Many residents of Graaff-Reinet are not pleased with the proposed name change of their town to Robert Sobukwe – the struggle icon.
Graaff-Reinet is a historic rural town in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province. It seldom makes headlines.
For place names to change, there must first be a process of public consultation. As a professor of geography with a The study revealed that the vast majority of those surveyed across various population groups indicated that they didn’t want the town’s colonial-era name to be changed. Of the 251 respondents who tried to identify who Sobukwe was, 29.9% associated him with the PAC; 32.7% associated him with the freedom struggle; and 24.6% indicated that he had some roots in Graaff-Reinet.Our study across these three sections was carefully calculated to ensure the results would reflect Graaff-Reinet’s population, with a 5% margin of error. Of the 367 respondents interviewed, 18.8% identified as white, 27.2% as black, and 54% as coloured.
One unemployed male from the former coloured group area who had been living in Graaff-Reinet for 57 years said:A smaller percentage felt that the focus should be on service delivery, not name changes. In other words, to rather spend money on improving lives than on changing names. Respondents also highlighted the economic importance of the town’s current brand, especially for tourism.
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