Calls to change South Africa’s name is on the table. Is South Africa due for a name change? The founders of a new South African think tank and advocacy group think so. Vuka Azania is calling on South Africans to consider changing the country’s name. According to The Citizen (newspaper), Vuka wants to change the country’s name to Azania, the same name previously suggested by several liberation movements during apartheid.
Founded by the Reverend Dr. Allan Boesak, Senior Counsel Dr. Muzi Sikhakhane, Professor Isaac Shai and Arthur Fraser, the movement was launched by the four prominent academics and activists in Sandton on Friday, 24 July. The movement is positioning itself as a Black civil society force that can unite people across party lines, religious denominations and professional classes.
South Africa’s Jacaranda FM quotes the movement leaders as saying it will focus on issues including land, jobs, education and improving the lives of Black South Africans. Sikhakhane emphasised that Vuka Azania is not a political party.
The Citizen (newspaper) reported that Boesak argued that South Africa’s colonial history had led to the “spiritual degradation of the African people”.
“Knowledge production remains geocentric and colonial in character, while African knowledge systems and languages remain marginalised and are not the languages of the economy or power.
“Secular colonialism, racism and racial capitalism continue to inflict on black people not merely an injustice to be corrected in the future, but a form of ongoing violence that demands an immediate and drastic response.
“We declare that this country must be renamed Azania. The colonial name South Africa cannot carry the full memory, pain, struggle and destiny of the indigenous people.
“A liberated people must name themselves if dignity is to be restored. Vuka Azania stands for, and will advocate for, a truly decolonised post-colonial constitution that confronts the history of conquest,” said Boesak.
“Our strategic posture is informed by the fact that fundamental change in the country will only come when black people begin to appreciate that they have agency and that only they can determine their destiny.
“One of the first strategic interventions that Vuka Azania wants to undertake is to call for and organise a black people’s convention to discuss ourselves and our condition, to discuss what we are about, to discuss why we hate each other, to discuss why we want to be slaves and why we do not want anything that seeks to liberate us,” said Sikhakhane. Jacaranda FM
