LETTER | One day, Port Elizabeth’s beautiful name will be restored

Azapo mayoral candidate Chris Swepu filled plenty of space in the Herald of April 9 pontificating on the supposed need to rename everything in SA that reflects our “Eurocentric” past.

What he fails to do, and what is required when writing on any issue, is to look at the question from the point of view of those he’s targeting, namely white South Africans.

We are native English- and Afrikaans-speaking Africans, not Europeans.

Our forebears came out on rickety sailing ships, some as long ago as 370 years back.

In my case, most of them arrived in 1820: the British Settlers.

It was these pioneers who developed modern towns modelled on the places they came from.

The Dutch and British settlement of what became SA was an organic consequence of those two nations at the time being the most advanced maritime powers in the world.

That’s just a fact of cultural and intellectual evolution.

So when they injected those advances into Africa — in science, technology, town-planning, building, agriculture, manufacturing, mining, harbour development, medicine and so on — it was only natural that they also named those towns to reflect their immediate socio-political environment.

But names such as Uitenhage, Cradock, Somerset East, East London and Port Elizabeth have no political significance to anyone today except historians and anti-white racists with an axe to grind.

In normal discourse I guarantee most people of all races still use the original names, not those plucked from thin air by political activists desperate to score points with their perceived constituencies.

Ironically, as each town is renamed, under ANC misrule it becomes increasingly dysfunctional.

So current thinking is, yes rename the places you’re steadily destroying.

When, one day, sanity and good governance hopefully again prevail, the original names can be restored.

Remember the communists — so admired by the ANC, Azapo, EFF and MK — renamed Saint Petersburg after the Bolshevik Revolution.

They called it Leningrad to honour one of their despicable leaders.

But when communism collapsed and the Soviet Union again became Russia, Leningrad was given back its name: Saint Petersburg.

One day, Port Elizabeth’s beautiful name will be restored.

Kin Bentley, Nelson Mandela Bay