Dancing the Tambo Tango
Some time ago, in the mid-1990s, Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg (South Africa) was renamed to the infinitely more poetic Johannesburg International Airport. In the spirit of the times, Jan Smuts (being white) was held up as a symbol of apartheid rule. In fact, Jan Smuts opposed the National Party all his life, had quite a few loopy ideas on the holistic nature of the planet and its inhabitants, and was involved in the founding of the League of Nations (forerunner of the United Nations).
On 30 June 2006, Johannesburg International Airport was quietly renamed again, this time to Oliver Tambo International Airport. Now, Oliver Tambo, despite being an ANC luminary and probably all-round splendid fellow, does not appear to match up to the international stature of Jan Smuts.
(In SABC3′s dreadful Great South Africans, Tambo finished as number 31, as opposed to Smuts’s position at number 9. Greatness is not a popularity contest, true, but popularity is a clear indicator of public support.)
According to the Mail & Guardian newspaper:
Department of Transport spokesperson Collen Msibi told the Mail & Guardian Online on Monday that “an overwhelming number of people” have expressed support for the name change, though he could not give exact figures or say whether any objections had been received.
Regardless of how many people supported the name change, I cannot imagine more than a dozen or so of them having hatched the idea. Even worse, I cannot imagine more than a dozen or so of them grasping the impact such a change will have in terms of cost and lost tourism.
Update: A reader of the Sunday Times perhaps comes closest to summing up the pro-renaming camp’s arguments when he writes: “Many if not all of our cities were given either English or Afrikaner names when colonialism took grip of our fatherland.” Of course, this argument holds no water. White settlers didn’t rename existing towns, but rather founded their own in unpopulated areas. An inherently racist argument, but one I believe to be factually correct: an airport like Johannesburg International was largely funded by white taxpayers and white-owned financial institutions, so where is the justification for changing its name?
give us some figures please. when it was changed from Jan Smuts to Johannesurg international, how much did it cost South Africa and how much tourism was lost?
Exact figures aren’t available, but the most obvious cost implications are changes in signage (including road signs), administrative costs, stationery and advertising and PR campaigns.
The impact on tourism is a pure brand issue: change a brand for which there exists a degree of recognition, and you lose loyalty. Not that new loyalties and relationships cannot be built, but that takes time and costs money.
Tourists recognise the name Johannesburg (as they recognised the name Jan Smuts before that), which clearly encourages them to use the airport. Business travellers don’t have as much choice, but might still have to choose between Johannesburg and Cape Town.
The SABC quotes a spokesman for the Ministry of Arts and Culture as saying that “he does not have an exact figure of the costs involved, but ‘there is not enough money in the world that could quantify the selfless sacrifice a man like Oliver Tambo made to what this country ought to be’.”
Clearly we’re talking about significant amounts of money, and the people who made the decision never even took the trouble to do an esitmate. South Africa has real problems, which can essentially be fixed by well-funded people who care enough. While self-absorbed idiots with chips on their shoulders are farting about trying to eradicate the legacy of their fellow countrymen, nothing will be done, and the quality of life will not improve for the majority of South Africans.
Of course the re-naming will consign the location of the airport to oblivion for a while. No one will know where it is, and in their mind’s eye will just be another foetid fly-blown airport decaying somewhere in Africa. Upset South Africans should take the long view, however. It is African to waste money by continually changing names, so if they exercise a little patience the next regime will likely change it again. And so will the next regime, and the next, and the next, ad infinitum. Who knows – in 100 years when they have exhausted all the heroes of whatever it might be renamed, oh, I don’t know, … Johannesburg International Airport, perhaps?