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’. . .”