Should Sterkhorn be renamed Mount Mandela?

The reason I raised the cable car issue in conjuction with the renaming is that the person who is proposing naming to Mt Mandela is doing so from an economic stand point - i.e. the renaming will put the Drakensberg on the map, get the tourists in and stimulate the local economy. Once they are all there, standing around and looking at their peak, it won't be long before the calls go out to drag their sorry backsides up in a cable car. Previously the cable car issue has been held at bay because the projected numbers of people were simply not sufficient to make the cable way viable. The convergence of prominent name and more punters is what made me think it wouldn't be long after a renaming that we would expect these calls for a cable way too. People who go to mountains because of what the mountains are called are the same sort of people who like to eat ice creams and have tea parties near cable way stations.

It wouldn't be the first time that the motivation for using Mandela's name was primarily for commercial reasons.

mnt_tiska wrote: People who go to mountains because of what the mountains are called are the same sort of people who like to eat ice creams and have tea parties near cable way stations.

This must be the most EPIC quote I have read this year, you have a way with words..

Why don't politicians ever name other things after themselves? Like places at the bottom of the ocean, for instance. The Stalin Trench sounds rather appropriate.

Nothing natural should be named after people - not mountains, not comets, not craters on the moon. Man made things, ok. (Streets, buildings, airports.) If you MAKE it, you can call it what you will. If you didn't make it, it's NOT yours. But no one's asking me.

In the Drakensberg, I have always been ashamed that the Bushman names have been erased, and I assume forgotten. Sani Pass is named for them, but I'm sure they didn't call it that. Whatever the political noise, the native peoples of Southern Africa, from Botswana to the Cape, and from Mozambique to Namibia, are the Bushmen tribes, Khoi-San in the literature, both Whites and Nguni are invaders. I believe Khoi refers to herders, and San to hunter-gatherers. The distinguishing feature of their languages was and is of course, the many different clicks, some of which the Zulu and Xhosa adopted.

From my childhood, some of the Zulu names I learned I now suspect are Bushman. Shongalolo, chocho, nunu are three that come to mind. I suspect this because the names are the same in a number of Nguni languages, and not derived from any more Northern African language.

Does anyone know if an account of the Bushman Drakensberg names exists?

I could not even find an online account of the final genocide of the Drakensberg Bushmen, which I was taught happened after the last Anglo-Zulu War (1879) - the British Carbineers massacred them all on orders.

I now live on (former) Ute land at the interface of the Rocky Mountains (Colorado) and the Great American Desert (Utah). The Utes were defeated in 1892 by the US Army that, after the Civil War ended, was turned on the natives. The Utes left plenty of petroglyphs, usually at their winter camps.

" the native peoples of Southern Africa, from Botswana to the Cape, and from Mozambique to Namibia, are the Bushmen tribes" I couldn't agree more!! The rest of us are pretty much invasive aliens.

I would far rather be reading Bushman names for peaks etc. than any others.