What's happened to name changes?
2009-07-08 16:12:25
Excuse me. I don't want to disturb a sleeping grumpy dog and I'm not intending to make trouble, but… whatever happened to the street name change debate in Cape Town?
Every so often this issue raises its ugly head and we froth and churn and then it all goes eerily quiet again.
The last action I can recall was two years ago when the formidable Rhoda Kadalie led a panel which came up with a list of 46 proposed changes including the removal of the most obvious ear-sores - Hendrik Verwoerd Drive in Panorama and JB Hertzog Boulevard in the CBD.
There were plenty of quibbles - my own was the retention of the drive named after Nazi sympathiser Oswald Pirow - but there always will be disputes in such a process and this seemed like a good Phase One.
The Kadalie recommendations were put out for public comment, then sent back into the depths of the city council for reasons which Councillor Owen Kinahan tried to explain to me several times, but I have forgotten.
No doubt the list sits in File 13 of a sub-committee somewhere and the blunt reality is that we have achieved precisely nothing on this issue in 15 years of both ANC and DA administrations.
The Zille city council was often at loggerheads with the Rasool provincial government on this - they are each responsible for different roads and had differing agendas - but now that the DA controls both bodies, surely it's time for some action.
There are plenty who consider the current inertia a good result and view all name changes as expensive distractions, but that's simply storing away a deposit of trouble which is earning compound interest and will prove far more costly, in every sense, in the long run.
We simply have to deal with this, and hopefully in a measured way that avoids the shambolic outcome which has been inflicted on Durban. Negotiating your way through its streets these days, as I did on holiday last week, is an almost comically confusing process.
Anyone giving directions will provide duplicate names for every key thoroughfare in the CBD, and street signs may be up with both, either or none of the relevant names.
To use the new names often provokes a blank look, and to utilise the old ones makes you feel like a gin-swilling reactionary.
Leaving aside the political tensions stirred up by the ANC in Durban when it moved to change IFP- connected names like Mangosuthu Highway, the process had a sweeping and irrational ideological basis that any name from "the colonial and apartheid eras" was vulnerable irrespective of its contemporary inoffensiveness (the likes of Point, North Coast, Broadway and Willowvale went into the bin).
The street name was an expression of politics first and foremost and subject to potential change from a ruling party which wanted to mark its territory, not a functional means of direction and a part of personal history and communal continuity.
Functionality went out the window and the famous main drag, West Street, suffered the most. Broken into four differently titled sections, its core now honours the full name of ANC founder Dr Pixley kaSeme, who was a very significant figure but, in that elongated form, represents a real mouthful for a road name and makes for an impractically stretched street sign.
But the names of the Durban roads are not as important as the way they are used, and in that regard the city still has a long way to go before it safely handles the thousands of World Cup visitors who will flock to its shiny new arched stadium sitting grandly on the foreshore.
Many of those football fans will need to take a taxi, as I did last weekend, from the impressive uShaka Marine World to the airport.
The vehicle we got into at the head of an official cab rank queue was an oil-smelling shocker and it was driven by an idiot.
During our journey he stopped for just R15 of petrol, barely enough for the journey, before twice taking us the wrong way down one-way streets then coming within an ace of wiping out a pack of triathlon cyclists (only our demented screams stopped him crashing into their path).
He never started his meter and then, even though we had been quoted R200, tried to charge us R280. In the absurd transport economics of the moment, an individual air fare to Cape Town costs less than that and a day's car rental would not have been much more.
I was tempted to pay the full amount simply because, after that horrendous journey, I was so relieved we were alive and not stranded in Mangosuthu/Luth-uli/Gandhi/Pixley/West Street with an empty tank.
Every so often this issue raises its ugly head and we froth and churn and then it all goes eerily quiet again.
The last action I can recall was two years ago when the formidable Rhoda Kadalie led a panel which came up with a list of 46 proposed changes including the removal of the most obvious ear-sores - Hendrik Verwoerd Drive in Panorama and JB Hertzog Boulevard in the CBD.
There were plenty of quibbles - my own was the retention of the drive named after Nazi sympathiser Oswald Pirow - but there always will be disputes in such a process and this seemed like a good Phase One.
The Kadalie recommendations were put out for public comment, then sent back into the depths of the city council for reasons which Councillor Owen Kinahan tried to explain to me several times, but I have forgotten.
No doubt the list sits in File 13 of a sub-committee somewhere and the blunt reality is that we have achieved precisely nothing on this issue in 15 years of both ANC and DA administrations.
The Zille city council was often at loggerheads with the Rasool provincial government on this - they are each responsible for different roads and had differing agendas - but now that the DA controls both bodies, surely it's time for some action.
There are plenty who consider the current inertia a good result and view all name changes as expensive distractions, but that's simply storing away a deposit of trouble which is earning compound interest and will prove far more costly, in every sense, in the long run.
We simply have to deal with this, and hopefully in a measured way that avoids the shambolic outcome which has been inflicted on Durban. Negotiating your way through its streets these days, as I did on holiday last week, is an almost comically confusing process.
Anyone giving directions will provide duplicate names for every key thoroughfare in the CBD, and street signs may be up with both, either or none of the relevant names.
To use the new names often provokes a blank look, and to utilise the old ones makes you feel like a gin-swilling reactionary.
Leaving aside the political tensions stirred up by the ANC in Durban when it moved to change IFP- connected names like Mangosuthu Highway, the process had a sweeping and irrational ideological basis that any name from "the colonial and apartheid eras" was vulnerable irrespective of its contemporary inoffensiveness (the likes of Point, North Coast, Broadway and Willowvale went into the bin).
The street name was an expression of politics first and foremost and subject to potential change from a ruling party which wanted to mark its territory, not a functional means of direction and a part of personal history and communal continuity.
Functionality went out the window and the famous main drag, West Street, suffered the most. Broken into four differently titled sections, its core now honours the full name of ANC founder Dr Pixley kaSeme, who was a very significant figure but, in that elongated form, represents a real mouthful for a road name and makes for an impractically stretched street sign.
But the names of the Durban roads are not as important as the way they are used, and in that regard the city still has a long way to go before it safely handles the thousands of World Cup visitors who will flock to its shiny new arched stadium sitting grandly on the foreshore.
Many of those football fans will need to take a taxi, as I did last weekend, from the impressive uShaka Marine World to the airport.
The vehicle we got into at the head of an official cab rank queue was an oil-smelling shocker and it was driven by an idiot.
During our journey he stopped for just R15 of petrol, barely enough for the journey, before twice taking us the wrong way down one-way streets then coming within an ace of wiping out a pack of triathlon cyclists (only our demented screams stopped him crashing into their path).
He never started his meter and then, even though we had been quoted R200, tried to charge us R280. In the absurd transport economics of the moment, an individual air fare to Cape Town costs less than that and a day's car rental would not have been much more.
I was tempted to pay the full amount simply because, after that horrendous journey, I was so relieved we were alive and not stranded in Mangosuthu/Luth-uli/Gandhi/Pixley/West Street with an empty tank.
Cape Town
