Durban is now eThekwini and Pretoria is Tshwane -- or at least these are the municipalities
Oh my god is that true? It's so hard to keep up with names in SA these days, I must be falling behind.
Actually I'm sure it is just the municipality. Or what is these days rather portentously called "the Greater Metropole of ...) or some such bureaucratise. Since each of these merged several municipalities (with a mix of Eurocentric and Afrocentric names) I suppose they had a pretty tricky naming problem; someone was bound to be offended.
I notice a lot of name changes around the world have been sparked by political events, some shamefully partisan and others more defensible (if I may be allowed to be so judgmental). By and large I must say I've been quite impressed at how successful we've been in adapting to to the new, more PC, names in SA. (Nobody regrets the end of the "Hendrik Verwoerd Dam". Well, almost nobody.)
Now I wish we could get rid of all the street names that honour obscure, minor politicians whose claim to fame, or source of influence, nobody can recall any longer. It's embarrassing to live in such a street and hell to get foreigners to spell them even vaguely correctly. I think there should be a rule about naming anything after anyone who hasn't been dead for 10 years. [emoticon for people who can't think up clever emoticons]
