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.

Virginia Haussegger is becoming well-known in Australia as a feminist critic of feminism.

She already had a public profile as a TV journalist when she wrote an explosive newspaper article in 2002, “The sins of our feminist mothers”.

In this article she describes how her generation of women was brought up to believe “We could be and do whatever we pleased”. This is the basic principle of liberalism: that we should be “free” to create who we are and what we do through our own individual choices.

At first things seemed to go well. She writes of a generation of women who “crashed through barriers and carved out good, successful and even some brilliant careers.”

But the story ends unhappily. The feminist mothers forgot “to warn us that we would need to stop, take time out and learn to nurture our partnerships and relationships.”

Virginia Haussegger describes very well the incompetent attitude to relationships of women brought up in a culture of liberal individualism:

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There is a certain, not very fatal fascination in watching the left try to grasp who we are and why we think as we do.  They tend not to get very far with it.  They veer off into ham-morality at the slightest challenge to the old auto-think.  John Ray is not wrong when he says that in public lefties need a regular fix of high-octane Feelgood Factor X.

Oddly enough, these creatures were once human, much like us really.  Alright, they were wearing terries then.  But a vestigial something might survive somewhere.  I do remind myself of that as I strive to listen to the liberal mind.  For one thing, I’m getting pretty close now to being able to grant them a complex inner life ... the capacity to love others, to have real opinions culled from real life, etc.  It’s a struggle every day of the week but one does one’s best, you know.  And then, biffo ... along comes a knockout example of otiose left-speak like this from today’s Guardian.  Game over.  Back to the political semaphore.

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This morning Tim Gillin, ace Aussie blogger, advised me that he has had to close his Personal Independence Day blog due to the heavy demands of his work.  This is very sad - but not necessarily for MR readers.  Tim will continue commenting here and, I hope, occasionally benefitting us with a post (that’s an arm-twist, Tim).

As a thoughtful and entertaining writer and pretty much, in British terms anyway, a man of the libertarian wing of the Conservative Party, Tim is altogether too useful to allow just to float off among the unblog people.  We profit from political breadth and variety because that is the catalyst for good debate and new understanding.

Good luck anyhow, Tim.  Just don’t forget where we are.

Liberal distopians must be delighted with the latest successes to have emerged from their glorious campaign against feminity, marriage, family, self-restraint, self-reliance et al.

Three sisters have each had children while still at school, the youngest at the age of 12.

Jemma, Jade and Natasha Williams, who receive benefits totalling more than £31,000 a year, are raising their babies alone after they became pregnant within three months of each other.

The sisters, aged 12, 14 and 16 when they gave birth, live in Derby with their twice-divorced mother, who holds the education system responsible for their plight ...

Jemma said: “I didn’t tell anyone because I was too scared and didn’t know what to do.  I only told my boyfriend, who was 14 at the time, but I didn’t want to have an abortion.

“He was my first love.  He was great to start with, but he’s got a new girlfriend now” ...

Jade said she had been determined not to do the same, after seeing all the dirty nappies and her sister enduring sleepless nights. But she became pregnant after “a one-night stand”.

She said: “It was just one of those things really. I wasn’t using contraception and I suppose I just thought it wouldn’t happen to me” ...

Natasha said her pregnancy, while unplanned, had pleased her.  “I don’t really want to be anything but a full-time mum,” she said.

The father, 38, came to see the child “from time to time”, but “he’s Asian and still lives with his parents, so they don’t know about me or Amani”.

How, then, do we get out of this mess?

John Ray asks in a previous post,

“Why are Americans who advocate broadly the reverse of what 19th century English liberals advocated still called liberals?”

The answer, I believe, is that there is no such reversal of politics. Modern left-wing liberals share the same underlying principle as nineteenth century liberals.

Both groups believe that we express our humanity by using our own individual will and reason to shape who we are and what we do.

However, once you adopt this view you have a problem. If we are all atomised individuals pursuing our own individual preferences, how is a society to function? How can millions of competing wills be reconciled?

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Occasionally, one comes across a stunningly original website into which some loving soul has poured hundreds of hours of labour.  One such I found by chance yesterday.  It is Luminarium - the work, apparently, of Anniina Jokinen.  I commend it to one and all.

Like many, I am aware of Fred Ross’s visually ravishing Art Renewal Centre, and agree wholeheartedly with its stand against “flat art”.  There must be many other, equally arresting and informative art and culture sites out there.  A pointer in the right direction would always be welcome.

Those who still try on the old RDNE line and the one about evil white racists have some explaining to do this morning.

White farmers may be allowed back on their land in Zimbabwe as part of a plan by the government of Robert Mugabe to solve the country’s deepening economic crisis.

The president’s key finance aide has called for some of the farmers whose properties were confiscated in a land seizure programme to be allowed to resume growing crops to boost the country’s flagging agricultural output ...

“In order to ensure maximum productivity levels, there is great scope in the country promoting and supporting joint ventures between the new farmers with progressive-minded former operators,” said Mr Gono in a state radio and television broadcast that lasted nearly three hours.

He added that the skilled whites and other new investors would be given special guarantees of uninterrupted tenure of five to 10 years, backed by government force to prevent any disruptions on the farms.

Mr Gono was careful to say that it would not reverse Mr Mugabe’s redistribution of white-owned land to blacks.

However, observers say his plan would be an implicit admission that the land seizure policy has failed.

A Zimbabwean economist, John Robertson, said: “This shows the desperation of the government to improve the economy. They say it is not a reversal of their land seizures, but it is. It won’t get very far.”

I hope it doesn’t.  Not out of the simple desire to turn a profit ... not out of some romantic notion of Africa ... not out of any satisfaction born of righting the injustice of Mugabe’s land “reforms” should Zimbabwe’s former white population turn again.  A bitter lesson should have been very thoroughly learned.  White Rhodesians are stateless until they come home to where they truly belong.