“We will continue until we walk the streets of our land as free men and free women, our heads held high.”
That promise by Robert Sobukwe, a founding member of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), was not made lightly. It was a call to the African Gods and to the African soil itself.
Thirty years after 1994, the name on the map is still South Africa.
The song in the stadiums still stitches Die Stem to Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika.
The land register still reflects the 1913 Land Act.
The march, then, is not over.
At independence, every other African state renamed itself.
Southern Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, South West Africa became Namibia, Gold Coast became Ghana, Northern Rhodesia became Zambia, Nyasaland became Malawi, Tanganyika and Zanzibar became Tanzania, Upper Volta became Burkina Faso, Portuguese East Africa became Mozambique… the list continues.
The name changes were not cosmetic; they were political acts.
A name declares who the country belongs to, and it severs the symbolic link to conquest.
With South Africa, the negotiated settlement left the settler’s footprint intact.
The 1994 transition ended legal apartheid but did not end the economic and symbolic order that apartheid protected.
The name South Africa was coined by the Union of South Africa in 1910, a white state built on African dispossession.
To keep the name is to keep the claim of the conqueror as the geographic default.
Azania, the name used by the liberation movement to signal an African future, was set aside.
Mandelamania and the language of “reconciliation” made renaming politically inconvenient.
You cannot reconcile with conquest without keeping its labels.
The legal chain from 1910 to 2026 remains unbroken, 32 years on post-1994.
The beneficiaries of the 1913 Land Act still inherit lands under the same state name that issued the Act.
Changing the name forces the question: if this is no longer South Africa, then whose country is it, and on what basis do the old titles stand?
Keeping the name avoids that question.
What is even worse is that South Africa not only kept the colonial name.
It kept the apartheid anthem, Die Stem van Suid-Afrika, which was the musical seal of a crime against humanity.
The United Nations declared apartheid exactly that in 1973.
In 994 Die Stem was merged with Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika.
The oppressor’s hymn was stitched to the African prayer for liberation and in a shambolic act of so-called unity.
Could we, as the oppressed individuals of this country, have forgotten the evils of apartheid?
The anthem says we are being asked to.
Die Stem sings of the “blue skies” and “mountains” while our people were in chains.
It was sung in Parliament while the Group Areas Act, the Bantu Education Act, the pass laws, and the “Sobukwe Clause” were passed.
To sing it today is to rehearse amnesia.
It tells the child born in a shack that the song of her dispossession is equal to the song of her freedom.
The evil system with all its pillars belongs to the dustbin of history.
It was built on theft.
No moral order can be built on stolen land.
The 1913 Land Act made 87% of the country white-owned by law.
That theft is the pillar holding up the banks, the mines, and the agricultural economy.
It was maintained by violence, the Sharpeville, Langa, Soweto, June 16, and countless other massacres.
The police, the army, and the Bantustan system were pillars of control. Apartheid codified racism as law and was not just prejudice but a state.
It assigned life chances at birth through the Population Registration Act. Its symbols reproduce consent.
A name and an anthem teach you who the country belongs to.
When the dispossessed sing the conqueror’s song, they are taught to consent to their own landlessness.
A name is never just a name.
South Africa is a “colonial direction” on a compass.
Die Stem is a musical monument to conquest.
The PAC understood this, which is why Azania was the counter-name, a name that centers Africans as owners, not subjects.
To say “until Azania is free” is to say the task of liberation is unfinished. Political rights without land are not freedom.
A national anthem merged with that of the oppressor is not dignified.
A colonial name kept after independence is not sovereignty.
Sobukwe warned us: “Watch our movements keenly and if you see any signs of ‘broad-mindedness’ or ‘reasonableness’ in us, denounce us as traitors to Africa.”
Keeping South Africa and Die Stem is “broad-mindedness” with the dispossessor.
It is “reasonableness” with theft.
The pillars of apartheid, its laws, its economics, its names, and its songs all belong to the dustbin of history because you cannot build Azania on the foundation of South Africa.
You cannot sing “sikhalela izwe lethu” and end with the chorus of those who took it.
So the march continues.
Not out of nostalgia, but because the pillars of dispossession still stand.
And we do not stop until we walk this land as free men and free women, our heads held high, in a country that bears our name.
*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
