Not by any name…

Verneukpan

A friend recently commented on Australian place names and that set me to thinking about the naming of places.

Of course there’s the dull and unimaginative naming a place after a person of note like some royalty or aristocrat who did nothing more than to buy up land and lord it over the locals. Strange how their descendants then later kowtow to the posturing exploiters! Just as boring is naming places in a new country after places in one’s old country, hence the Kensingtons, Blackheaths, Kews, Wellingtons, Bristols, Camdens et boringly cetera, ad nauseum; it’s enough to make one expire from pure lack of interest!

No, what fascinate me is the names given to places by the people who were the first to settle there, or the first to start a new farm or village. In Australia there are thousands of examples of such places, mostly with aboriginal names. The problem is that, unless one can understand one of the aboriginal languages, the true whimsical or poignant nature of the place name is usually lost. And that brings me to the country of my birth, where places also have unusual, weird, amusing or strange names.

South African places were mostly named by the early settlers (Dutch, French, German, or English) or by the earlier inhabitants like the Khoi (Hottentots), San (Bushmen), Griquas and in the north and east of the country the black linguistic groups like the Nguni, Sothos and Tswanas. Later descendants of the early settlers named their farms, and often these farm names became attached to villages which grew into towns. Other named places just never amounted to more than a piece of land or a valley, or a tiny hamlet.

As a child I marvelled at names like Verneukpan (Cheat Flats  -  large salt lake in the central northern Cape), Misgund (Ill-favoured), Nooitgedacht (Never Imagined), Driebeenfontein (Three Leg Fountain), Garies, Gariep, Prieska, Umtata, Ixopo, Tzaneen, etc., the latter all having indigenous names. Grootmis was named thus because of the dense fog off the not too distant Atlantic, not because it was the site of a huge pile of manure or even a disaster of some kind – mis in Afrikaans can mean fog, or manure or excreta. In the Western Cape places like Vergelegen (Distant), La Motte, Groote Schuur (Large Barn), Klapmuts, Zeekoevlei (Hippopotamus wetland), Sandvlei, La Rochelle, and Muizenberg (Mountain of Mice) all have interesting stories behind their names.

Vergelegen

It seems to me the early Dutch settlers started the trend in the latter half of the 17^th century when the founder of the refreshment station in the shadow of Table Mountain, Jan van Riebeeck, gave outposts names like Keert de Koe (Stop the Cow), Houdt den Bul (Hold the Bull) and  Coornhoop (Hoping for wheat). These descriptive names were later followed by more, like Pramberg (Boob Mountain) in the Karoo (and it does look like a breast!), Knersvlakte (Gnashing Plain), Moordenaarsrivier (Murderer’s River) Putsonderwater (Well without water) and thousands more. Of course South Africa also has its Wellington, Adelaide, Blackheath, Wentworth, Cooktown, Newcastle and Queenstown, to name a few of the unimaginatively named places, but there are enough others to make one smile or wonder…

Pramberg

Putsonderwater