Our identity is that which binds us; we are Africans first, bound by the land that was stolen and the future we must reclaim together.
The words we use for people are not neutral. They carry history, power, and ownership.
South Africa’s naming problem exposes a deep sleight of hand that began with colonial cartography and continues today.
Afrikaaner is a stolen name that literally translates to African.
It was claimed by Dutch descendants in the 18th and 19th centuries as they severed ties with Europe and sought to naturalise themselves on this soil.
But you cannot become indigenous by declaration.
You become indigenous by origin, by ancestral graves, by cosmologies tied to the land for millennia.
To take the name Afrikaaner while still holding the land, language, and legal instruments that dispossessed the first inhabitants is to commit identity theft.
It says: “We are the Africans now.”
It transfers the moral title of the continent from the people who birthed it to the people who colonised it.
Sobukwe put it plainly: “The African people are the indigenous owners of the land.”
You cannot own and be dispossessed at the same time.
“One claim must be false.
“Our identity as Africans is not drawn from borders or colonial labels, but from the shared land, history, and struggle that unites us.
“Black or blackness” can never be an identity; it is a category of subjugation.
Colonialism could not deal with nations, kingdoms, and lineages.
It needed a mass label to manage.
So Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, Pedi, Venda, Tsonga, and San all became “Black.”
Black is not a nationality nor a nation, not a history, not a language.
It is a colour code invented in the hold of a slave ship and perfected in the apartheid legislature.
Its function is to erase.
To call someone “Black” instead of African strips them of geography, heritage, and claim.
It reduces them to a demographic, a problem to be solved, a minority to be managed, even on their own continent.
Meanwhile, the descendant of the coloniser becomes “Afrikaaner” rooted, named, and belonging.
The swap reveals the programme; it is not accidental.
The same system that gave us “South Africa” instead of Azania, gave us this inversion: Settler becomes “Afrikaaner”, endowed with indigeneity, nationality, culture; Indigenous becomes “Black”: reduced to race, to skin, to a census box.
If you can rename the native as “Black,” you can argue he came from somewhere else, too.
You can call him “immigrant,” “refugee,” or “tribesman.”
You can say “we are all settlers,” and thus nobody owes anybody land.
The theft is laundered through language.
“African” is an identity. It says: I am of this land; my ancestors are here; my claim is prior.
“Black” is a classification.
It says: you are what we say you are, and we can re-classify you when it suits us, Coloured, Bantu, other.
A colour cannot be dispossessed, but a people can.
A colour cannot demand repossession, but Africans can.
That is why the system insists on “Black.”
Black can never be an identity because identities have birthrights.
Categories have quotas.
As we restore the names, we restore the truth it is incorrect to call Dutch descendants “Afrikaaners” because they are not the indigenous people of Africa.
It is incorrect to call Africans “Blacks” because that severs them from the land and history that is theirs.
To correct it is simple: The indigenous people of this continent are Africans.
The descendants of Holland are Dutch South Africans, or Europeans who became settlers. Names must match reality.
As Sobukwe taught, we must fight for the right to call our souls our own.
That fight begins with calling ourselves by our true name – “Izwe lethu” belongs to Africans – not to “Blacks,” and not to those who took the name “Afrikaaner” while keeping the land.
The dustbin of history waits for the lies.
Our identity as Africans is not drawn from borders or colonial labels, but from the shared land, history, and struggle that unites us.
*Xola ‘eXTee’ Tyamzashe is an APLA veteran. and a prominent figure in South African history and politics, known for his contributions to the Pan-Africanist movement. The views expressed by Xola ‘eXTee’ Tyamzashe are not necessarily those of The Bulrushes
