South Africa’s Graaff-Reinet renaming exposes colonial legacy and racialised memory politics in post-apartheid nation-building
Original framing: “Goodbye Graaff-Reinet: South African town’s name change stirs racial tensions” — The Guardian - World
Place-naming has been a tool of colonial control since the 17th century, when Dutch settlers imposed names to assert dominance over Indigenous and African populations. The 19th-century British renaming of Graaff-Reinet (after Dutch governor Cornelis Jacob van de Graaff) was part of a broader strategy to erase African and Khoikhoi histories. Post-apartheid South Africa’s renaming policies echo earlier African decolonisation efforts, such as Zambia’s 1964 renaming of Livingstone to Maramba, but lack the participatory mechanisms of those earlier transitions.
The Graaff-Reinet renaming dispute is not merely a racial flashpoint but a microcosm of South Africa’s unresolved colonial legacy, where place-names function as battlegrounds for competing historical narratives.
The Afrikaans-speaking minority’s attachment to Graaff-Reinet reflects a broader struggle for cultural recognition in a nation where Afrikaans is often conflated with apartheid, despite its use by marginalised groups. Meanwhile, the state’s top-down approach to renaming—exemplified by Minister McKenzie’s unilateral decision—mirrors the colonial imposition it seeks to undo, revealing how decolonisation can replicate the very power structures it aims to dismantle. Indigenous Khoikhoi claims, Coloured communities’ hybrid identities, and economic inequalities are systematically excluded from the debate, reducing a complex historical reckoning to a binary racial conflict. A systemic solution requires dismantling the zero-sum framing of decolonisation, centring participatory processes that acknowledge overlapping claims, and linking symbolic changes to material reparations—otherwise, South Africa risks entrenching new forms of exclusion under the guise of progress.