Place Names - A Short History

South Africa is a multi-cultural land and has been so for hundreds of years, even before the arrival of White explorers and the Black migration southwards out of central Africa.  The indigenous people of Natal were the San Bushmen, little people with an acute awareness of their place in nature.  They hunted with bows and poison arrows and while, like all African people, they had no written language of their own, they left a wonderful legacy of rock art which remains the only method by which we can try to understand their culture, there being no true Bushmen left in Africa today.  Their language, which consists of a large number of different clicks, is still spoken by a few small groups of "Bushmen" who are now actually of mixed race.  Their influence on name places in the Natal Drakensberg is poorly understood, but perhaps the invading Zulus adapted variations of Bushmen names to describe the locality.

The Bushmen were hunter gatherers while the fearsome Zulus were herders and subsistence farmers.  Stock theft by the Bushmen did not endear them to either the Zulus or the White settlers, and within the space of 100 years the Bushmen were entirely wiped out.  The dominant influence on place names in the Natal Drakensberg is that of the Zulu, followed by the English who colonised and surveyed most of Natal.  There are very few Afrikaans place names as a result.

Zulu is a dialect, and it was not until the arrival of missionaries that it was formalised into a written language.  While nouns are generally preceded by a vowel, in recent times it has become common practice to omit these since they are seldom pronounced.  Consequently, you will notice that in this guide most place names omit the preceding vowel except where it has become customary to include it in the written form.  Similarly, the silent "h" has been omitted in most cases.  To the uninitiated this may appear confusing, but generally whenever a name looks and sounds similar, it is referring to the same geographical feature.

Zulu tribes were very territorial and no consideration was given to the confusion which might result by giving features in different parts of the berg the same name.  Thus there are two widely separated Mlambonja rivers, for example.  Zulu place names are usually wonderfully descriptive, concise, often humorous and sometimes spiritual in nature.  Mlambonja, for instance, means "hungry dog", an apt description of these rivers when they are in flood, lashing and twisting about like a very hungry dog trying to shred meat from a bone.  Unfortunately dialects may differ quite substantially over relatively small areas, and over the years the exact meaning of many place names has become lost.  If you were to ask a Zulu to translate a place name he will often reply that he cannot do so, but he may venture a guess.

To the confusion of Zulu place names can be added the additional influence of the Basuthu (Basotho) tribes of Lesotho (previously Basotholand).  Also herders and subsistence farmers, it was inevitable that they should come into contact with the Zulus along the edge of the Drakensberg escarpment, since there are many passes which allow the movement of livestock up and down the mountain range.  As one might expect, this eventually led to stock theft, particularly by the fit Basuthu tribesmen who could quickly melt into the many large valleys of their mountain kingdom.  In the end no love was lost between the Zulu and the Basuthu, and even today there are frequent incidents of stock theft, although the dagga trade between them seems to be thriving!

Last modified on 2011/11/10