Seventeen years after the provincial government attempted and failed to rename the Eastern Cape province, premier Oscar Mabuyane has indicated his administration will resuscitate the initiative, saying it is not a forgotten project.
The renaming aims for an official African indigenous name to be used alongside the English name, Eastern Cape.
As far back as 2002 the late Reverend Makhenkesi Stofile, while he was Eastern Cape premier, established a name change task team.
While officially the province is called Mpuma Koloni, confusion is caused as others who prefer to call it Mpuma Kapa which references the problematic connotation of the name Koloni (colony). Since 2004 the Eastern Cape House of Traditional Leaders has called it Mpuma Kapa, not Mpuma Koloni
Other government and municipal leaders followed suit, while the official Xhosa name remains Mpuma Koloni. Like Mabuyane, the ECHTL objects to the word colony in the name.
On Wednesday Mabuyane's spokesperson Mvusiwekhaya Sicwetsha said premier was still committed to province’s name change, ''but the premier wants to do it responsibly''.
''The name Eastern Cape, be it in English or Xhosa, is not talking about who we are as the people of the province. The name Koloni talks to us being a colony and we are nobody's colony.
So the focus is to link the name of the province to our aspirations as the people of the province, to the province we want to have. He wants to take it forward because the previous efforts were left and now does not talk to us as people united in our diversity,'' said Sicwetsha.
Mabuyane first made his intentions known in a speech at the Heritage Day celebration in Dutywa on September 24.
He stated: ''During the state of the province address in February I will outline more on how the process will unfold and what shape will it take. But the fact is that we will have to resume the process that was started by Reverend Stofile to rename our province. I know that among the proposed names was KwaXhosa,'' said Mabuyane.
He has already tasked sport, recreation, arts & culture MEC Fezeka Bayeni to push the process, working with the Provincial Geographical Names Council.
Stofile's task team was spearheaded by the poet Jongela Nojozi, who has since died.
The task team shortlisted five proposed names, which were publicised in order of preference: KwaXhosa (Xhosaland), KwaNtu (the people's province), Eastern Cape (untranslated to Xhosa), Ekhaleni (at the aloe) and eNciba (Kei River).
Political parties, including Stofile's ANC and traditional leadership, had mixed feelings over the five proposals and eventually the process was abandoned.
The ANC said the name change task team did not get to the bottom of the process to find out what would be a unifying name for the province, one which encompassed all its people and areas.
They raised concerns about the names KwaXhosa and KwaNtu saying they promoted tribalism and were irrelevant.
On Ekhaleni, the ANC and the DA agreed that aloes did not occur everywhere in the province.
The ANC's view was that Eastern Cape (untranslated to Xhosa) should be the name of the province.
Then-DA Eastern Cape leader Athol Trollip, said KwaXhosa would be his preferred name though he would be delighted to have the name Eastern Cape.
The ANC then believed that KwaXhosa was ethnically too narrow and KwaNtu was so general it did not uniquely identify the province.
Mabuyane said the process would be started from scratch, but did not give details.
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