What's in a name

Then we came to a place we had known
And knew it not.
We could see signs we had always seen
And could no longer read them-
The road to our destination we were told
Began right where we stood
So let this then be a marker.
From:
The Buffalo Hunters by NiK-[publ:1996]

When I wrote the Buffalo Hunters-a violent crime fiction novel, ten years ago as a form of exorcism for a shooting incident in which I'd been involved, it started with the above words. The book itself uses no place names that could be changed in the future. The absence of identifying place names was regarded then, as a weakness by some reviewers: today the presence of now redundant place names would have made my work obsolete.

In the spirit of the times my latest novel, a faction piece released this month does not carry the name that I was born with. I decided that for my sixtieth year I would change my name and publish my work anonymously-like the web page bloggist that I am. I can see that a name is irrelevant and I wouldn't have used an author's name at all except that my publishing assistant pointed out that libraries and bookstores needed to put books on shelves alphabetically by author's name, so I made up a name that didn't sound like anything you could associate with anything at al and stuck it on the book.

What's in a name: Jo-burg, Jozi, or Johannesburg, which do you use: which do you prefer-which of these rolls off the tongue, rolls off the ear, with comfort and ease -which one do you choose.

Now try Oliver Tambo International; O.R.Tambo International, O'Taambo International-which of these rolls off the tongue, rolls off the ear, with comfort and ease-which one would you choose to use?

Often the people who propose name changes are visually oriented-concerned with how a name looks. They go to great trouble ascertaining that the name looks right without giving serious consideration to how the name will sound from the point of view of the user.

Los Angeles International is universally known as eL- Ay-X, but Heathrow is rarely called H-R simply because the name is more difficult to say in its abbreviation. So it is certain that O.R Tambo will instantly be shortened to O'Tambo-for the mind works by ear, as Al Ries and Jack Trout pointed out in their 1981 Marketing classic: 'Positioning' the battle for your mind.

What those people who propose the name change, to honour someone they regard as important, must ask themselves is would they be happy at their hero being reduced to O'-Tam-bo Int'-? Personally I think it sounds cool and exotic and certainly it gives us an ethnic afro feel that simply doesn't wash with Jo-burg.-except that I don't know where it is so I have to spend more money now telling the customer where my product is instead of letting the brand name do the job where appropriate and it is appropriate for an airport to be associated with a place since it defines a destination. It isn't essential though or the world would be full of people going to the wrong destinations and it isn't. And anyway we could solve the problem by changing Jo-burg to O'Taambo as well.

The easiest thing for that random parasite called 'politician' to do, is to change the name of a place to suit a specific agenda. The name may be changed because the association of the current name is inconvenient, inadequate or inappropriate, even outdated.

Sometime names change back to earlier names presumably because the new name became in its turn inappropriate. So for instance the recent, so-called G8, conference was held in a place called St Petersburg, which turns out to be a city with a long history that has been restored and the name by which it lived for the past three generations, Leningrad, has now been consigned to the garbage dump along with the ideology that created it.

In effect the old name simply refused to die out no matter that the citizens were subject to one of the most brutal campaigns of re-education ever imposed on any society in the story of the human race.

The sorry tale of Leningrad's rise and fall is a salutary reminder that all too often the disconnection that accompanies the change of name is ultimately the root of decline and fall, sometimes of the place itself and often of the entire region. It is expedient and relatively easy for a controlling power to change a name. It is another matter altogether to retake ownership of that part of the collective consciousness that associates names with places.

So Congo became Zaire which having been discredited returns to Congo, now conveniently shortened to DRC to avoid confusing it with another better known Congo. The disconnection is complete and the place is permanently in the process of becoming. There are some indications that the name New Orleans is now so inextricably associated with the disaster Katrina that it may never be repopulated by those who left when it was destroyed last year.

The politician obsessed with name change intends to negate the undesirable associations of the past in order to establish a renewed sense of future. The very act that is intended to sever ties to the past obliterates whatever glories the past held [along with its more forgettable ignominies] and the loss of memory cannot be selective. So currently two places locally called Potchefstroom and Lydenburg are to be renamed to kill bad past associations and since neither place was formerly particularly memorable to any who did not live there or have to go there for some urgent purpose, it is likely that no one will particularly care that these references disappear and are replaced by names that are equally non-memorable identifications of dusty shanty towns in the middle of nowhere. They will simply disappear and hearing the new names on the weather bulletin there will be no sense of okay that's bad weather coming from the east or the south west or whatever.

Ordinarily for the past millennia the problems compounded by persistent name changes was not an acute one. We lived then in an under-communicated world. After all it is well known that it took a thousand years for bronze making knowledge to percolate from China to Egypt back in former times. Even as recently as 1920 A.D. the name Leningrad could be adopted with a reasonable presumption that within a few years all people everywhere would know where it was. When in 1990 something it was changed back to St Petersburg the effort to inform a planet obsessed with the day to day minutiae of living has been arduous and drawn out and for the ordinary productive citizen of the planet probably meaningless-This is one reason why the G8 conference was held there -to popularise the new name [and probably because too, the newly emerging autocratic Russian State would not tolerate the levels of protest that have accompanied all previous G8 conferences during this decade.] It is significant that after all the brutality of the past, the Soviet Union morphed so easily back to its historical 'Russia'-which apart from everything else is easier to say.

In our own part of the world we changed the name of our currency close to forty years ago and yet an old slang name for the dead currency lingers on in memory amongst the poor and dispossessed in the most curious of manners. Someone wanting to purchase a single cigarette could buy something called a 'loose' from a streetside vendor. 'How much for a loose?' Fifteen 'bob' will be the answer. What is a 'bob'? Who knows? -The answer; the ancient currency involved something referred to in the slang of the time as a 'Bob'. This is translated into today's currency; and to keep up with cigarette tax inflation the price has moved over the decades from 'two bob' to its current twelve, fifteen or twenty or even twenty five 'bob'. 'Bob' has morphed into a convenient multiple of ten.

The negation of memory is, in this case, as with St Petersburg, an incomplete process.

All to often the intention to obliterate memory is political and is deliberately intended to exclude the class of citizen formerly associated with the place to be renamed. Where the change is accompanied with dynamic growth and development and a complementary battery of applied effort, the transition to the new name is often successful. Where it isn't then the outcome is less certain.

So a quarter century ago the rebel State of Rhodesia was overthrown and replaced with the shiny new State of Zimbabwe. Steps were actively taken to drive out the people who had an emotional attachment to the former name but it seems that the Applied Effort category of actions to be associated with the change were misdirected: and over time the new name has become synonymous with failure, as the citizens who replaced the former overlords failed to live up to the promise implicit in the name change. Today the country's new name is synonymous with oppression, corruption and the taint of failure, like that of the re-named Myanmar. What the failed State of Zimbabwe demonstrates is that in a communication crowded planet a bad reputation is easier to popularise than a good one, as we all know, say, regarding the lapsed schoolgirl from our old high school gossip days.

Which brings us to the core issue relevant to name changing. The decision to change the name of a place is invariably driven by political expediencies. It is relatively easy to have a re-naming ceremony at which all those who will be the emotional beneficiaries of the change can slap each other on the back. Later however comes the difficulty re-establishing the new name in the consciousness of the wider populace. Of re-taking ownership of that space in our consciousness that associates a place with a name.

In the days of Leningrad there was no problem since the wider populace was actively discouraged from travelling to the place. In 2006 however the most crucial requirement for almost every place on earth is to generate tourism revenue to deal with the problem of unemployed surplus and inherently unwanted humanity. Thus there may well be pitfalls inherent in what marketers call 'branding'.

For instance if one lived in the place formerly called 'Warmbaths', a place well known for its health giving waters, then changing the name to 'Bela Bela' creates two difficulties for prospective tourists. Where is the place and why is it a useful place to visit? [ Perhaps Bela Bela means beneficial waters in some other language-how does one communicate that idea to a prospective customer with more simplicity than was done with the old name-or is it the intention of the name changers to restrict advertising to only encompass and target those who understand the meaning of the new name-?]

The usual approach is to advertise the place as Bela Bela [formerly Warmbaths] adding to the cost of marketing and creating communication difficulties for the marketers. When the name is even more well known-like say Pretoria: a place celebrated amongst others things in globally famous drinking songs like 'We are marching to Pretoria', a song known all over the planet and the place disappears-morphed into the new name Tshwane, the confusion is immense as anyone attempting to give tourist information to bewildered foreign travellers will testify. T-Shwaa-nee is technically easier to say than the more cumbersome Pre-taw-ria-Shwayne is more probable to a foreigner who associates 'ane' with pane, lane or sane-shwayne has also got fewer syllables than shwaa-nee so shwayne is the more probable choice over time-.people will soon be saying that they going to Shwayne, no matter how many disapproving mutters come from those who have an emotional attachment to the new name.

Then of course one gets the multiple name change like when a place at which the traveller may choose to disembark changes its name from that of a once renowned albeit generally discredited politician to a geographic location and then to a less well known politician not only does the cost of re-establishing that the new name is associated with the old location, but in the case in question -renaming an international airport from Jan Smuts [never incidently shortened to Jay- Ess-] to Johannesburg International [a sensible change, some would say, and shortened instantly to Jo-burg Int] to the relatively obscure [from an International perspective] O.R. Tambo International is guaranteed to cause hassles and inconvenience to marketers. This is both because the location of the airport now has to be explained and clarified and because the initial letters in the honoured politicians name are associated with ambiguity in the world's dominant travel language.

In the final analysis the change of name is not the issue, it is the task of replacing the old established name with a new name in the minds of a world in a state of perpetual motion that is the issue. In an over communicated world finding a place in the mind of the customer is expensive, brutal and probably short. To give one instance of the difficulties lying ahead of this particular change, how would the new name be listed in the telephone directory when it becomes universally referred to as O'Taam-bo-thereby sounding quite different to how it is spelled.

One has only to contrast the different responses of the world at large to three disasters over the past few years to truly appreciate the difficulty inherent in re-branding a product. When South East Asia suffered the Tsunami disaster two years ago the event occurred at the one time of the year guaranteed to get everyone's attention-The annual Christmas/New Year shut down - the result was an instantaneous outpouring of charity unprecedented in the history of disaster relief. On the other hand last year's earthquake disaster in Pakistan administered Kashmir, and the more recent tsunami disaster in Java took place during prime business time and were barely noticed. In fact the most recent disaster in Java coincided with the current Israeli incursion into Lebanon and it is doubtful that it received even one percent of the attention generated by the first disaster with naturally a minimal amount of relief in a relief crowded agenda. The Palesinian/Israeli conflict is incidentally almost entirely rooted in the repercussions following forcible name changes.

The recent change of street name in my neighbourhood of Harrow road to Joe Slovo Drive is a prime example too of the unintended outcome associated with a change that can backfire to the ridicule of the person to be honoured-the road is so frequently blocked with traffic at crucial times that the word 'drive' is inoperative and the roadway it is now informally known as 'Slow Jovo'.

At least the city has managed to replace most of the relevant signposting. Since it is not a particularly widespread name change. Changing names is expensive and it is again fashionable for those who propose to change the name using taxpayer's money to make emotion drenched claims that no expense should be spared to facilitate the change and of course when that the time comes to spare no expense there just happens to be no budget, or the starving and the indigent part of the budget is cannibalised to make the payments to well-positioned cronies. There are unlimited opportunities to change names in a revolutionary outcome there are however seldom sufficient funds to do even the urgent things like maintaining hospitals and roads and police services, so the result is that I may be heading for Ch-wayne-but all the signposts still point to Pretoria and strangers to whom both names are new get lost and stand a good chance of becoming someone's lunch.

All too often too the new name is also associated with declining performance. For instance a group of towns to the east of 'Jozi' were transformed some years ago into the impenetrably named 'Ekuruleni' [ Now shortened to Eek or Ee-Kay]. Anyone travelling to the more outlying parts of the new 'metro' as its fashionably called, will notice that the parks and pavements haven't been mowed for a season of two, streetlamps work desultorily, street signage and manhole covers have gone of for recycling and the gutters overflow with effluent.

Suddenly few of the formerly independent towns now grouped under the single heading, 'Eek', are able to manage the most simple of services that ratepayers used to take for granted and vast numbers of people simply evade paying their rates and service levies because they can-the newly empowered authority is apparently unable to cope with the logistics of controlling all that falls under the new name. Perhaps this is because presumably so many people had to be laid off to accommodate the inflated salaries of the new metro managers and the needs of 'downsizing' and rationalisation of services to extract so-called economies of scale. -Perhaps that was the intention all along, change provides wonderful profiteering opportunities for otherwise unnecessary humans.

So what's in a name? Perhaps nothing it seems.

Cheers.