Places are named after people who built it. Not after people who destroyed it.
Except in South Africa.
Grahamstown will in future officially be known as “Makhanda”. Not named after Lt Col John Graham, the British officer who founded the town in 1812, but after Nxele, or Makhanda, the Xhosa prophet and witch doctor who incited the 22 April 1819 attack on the town after promising the Xhosa warriors that the ancestor will turn the bullets from the British rifles into water.
Makhanda, ominously, means “The left handed.”
It was during this battle that one of the bravest acts of courage took place. Mrs Elizabeth Salt, the wife of an army officer noticed that the British troops were split by the Xhosa attackers and that a small troop of soldiers under her husband’s command were cut off at the fort a small distance from the town. By holding his gun upside down, lt Salt indicated that they were running out of gunpowder.
Without hesitation mrs Salt picked up a barrel of gunpowder, and with commendable determination started walking right through the Xhosa army. They were so stunned by this act of bravery that the entire army downed their assegais and stared at the woman in bewilderment as she walked right through, without even lowering her eyes or turning her head away. She brought the gunpowder to the small band of men at the Fort, the battle resumed and the Xhosas were defeated.
Grahamstown became the main settlement around which the British Settlers of 1820 started a new life and formed the bulwark against attacks on the eastern frontier farms after 1820.
In their attempt to rewrite history in order to justify the condemnable political disaster created in this country after 1994, the ANC now decided that more than 200 years of history should be ignored because it does not suit their narrative.
They steal what they have not created and change the name of the town, not to honour the founder of it, but to honour the savage who could not succeed in destroying it.
We record all these name changes. Nothing lasts forever and a day will come, sooner than they might think, when we will change all of these names back to the proper, dignified, historically correct ones.
Read the original article on Front Nasionaal SA
South Africa Today – South Africa News
