannibalism.

Waugh was of course a terrible reactionary. His, you could well argue, was certainly an ugly head that reared. But he was strangely and amusingly prophetic. Here, for example, is an African diplomat from his 1938 novel Scoop, sounding off rather much like your average ANC parliamentarian:

“The patriotic cause in Ishmaelia is the cause of the coloured man and of the proletariat throughout the world. The Ishmaelite worker is threatened by a corrupt and foreign coalition of capitalistic exploiters, priests and imperialists. As that great Negro Karl Marx has so nobly written . . . Who built the Pyramids? Who invented the circulation of the blood? . . . Africa for the African worker; Europe for the African worker; Asia, Oceania, America, Arctic and Antarctic for the African worker.”

But back to the name change and Azania. According to the critic and journalist Christopher Hitchens, in the early 1960s, the exiled leadership of the then-recently formed Pan-Africanist Congress wrote to Waugh at his Somerset home, “asking if they could annex the name ‘Azania’, from his novel Black Mischief, for the future liberated South Africa! (The title ‘Azania’ survives now in lapidary form on the gravestone of Steve Biko.)”

This, I may add, is from Hitchens’ introduction to Scoop, one of the more accurate novels about journalism. Hitchens, incidentally, also deals with the term “mahogany ridge” in this essay, and those who’ve plagued me with inquiries as to where it is exactly that I take my drink should be directed to these pages.

Mboweni, meanwhile, claims he has grown “very warm” to a suggestion that South Africa be renamed Limpopo – because we live south of the river. It would help, of course, if residents of that province wouldn’t pronounce it, as they do, “Limpompo”. But that’s a small quibble.

This article first appeared in the Weekend Argus.