By Danny Bagg
South Africa hasn’t been able to rename itself Because “Azania” has never been used as a geographic indicator for South Africa. It historically referred to the East African coast, especially modern Tanzania. Post-Antiquity, the term was just a generic label in European cartography for all of sub-Saharan east Africa.
Aside from having zero connotation with what is today South Africa, “Azania” is also not an African word. It was coined by Europeans – ancient Greeks and Romans – and perpetuated by European explorers and chroniclers.
During the 1960s and 1970s, it was in vogue for various black nationalist movements across the African continent to reject European colonial names for their countries and adopt properly indigenous ones instead. Hence, we have these self-declared nationalists adopting names for their countries such as Burkina Faso (Upper Volta), Botswana (Bechuaneland), Zimbabwe (Rhodesia), Zaire (Congo), and Namibia (South West Africa) explicitly to distance themselves from the colonial past.
Black nationalists in South Africa wanted a similarly indigenous name to apply to their country to fit this trend, but could find none. They could find no names for the entirety of what later became South Africa in any of the Bantu languages, so they dug up “Azania” from obscure historical sources instead. Suddenly, a long-extinct colloquialism virtually unknown to anybody but the most dedicated scholars of cartography became the newest chic moniker being marketed as a truly “indigenous” name for South Africa.
You know who went around saying Azania? Black academics in other countries, especially the US and the Caribbean. A handful of hip anti-apartheid activists affiliated with the Pan-African Congress (PAC) and later, Azanian People’s Organization (AZAPO).
The vast majority of South Africa’s black population were oblivious to “Azania” because it wasn’t a word from any of their languages. And the black nationalist organisation with the biggest grassroots presence, the African National Congress (ANC), rejected “Azania” because it was a) not even an African word to begin with, and b) they liked the name “South Africa” because it had “Africa” in it. PAC/AZAPO tried to justify their use of the term by claiming it had an Arabic rather than a European origin, a dubious theory at best and still indicative of a non-African origin. Conveniently, the Arabic argument was always trumpeted the loudest by PAC and AZAPO when they were seeking military aid from revolutionary left-wing governments in the Arab World such as Algeria, Gadaffi’s Libya, and Ba’athist Syria and Iraq. It may have even been invented to pander specifically to the pan-Arab nationalists who ruled these countries during that era. At the very most, old Moslem maps may have been drudged up which used Arabic derivatives for some of the same contemporary Western and Byzantine Greek cartographic language, including “Azanj” (from “Azania”) but even then there’s no denying the term originated in Europe.
A sign of “Azania”‘s unpopularity outside of the narrow PAC/AZAPO circle and the few intellectuals overseas who supported them is the fact that not even those governments which supported PAC and AZAPO – like Iraq and the People’s Republic of China – used this terminology in reference to South Africa. This is in marked contrast with the way the nations (especially member states of the Organization of African Unity) that supported black nationalist guerrillas in Rhodesia consistently referred to that country as Zimbabwe in their domestic media. Ditto for South West Africa/Namibia.
PAC and AZAPO agitated to have South Africa’s name changed to Azania in 1994 with the introduction of majority rule, but were rebuffed by the ANC, the majority of South Africans, and the international community. They have continued to agitate for a formal name change; however, the term peaked in popularity during the heyday of both movements in the 1970s and 1980s and most of the younger generation of South Africans have even less regard for “Azania” than their parents. “South Africa” is now just as associated with Nelson Mandela, a nonracial sports legacy, and an entire generation of “born-free” black South Africans as it is with apartheid and colonialism.
Source: Quora
