The Boer years were rolled back yet further yesterday when some official commission decided that the RSA capital Pretoria should henceforth be known as Tshwane.

A city built as a monument to the white Afrikaner heroes - and a symbol of resistance to the British during the Boer War - will soon carry the name of an African chief who once ruled the area.

Critics said the change was designed to obliterate the symbols and folk memories of the country’s three million Afrikaners.

But Ben Mncube, 28, said whites should learn to live with the new name. “It was the whites who introduced all these names when they came here,” he added. “There should be African names for African cities.”

Leaving aside the question whether there is such a thing, strictly speaking, as an African city, I don’t think one can argue there with Ben.  Sorry Pretorians of old, hunkered down behind your electrified fences, a loaded gun in every drawer.  African heritage and culture should inform the naming of the seats of power in African nation states.  Leaving aside, of course, the question whether there is such a thing as an African nation state ...

Justice ... nay, not merely justice but democracy and freedom demand that this worthy principle must translate everywhere.  That, after all, is only being equal, isn’t it?  Can’t argue with that.

And so to Britain, where the new colonisers have, with typically uncaring and selfish disdain, imposed their own culture upon us in the form of, quite probably, hundreds of alien place and street names.  Are we not to share in the rights of all ancient majorities, so expressly contained within that one glorious, never to be forgotten word, “Tchwa ... Tchaw ...  Tsch ... well knee, anyway?  Or Nay.  Or Nur.

Probably not.