Is renaming geographical areas important?

Is renaming geographical areas important?

  • Yes

    Votes: 38 7.9%

  • No

    Votes: 416 86.7%

  • Other

    Votes: 26 5.4%
  • Total voters
    480
If the name is truly offensive, sure. If not, it’s a bit of a waste of money for a struggling country
 
It takes a generation or more to call a place by its new name... Me and the family will never be able to pronounce those name and will always call it PE or Port Elizabeth.
 
Erasing the history of the people, who created the very things being renamed, is abhorrent.
If a new city was made tomorrow and it was called some random Zulu/Xhosa/Ndebele name, there'd be no issue, since that's who's building it. It's a reflection of the time.
Renaming has one goal. Pure history erasure.
 
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It IS important, but not AS important as other pressing social issues like service delivery, income inequality, crime and poverty. Once you have solved or addressed all of those issues, then you can move on to other issues like geographical naming, etc. it is ludicrous in a country like South Africa, that we have to borrow money to roll out a vaccine, but we waste money on things like this.
 
This point has been mentioned before in this thread but about the only town that successfully changed its name in South Africa was Polokwane - probably because there are no longer any Pietersburgers living there.

As for the rest, each language group still uses its own name. Examples of this is Warmbad/Warmbaths/Bela-bela. Very few English or Afrikaans speakers refer to it as Bela-bela. Same with Durban, now PE, Grahamstown and Nelspruit amongst others.

Official names can change but when a Durbanite needs to tell someone where he lives he will still say Durban. This will remain like that for a very long time. There is therefore no need to get one's knickers in a knot about name changes unless you are concerned about the costs involved
 
The day Pietermaritzburg is renamed to The Msunduzi is the same day I will lose my ****....

If you want to lose somebody in PMB, give them directions with the new street names. This is largely because the new street signs are faded/missing/broken and nobody remembers what the damn road is called.
 
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I have never agreed with naming anything after any person for whatever reason. The right thing is to keep names neutral and consistent. For example, there was buggerall at place X before a city came into being except maybe a water source. Find out what the locals knew the place by and that should be the name forever afterwards. Problem gone.
 
Geoff.D said:
I have never agreed with naming anything after any person for whatever reason. The right thing is to keep names neutral and consistent. For example, there was buggerall at place X before a city came into being except maybe a water source. Find out what the locals knew the place by and that should be the name forever afterwards. Problem gone.
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London should be renamed to whatever the Celts who dwelled there knew the area as ?
 
I do not mind the name changes, IF....
1. Do not cost much.
2. Even if in another language, be something neutral, not a person's name, or 'death to all whities' or something like that.
3. Our african languages do have words that roll nicely of the tongue. By all means use some of those nice names.

I recall some time ago they wanted to rename Cape Town to something. DO not recall what, but the name was actually easy to pronounce and sounded cool.
 
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