Last week the city council of South Africa's capital, Pretoria, decided it was time the place had a name change. If the South African Geographic Names Council approves, as expected, the city as a whole will henceforth be known as Tshwane, which according to its Web site means "We are the same" or "We are one because we live together."
Only the city center will still be known as Pretoria. The council deemed both the sentiment and the language represented by the new name to be more fitting for the 150-year-old city than the old one, which honored Andries Pretorius, a leader of the Afrikaans-speaking settlers who arrived in the area in the early 1800s -- and whose views with respect to Africans boiled down to: "We are definitely not the same."
The road from Pretoria to Tshwane has been long and rocky, especially in recent decades, winding through legal discrimination and inequity under apartheid and inefficiency and stagnation under universally elected governments since that dark era ended in 1994. To outsiders reflecting on the journey, this change -- any change -- therefore seems to be a step in the right direction (provided we don't suddenly have to travel to South Africa's capital and find ourselves lost and confused in the middle of Tshwane, having long forgotten about the relabeling). As symbols go, "Pretoria" is unequivocally benign for only a handful of South Africans.