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A small town in South Africa’s semi-desert Karoo has become the unlikely centre of a national argument about memory, identity and who gets to decide what a place is called — after the government renamed the nearly 250-year-old settlement of Graaff-Reinet after anti-apartheid leader Robert Sobukwe, triggering protests, legal threats and a community fracture that has unsettled a town known, until recently, for its calm.
More than 22,000 objection forms have been delivered to the government since the renaming decree was published, a number that exceeds the town’s total population of 25,000. A legal challenge is being prepared. Residents have taken to the streets. And a mayor’s remark that colonial settlers arrived by sea — and that “the sea is open” — has sharpened a debate that was already generating what one local lawyer described as “angry rhetoric” in a community that has not been accustomed to it.
The town sits about 650 kilometres from Cape Town, tucked into a loop of the Sundays River and ringed by the flat-topped hills of the Karoo. Its whitewashed Cape Dutch houses, jacaranda-shaded verandas and lack of the high security walls common across South Africa give it the quality of a place that time has handled gently. It is the fourth oldest town in the country, established in 1786 and named after Cornelis Jacob van de Graaff, then-governor of the Cape Colony, and his wife Reinet. A century after its founding it served as a staging point for the Great Trek, when Afrikaner settlers moved into the interior to escape British rule — a fact that gives the town an almost totemic significance within Afrikaner historical memory.
The new name honours Robert Sobukwe, born in Graaff-Reinet around a century ago, who founded the Pan Africanist Congress in 1959 and led protests in the period leading up to the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, when security forces killed dozens of demonstrators and exposed the savagery of apartheid to the world. For his family and his movement, the renaming is recognition that is three decades overdue.
“Someone who comes from that area, who led this glorious struggle for everyone to live in harmony, is being ignored and not accepted by the community of Graaff-Reinet itself,” said Jaki Seroke, deputy president of the PAC. “There is no malice intended in the name change. It is really to build a nation.”
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Sobukwe’s grandson, Mangaliso Tsepo Sobukwe, said the opposition did not surprise him. “I am not surprised by the resistance of a specific segment of the population who does not want to embrace change,” he told AFP — a formulation that frames the controversy as a predictable rearguard action against an overdue reckoning.
Opponents see it differently, and their objections are more complicated than straightforward nostalgia for apartheid-era geography. The majority of Graaff-Reinet’s residents identify as coloured — people of mixed African, Asian and European ancestry — a community that has navigated a difficult position in post-apartheid South Africa, neither the primary beneficiaries of liberation nor the architects of the system that preceded it. Laughton Hoffman, a campaigner with the Hands Off Graaff-Reinet movement who has been going door-to-door collecting objection forms, said his community has felt sidelined for thirty years. “We don’t agree with things like black economic empowerment because I’m a coloured person and we have been marginalised,” he said.
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His argument is not that Sobukwe’s legacy is undeserving of recognition — it is that the method and effect of this particular recognition have divided a community along lines that had, he says, been manageable. “There are now groups fighting each other,” he said. “The renaming is taking us back.”
A 2024 survey of 367 residents, described by lawyer Derek Light as representative of the town’s racial composition, found that nearly 84 percent opposed the name change. Light, whose previous clients include the billionaire Johann Rupert — whose family roots are in Graaff-Reinet — is preparing a legal challenge to the decree. He said the controversy has exposed fault lines that the renaming process failed to anticipate or address. “What they’re doing is to divide a community that was otherwise healthy and happy,” he said.
The remarks by Zola Hanabe, the town’s first post-apartheid mayor, have added an uglier register to the dispute. In a recent television interview, Hanabe referred to colonial settlers arriving by sea, adding that “the sea is open” for those who resist the town’s new direction. The comment was widely interpreted as a threat, and Light cited it as evidence that the renaming has given license to language that has no place in a democratic society.
The government has proceeded anyway. Graaff-Reinet is one of roughly 1,500 geographical name changes since the end of apartheid in 1994, part of a sustained effort to remove place names that, in the government’s words, “still reflect colonial and apartheid legacies.” The process has generated conflict in several locations, but few have produced opposition as organised or as numerically striking as this one.
The town draws about 100,000 visitors a year, many heading to the nearby Valley of Desolation. Its heritage architecture and sense of preserved history are central to that appeal — and some objectors have argued, practically, that a name change risks damaging a tourism economy the community depends on.
