JAMIL F. KHAN | Graaff-Reinet renaming sparks backlash as debate over colonial legacy deepens

The renaming of Graaff-Reinet in the Eastern Cape to Robert Sobukwe Town has been met with resistance by community members and others dedicated to preserving the memory of its former namesake.

The renaming of places and institutions in South Africa has been subject to contention, often inspiring claims that renaming incurs unnecessary costs that we could put to better use.

The argument that social services and infrastructure could be funded with this money is a popular form of virtue signalling used to express concern for the poor management of public funds we have witnessed through eye-watering corruption in government.

The same virtuous insistence that public funds be used to service those most in need is nowhere to be found when workers demand better salaries, when social grants are increased or when any social relief is provided for the most vulnerable.

Graaff-Reinet was established by the Dutch East India Company in 1786. The town is named after the then-governor of the Cape Colony, Cornelis Jacob van de Graaff, and his wife.

Originally established as a trading post to expand trading inland from the Cape Colony, in 1795, the town's burghers, who resisted company taxation, proclaimed themselves to be the independent "Colony of Graaff-Reinet" and then requested guardianship from the government of the Netherlands.

The town and its history are a roadmap of colonial expansion by European settlers who claimed land that was not theirs and had the audacity to invoke the power and protection of a foreign government to make decisions about the natural resources and sovereignty of African people.

According to community leader Laughton Hoffman, who is rallying support for a “Hands Off Graaff-Reinet” movement, the renaming is taking the majority of Coloured community backwards.

Alongside this, lawyer Derek Light, who is challenging the renaming in court, claims that “what they're doing is to divide a community that was otherwise healthy and happy."

Despite claims that the town has been progressing away from and beyond the burden of its history, this very display of resistance and the alliances it beckons reflect an uncomfortable, familiar historical dynamic – anti-Black collusion between Coloured and white people, with the former often being a convenient pawn for advancing the interests of the latter.

As Hoffman notes, “we don't agree with things like black economic empowerment because I'm a coloured person and we have been marginalised over the last 30 years."

The choice to frame Coloured marginality as an experience confined to the last 30 years, referencing our democratic period, wilfully erases the centuries of white supremacist colonial violence that orchestrated this marginalisation in the first place.

Light’s statement above echoes an old apartheid mindset amongst white people, operationalised by the apartheid government for propaganda, that claims subjugated communities are living happily with their oppression, only now, it can be framed as an oppression orchestrated by a Black government, which white people also claim to be victims of.

This convergence of concerns amongst people with dishonest historical motivations shows this resistance to renaming a colonial town after a Black struggle icon to invoke the anxieties embedded in “swart gevaar” discourse. The mythology of Graaf-Reinet and the historical figures it is named after serves to valorise colonialism.

Coloured people are marginalised in South Africa, before and after apartheid – that is a fact. This is not an invention of the democratic period in South Africa though some insist that it is, and moreover, our marginalisation has absolutely no shared struggle with white people, whose claims of race-based discrimination have no basis in reality.

This alliance must be seen for what it is: a teaming up of anti-Black interests masquerading as concerns for self-determination and community values. If this self-determination depends on the preservation of colonial histories and a rejection of restitutive attempts at epistemic justice, then it cannot be taken seriously.

Many places, roads and landmarks in South Africa are still named after the oppressors of this land, from Britain to Portugal and the Netherlands. White people in this country, after everything perpetrated against Black people, still enjoy the privilege of having their histories of plunder and violence commemorated and honoured, without a hint of irony.

Nobody should want to cling to an illegitimate right to find belonging and representation in crimes against humanity.

Our reconciliatory project has already prioritised the feelings of white people to an unfair degree, and after many struggles for justice and freedom, which continue today, the least we can do is to cleanse our symbolic landscape of figures who bear responsibility for an unprecedented scale of human suffering. Nobody is entitled to honour the legacies of such figures, who by any definition are criminals.

There is a tendency amongst some South Africans to downplay the importance symbolic justice, attempted through renaming, claiming it is of less concern than more material interventions.

Besides the fact that this is the mandate of the Arts and Culture portfolio, and resources allocated for one purpose cannot simply be redeployed to another in a different department, spending our taxes on restoring the dignity of African lives through honouring those who fought for our freedom from white supremacist fascism is important.

We must never be allowed to forget that this is a land for which a heavy price was paid, and the iconography across the symbolic landscape must tell that story.

When people ask who our towns are named after, the answers must invite stories of our struggles for freedom that centre our perspectives and not those of our oppressors.

Europeans do not have a place in our collective memory as heroes on this land, and those who feel a sense of identification with them should evaluate their motivations. It is enough that the descendants of those Europeans have been invited into a democratic project which protects and respects their human and cultural rights, despite much of their culture still refusing to integrate into African ways of life and being.

Personal preferences and convictions aside, the memory of colonial masters has no place in our public landscape. Those who disagree, for whatever reasons, are simply wrong.

Dr Jamil F. Khan is an award-winning author, doctoral critical diversity scholar, and research fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study.