Pretoria, the capital of South Africa, is no more. Its city council, controlled by the African National Congress (ANC), announced last week that it will henceforth be known as Tshwane (Ch-wa-nee).
White residents are bitter about the change in a city named in 1855 after one of the greatest of trekker heroes, Andries Pretorius. Many point out that capital cities are seldom renamed and the precedent of Salisbury becoming Harare is hardly a happy one.
Pretoria played a key role in British imperial history. It served as the capital of the Transvaal Republic, headed by the Boer leader Paul Kruger, and presided over the world’s richest gold mines. As such, it defied the might of the empire for decades, to the fury of Cecil Rhodes, Sir Alfred Milner and Joseph Chamberlain, the architects of the Anglo-Boer war.
It was here, when guerrilla war continued after apparent British victory, that Lord Kitchener instituted concentration camps for Boer women and children, forcing the Boer leaders to Pretoria to surrender finally in 1902.
As capital of the country’s economic heart, the city almost automatically became the capital of the new united South Africa. It houses the University of Pretoria – the country’s largest, which has no plans to change its name – and is also the country’s rugby capital.
Black opinion seems unanimous in favour, although almost nobody knows that Tshwane was the name of an African chief and means “we are all the same”.
Some black residents wrongly assert that “it was Tshwane before it was Pretoria” and that Pretoria was “the old apartheid name”.
The real reason for the new title is that Pretoria and the Northern Transvaal, of which it was part, were home to many of the most rigid apartheid ideologues, so that losing the name Pretoria has symbolic value for the local ANC.
Initially, Tshwane was set up as a wider metropolitan authority and Pretoria was retained as the name of the city, just as eThekwini is now the metropolitan area around the city of Durban and Nelson Mandela is the metropole around Port Elizabeth (no one dares to suggest changing the names of Johannesburg or Cape Town).
Now the city council has ruled and tempers are running high, with resisters threatening to tear down the new signs. The one thing that seems certain is that the cheerful message “we are all the same” is going to be thoroughly disavowed.
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