Blacks changing the names of South Africa

R.W. Johnson writes in the Wall Street Journal:

DURBAN, South Africa—South Africa is going through an orgy of name-changing. In Durban alone, the city council, run by the ruling African National Congress, has come up with 194 streets to be renamed while the local provincial authority has listed 78 rivers and 76 places to be renamed. Pretoria, the capital, is no more: It is now Tshwane, though even Africans seldom know that the name refers to a 19th-century local chief. Typically the name changes are pushed by the ANC and resisted by whites, especially Afrikaners, who see the most famous names of their own history disappearing.

Excuse me, but did the Wall Street Journal, uh, oppose the transfer of power to South Africa’s black majority in the 1980s and early 1990s? Of course not, it supported it and pushed it. So, what did the neocons and economystics at the Journal think would happen when a country created by whites and ruled by whites through its entire history was turned over to blacks? Did they think that the skin color of the people running the government would be different, while everything else would remain the same?

And you can bet on it, the evil bastards at the Journal will do the same to America, when its culture is third-worldized. They’ll note, in their half-rueful, oh-so-superior tone, that there is some silly “orgy” of name-changing going on in America … that there is some ridiculous “craze” for installing Muslim foot-baths in the restrooms of universities … that there is some wacky “mania” for making Spanish the official language of more and more cities and states … and that there is some absurd “obsession” with arresting and investigating white people who say anything critical about any of these things…

Since the article is online for subscribers only, here is the rest of it, followed by another comment by me:

Durban has seen a particularly fierce fight. A young Winston Churchill gave a famous speech here, during the Anglo-Boer war in 1899, and always regarded Durban as “a bastion of the imperial spirit”; others would say it was a center of jingoism, the last outpost of the British Empire. Certainly it is that spirit which the ANC wants to puncture.

The council wants Edwin Swales VC highway (after a local World War II hero) renamed after an ANC guerrilla hanged for sabotage, while Natal Mounted Rifles highway is to be renamed after an ANC activist who died of AIDS. (Whites bitterly point out that Swales died in a Lancaster bomber over Germany and the NMR fought the Nazis with distinction, so even “those who fought fascism” are to be forgotten.) The main road to the airport becomes Yasser Arafat highway; Moore Road (after Sir John Moore, the hero of the Battle of Corunna) becomes Che Guevara Road; Kensington Drive, Fidel Castro Drive; and Chelmsford Road (after Lord Chelmsford who defeated the Zulu King Cetshwayo) JB Marx Road, after the former black Communist leader who lies buried next to Khrushchev in Moscow. Naturally, Jan Smuts Highway will be Cetshwayo Highway and Victoria Road, Mandela Road. Most of the city-center streets are to be renamed after local Communists that not many have heard of.

However, the ANC, rather foolishly, decided to wipe out names associated with Chief Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party, even renaming the local stadium being built for the 2010 soccer World Cup after a local Communist leader, when it had been named after the father of King Shaka, founder of the Zulu nation. This led to a 10,000-strong march of angry whites and (mainly) Zulus through the city center, with shops smashed and looted, and a (temporary) council climb-down. Even the local Indians, who outnumber whites two to one, were ambivalent about Point Road’s being be renamed after Durban’s most famous Indian, Mahatma Gandhi—for Point Road is the red-light district.

The biggest problem is the name Durban itself. In 1497 Vasco da Gama sailed up this coast on Christmas Day and thus called it Natal; the town was called Port Natal by the original trekkers. English settlers renamed it in 1835 after the governor of the cape, Sir Benjamin d’Urban. The ANC, hating this, extended the city limits and called the new metropolitan area eThekwini, the traditional Zulu name for Durban—and then used this designation all the time as, effectively, the city’s new name. This doesn’t really work: Durban is the world’s ninth-biggest port, appears on all world maps, and is internationally famous. But millions have been spent over the last few years promoting eThekwini.

Now, however, the ANC mayor, Obed Mlaba, says he is embarrassed because the term actually refers to the shape of the bay and means “bull’s testicles” in Zulu. This has produced convulsions within the ANC and a suggestion that eThekwini now be changed to KwaKhanghela, after Shaka’s original military base here.

But currently all is confusion. One suspects that the ghosts of Vasco da Gama, Sir Benjamin d’Urban and Winston Churchill are laughing.

Mr. Johnson is emeritus fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and Southern Africa correspondent for the London Sunday Times.

That’s the establishment right’s way of talking about the deliberate destruction of a Western country that the right’s own democratic universalist ideology has helped bring about: they treat it as a joke, to make people feel that nothing has been lost, that no harm has been done. Just as homosexualists have no respect for the traditional family, and mock at its destruction, neocons have no respect for Western nations, and will, when the time comes, mock at their destruction—unless we stop them.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 05, 2007 05:25 PM | Send