BEYOND DEFINITION
To attempt to define what it means to be African is to confront a reality that resists simplistic categorization.
Being African is not a monolithic identity, nor a geographic accident, nor a label assigned by external observation. It is an active, historical, cultural and prospective condition — rooted in antiquity, tested by modernity, and oriented toward the future.
This article seeks to explore, explain and preserve the core pillars of that identity in an uncompromising and educative manner.
HISTORICAL ROOTEDNESS – THE FOUNDATION OF BEING
To understand the African is to begin not at the moment of contact with the outside world, but at the origin of human presence itself. The African exists within the longest unbroken continuum of human history on this planet. To be African, therefore, is not simply to be born on a continent; it is to stand, both literally and symbolically, on the original soil from which humanity itself emerged.
This rootedness is geographical and epistemological. Long before the arrival of cartographers, our mountains possessed names, our rivers possessed custodians, and our valleys possessed histories. The landscape was not wilderness awaiting discovery; it was a lived archive.
The imposition of colonial toponymy upon that archive is not a single incident but a systematic pattern of epistemic overwrite, designed to sever the link between a people and their place by controlling the language used to describe it.
This pattern is evident across South Africa at city, town and provincial level, and each restored name carries its own explanatory weight:
From Mount Frere to KwaBhaca
The colonial name Mount Frere was imposed in 1876 to honour Sir Henry Bartle Edward Frere, Governor of the Cape Colony, an administrator who never lived in the area. The name it attempted to overwrite, KwaBhaca, is not merely descriptive; it is historical. It means “Place of the Bhacapeople,” acknowledging the AmaBhaca who settled there under King Ncaphayi after migrating from KwaZulu in the early 19th century. The restoration is therefore not a change, but a return to sovereign identity.
From Port Elizabeth to Gqeberha
Port Elizabeth was named in 1820 by British administrator Sir Rufane Donkin after his late wife, Elizabeth. For almost two centuries, an African city bore the name of a British woman who never set foot in Africa. Gqeberha is the isiXhosa name for the Baakens River that flows through the city, derived from the original Khoekhoe inhabitants. The name restores a linguistic lineage that predates 1820 by centuries, grounding the city in its river rather than in an imported romance.
From Pietersburg to Polokwane
Pietersburg was named after Voortrekker leader Petrus Jacobus Joubert. Polokwane, in Sepedi, means “Place of Safety.” One name memorializes a single settler figure and his trek; the other articulates a communal aspiration that belongs to everyone who lives there. It moves identity from conquest to collective purpose.
From Louis Trichardt to Makhado
Louis Trichardt was a Voortrekker leader whose party suffered immense hardship in the area. Makhado is the name of the 19th-century King of the Vhavenda, King Makhado waRamavhoya, who successfully resisted colonial encroachment in the Soutpansberg for decades. To maintain Louis Trichardt is to commemorate an incursion; to restore Makhado is to commemorate resistance, governance, and Venda sovereignty.
From Durban to eThekwini
The colonial name Durban honoured Sir Benjamin D’Urban, Governor of the Cape Colony in the 1830s. eThekwini is derived from the isiZulu word _itheku_, meaning bay or lagoon, describing the natural harbour itself. The metropolitan municipality name shifts the frame from a tribute to a colonial official to a description of the landform that made settlement possible.
From Pietermaritzburg to Mgungundlovu
Pietermaritzburg was named after two Voortrekker leaders, Piet Retief and Gert Maritz. Mgungundlovu has a dual heritage. In isiZulu it was the name of King Dingane’s royal capital meaning “Place of the Elephant,” a symbol of power and custodianship. Restoring Mgungundlovu re-centres Zulu statehood and pre-colonial governance as the primary historical reference.
From Nelspruit to Mbombela
Nelspruit was named after three Nel brothers who grazed cattle there in the late 19th century. Mbombela, in siSwati, means “many people together in a small space.” The old name elevated a single settler family over a landscape; the new name describes a vibrant, crowded, productive capital city.
From Johannesburg to Egoli
Johannesburg was named after two officials, Johannes Meyer and Johannes Rissik, who were involved in surveying the new gold rush town in 1886. Egoli is its African name in isiZulu and Sesotho meaning “Place of Gold.” Egoli explains the city itself — not who surveyed it, but why it exists. It is the gold beneath the soil, and the labour of African hands that extracted it, that gave the city meaning.
From Queenstown to Komani
Queenstown was named in 1853 after Queen Victoria of England. Komani is the name already in use, understood as derived from the Khoekhoe reference to place of many wild olive trees. The restoration removes the need for a town in the Eastern Cape to pledge allegiance to a distant British monarch.
From Grahamstown to Rhini/Makhanda
Grahamstown was named after Colonel John Graham, who led a brutal campaign to clear the Xhosa from the area in 1812. Rhini is its long-standing isiXhosa name, derived from the thicket characteristic of the area. Its official new name, Makhanda, honours the great Xhosa warrior, prophet and philosopher Makhanda ka Nxele, who led the 1819 attack on the British garrison. The shift is from celebrating the colonizer to honouring the land and its defender.
From King William’s Town to Qonce
King William’s Town was named after King William IV of England. Qonce is the isiXhosa name for the Buffalo River that runs through it, derived from the Khoekhoe name for the river. As with Gqeberha and eThekwini, the restoration returns the town to its river — to geography, not monarchy.
From Northern Province to Limpopo
After 1994, the far north of South Africa was simply designated Northern Province — a cardinal direction, a placeholder without identity, as if the area had no history of its own. Limpopo restores meaning. It is named after the Limpopo River, whose name in Sepedi, _Diphororo tšameetse_, speaks of gushing waterfalls, and whose Venda name, _Vhembe_, carries deep spiritual significance. A river that has been a trade route, a boundary, and a source of life for centuries is a far more grounded anchor than a compass point.
From PWV to Gauteng
PWV stood for Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging — an acronym of three apartheid-era industrial nodes linked by colonial and Afrikaner economic power. Gauteng, in Sesotho, means “Place of Gold.” Like Egoli, it reframes the province not around Afrikaner administrative towns but around the mineral that built it and the African labour that extracted it. It transformed a technocratic acronym into a place with meaning.
From Natal to KwaZulu-Natal.
Natal was named by Vasco da Gama on Christmas Day 1497 — Natal meaning Christmas in Portuguese — because he sighted the coast on a Christian calendar, not because he understood the land. KwaZulu-Natal is a profound act of recognition. KwaZulu means “Place of the Zulu people” or “Place of Heaven,” affirming the existence of the Zulu Kingdom before and beyond colonial sighting. The hyphenated KwaZulu-Natal acknowledges both historical realities, but places the African kingdom first.
THE DUALITY OF EXISTENCE: TRADITION ANDMODERNITY AS COMPLEMENTS
A persistent fallacy, carefully constructed in the colonial classroom and perfected in the colonial museum, has been the framing of tradition and modernity as opposites in Africa. As if one must kill the other in order to live.
Tradition was coded as darkness, as static, as backward, as something to be overcome. Modernity was coded as light, as dynamic, as forward, as something to be attained. The African was therefore presented with a false choice: remain African and remain behind, or become modern and cease to be African.
This is a lie. In lived reality, in the actual homestead, in the actual street of Thaba Bosiu, Mafikeng, Gcuwa, orKwaBhaca, tradition and modernity have never been at war. They are complementary tools, drawn from different toolboxes, for the survival of the same person.
The False Binary Was a Colonial Invention
The coloniser needed the binary to justify his presence.
The African never experienced his life as a binary.
• The elder who could read the sky for rain was a meteorologist.
• The traditional surgeon who performed circumcision in the mountains was a surgeon.
• The midwife who knew which herbs to turn a breech birth was a pharmacologist.
• The imbongi who could recite a genealogy of seven generations without writing was an archivist.
What colonialism called tradition was in fact science, only that it was science without a white coat. What it called modernity was simply another tradition — the European tradition — that had acquired guns and factories.
Once you understand this, the binary collapses. There are not two worlds — the traditional world and the modern world. There is one world, and there are many ways of knowing it. The African, being intellectually generous, never felt the need to choose only one.
Education – Progress Does Not Require Self-Erasure
The most damaging lesson colonial education taught us is that to progress, you must erase yourself. We were taught to cutour hair in a certain way to be professional or:
• To anglicize our names to be employable — John instead of Makhado, Elizabeth instead of Gqeberha.
• To speak English at home so our children could succeed.
• Progress was measured by distance from ourselves.
The African model reverses this. It teaches that progress is measured by the depth of your roots and the height of your reach. A tree does not become taller by cutting its roots. It becomes taller because its roots are deep.
Therefore, the child in Limpopo who learns coding in Sepedi is not less modern than the child who learns it in English. He is more rooted, and therefore more innovative, because he can solve problems for Polokwane that a child in California cannot see.
This is the pedagogy we must reclaim:
• That an African can be fully scientific without being culturally western.
• That one can wear a three-piece suit to court in Gauteng and still wear amabheshu to welcome the bride in KwaZulu-Natal.
• That one can file at the High Court and still consult the family council.
• That these are not two men. They are one complete man.
The Whole African
The duality is not a conflict to be resolved. It is a completeness to be inhabited. We are both, intentionally. We are the same people:
• Who renamed PWV to Gauteng without losing the Witwatersrand.
• Who renamed Northern Province to Limpopo without losing the history of VhaVenda history.
• Who renamed Queenstown to Komani but still drive on tarred roads.
• Who say Egoli and Johannesburg in the same sentence and know exactly what we mean.
Conclusion
Colonial Impositions Continue To Be Undone
What is profoundly instructive is that African identity was never extinguished by these impositions, because it was never merely nominal. It was never dependent on whether the map recognized it.
It endured because it was structural. It was embedded in resilient, interlocking systems that colonial administration could observe but could not fully dismantle. It resided in customary law, which governed land, marriage, and justice without written statute. It resided in agrarian knowledge — the precise reading of soils, seasons, and seeds passed through generations of practice. And perhaps most emblematically, it resided in pastoral economies where the cattle kraal cannot be reduced to a functional enclosure of wood and wire.
The kraal is an institution. Economically, it is a bank and a measure of wealth and social security. Socially, it is a contract, the site where lobola is negotiated and families are joined.
Therefore, preservation in the African context must be correctly understood. It is not an act of sentimental nostalgia or a romantic longing for a past that has passed. It is a deliberate, strategic act of continuity and restoration.
The return from Port Elizabeth to Gqeberha, from Pietersburg to Polokwane, from Louis Trichardt to Makhado, from Durban to eThekwini, from Pietermaritzburg to Mgungundlovu, from Nelspruit to Mbombela, from Johannesburg to Egoli, from Queenstown to Komani, from Grahamstown to Rhini, from King William’s Town to Qonce, from Northern Province to Limpopo, from PWV to Gauteng, and from Natal to KwaZulu-Natal is not a matter of political correctness. It is the correction of the record, and the reclamation of the compass.
An African who is severed from his origin is not modern; he is disoriented. He cannot chart a coherent destination because he has surrendered his point of reference. To know that I come from KwaBhaca and not Mount Frere, from Gqeberha and not Port Elizabeth, from Komani and not Queenstown, is to know who I am. And because I know who I am and what was preserved for me through systems they could not destroy — therefore I remain an African.
We Do Not Apologise For ‘Duality’
We do not apologise for this duality. We wield it. This is intellectual maturity. This is not confusion. This is the African advantage in a world that is now finally learning that linear, either/or thinking is destroying the planet, destroying community and destroying meaning.
Therefore I remain an African — not in spite of modernity, but because I have mastered both as complements, without amputating either.