What’s In a South African Name?
Wednesday, December 16, 2009 By Rejoice Ngwenya Names mean a lot to us Africans, since they carry a strong message about ancestry, cultural and spiritual connotation. South Africans love traditional indigenous names, while we Zimbabweans and Zambians prefer English and Jewish nomenclature. A few weeks ago, South African Arts and Culture Minister Lulu Xingwana informed her nation that she had approved the changing of twenty-eight names in Mpumalanga, one in Gauteng, five in the North West and eleven in KwaZulu-Natal provinces. This raised so much hue and cry, inevitably from the ‘career’ opposition Democratic Alliance and other political organisations like the Afrikanerbond and Freedom Front Plus (FF+) traditionally operating at the extreme end of the governing African National Congress [ANC]socialist ideological scale. Names mean a lot to South Africans – a huge conflagration of rural and metropolitan culture that was bruised by years of the brutal Gog and Magog Apartheid regime. I wou
