City scope: trouble on Mao Zedong Street

When Mao Zedong's name popped up in a Pretoria municipality "name bank" debate, the politicians present must have wondered if they were experiencing a cultural revolution of their own.

Road name changes, per se, are nothing new in South Africa. Since the country's democratic transition 20 years ago, airport, hospital, suburb and street names have been, and continue to be, renamed. Most often, the new titles erase colonial names and are a nod to the icons who laid the foundations for a democratic South Africa. But this process also involves political scent-marking.

Bar the odd frustration at having to continuously upgrade satellite navigation systems and dump obsolete maps, most South Africans accept and even applaud new monikers for a new era.

Jan Smuts Airport gave way to OR Tambo International Airport, Verwoerdburgstad district became the politically neutral Centurion, and there are Nelson Mandela drives, roads, squares and streets all over the country.

A foreign political figure's name, however, has never been considered - let alone one as controversial as Mao Zedong.

South Africa's ruling African National Congress (ANC) is cosy with Beijing, and China is now the rainbow nation's largest trading partner. Unsurprisingly then, the resistance of the official opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), to this proposal made little difference.