Pretoria/Tshwane

Let's throw more money away, because we can

Ooooh some deep thoughts coming into my head. Stick with me, I will lighten up later, it's just a bit cloudy. The sun usually brings me back to life. Wrote this on Wednesday morning.

I am quite intrigued by this whole move to rename Pretoria as Tshwane. I don't know about you, but I don't see the point of this whole exercise, other than another move to mention apartheid and to spend money. If the government did it's research, they would realise the future of this country don't really give a damn about these names. Do you see young people debating this topic? Maybe I'm generalising, but I have never once stood round the braai where any of my friends, black or white, have brought up this whole Pretoria debate. In short, they don't give any thought to it for the most part. What they do care about is when the food is going to be ready, where the rest of the beers are and if our mates are going to be long with the ice. It's just not something that anyone spends time discussing. People our age can never ever bring apartheid into any discussion, well at least a personal one, because they have not experienced it.

Let's stray from the topic here. Look at the tug boat the John Ross. A tug boat that became legendary as being the toughest tug in the world. Suddenly black empowerment came in and renamed it the Smit Amandla. This means nothing to me. To me, it is still the John Ross. It was the John Ross at it's peak, and that's the way it will stay. Not because it's a white name, but because THAT WAS IT'S NAME! If it was the Smit Amandla back in the day, I would not want it to be renamed the John Ross today. And so this Pretoria renaming is getting out of control.

You can rename things as much as you want, but then we may as well rename “South Africa” Yes, we are in the South of Africa, but then this name has to change. Because when apartheid is mentioned, it will always be “Apartheid South Africa” We were the only ones with apartheid. We took all the abuse for it, for formally naming it. If you go to America today, or if you watch the movie Borat, you will realise racism is still rife there. In fact, in those small towns it is probably as bad as apartheid. But it has no formal name.

What the government fails to realise, is that to today's youth, we really don't care about apartheid. We don't talk about it because we did not experience it. We are not trying to ignore it, but we just were not there at the time.

My folks may speak about the 70's and how great the parties were then, but that's because they were there. In the same way I don't speak about the 70's and the parties, I don't speak about apartheid. Not because I'm ignorant, but purely because I WAS NOT THERE! It's actually that easy. It's really that simple. We obviously need to know about it, but it just gets out of control when we decide to rename everything. We don't need to go into deep government debate about this, we just need to speak to the people. Older people work like that. Instead of seeing what's happening on the street, like our record label boys, they would rather debate it amongst themselves in a nice office while they are served tea and snacks. It's much simpler that way, and it also means they don't have to go to all the hassle of speaking to the man in the street. Besides they can't go out in public anyway, because EVERYONE wants to kill them. Do they honestly think they are JFK? Does anyone really want to kill our president? I don't think they do. He's not such a bad guy that they want to kill him.

I can see people wanting to kill George W, but Thabo, I highly doubt it.

And so it seems, the youth are neglected once again, because we are stupid. We drink too much, we smoke too much, we are not intelligent. We know nothing about the world.

Maybe we don't know exactly how the world works, but maybe we do know a little something. Maybe in between all those parties and days on the beach, we have something insightful to say, or think, or do. Maybe if someone bothered speaking to us, they could learn something.

Tell me this, have any of you government boys ever bothered speaking to us? That's what I thought.