SPEECH BY THE EXECUTIVE MAYOR OF CAPE TOWN, ALDERMAN PATRICIA DE LILLE
The significance of the city's naming process is to heal the divisions of the past
09 August 2012
(Note to editors: This is an extract of the speech delivered by the Mayor on the occasion of the naming of Krotoa Place Friday August 10 2012)
This is another great day for the city and the people of Cape Town. We have committed ourselves to building an inclusive city, a city that brings everyone together. That mission is a challenging one. It includes overcoming a long history of divisions that still make themselves felt in the present. We have to interrogate the ways that we can start to celebrate our diversity.
One of the ways in which we do this is by direct social and economic redress, through policies that cross-subsidise services for the poor while maintaining high services for ratepayers; thus ensuring delivery for all of the people of our city.
But we must also think of the spaces in which we live in order to create a deeper meaning in our relationships as a broad community.
That deeper meaning is one of reconciliation, a meaning of healing the divisions of the past by changing the way we think about our city. That is the significance of the naming and renaming process.
It is to reach that deeper meaning of unification by creating a sense of shared ownership of Cape Town and our heritage. It is to make the public space one that is a celebration of our different traditions and our mutual history, acknowledging aspects of our past that were neglected to create a shared future.
Today, we honour Krotoa, of the Khoi, a wife, a mother and an interpreter for the first Dutch settlers in the Cape. Krotoa's life was not a long one. But the work she achieved in that brief life represents all that we are trying to achieve in our great city.
Krotoa represented the joining together of two cultures, the Khoi and the Dutch. Her work showed that seemingly separate traditions only need a simple bridge between each other in order to create understanding.
While the meaning of her achievement might not have been celebrated in her lifetime, we celebrate her today as a symbol of reconciliation. This celebration is made even more significant today, Women's Day, where we acknowledge our country's women, recognising that the divisions of our past, in as much as they were based on race and culture, were equally based on gender.
We recognise the achievements of women and their role in our society, a recognition that was neglected for too long in the past. We want the Cape Town of the future to be owned by all people, no matter their race, culture, gender or sexuality. That is the significance of our reconciliation process. And that is the significance of the steps we take as part of that process, including the naming and renaming of public spaces.
Let Krotoa Place be a symbol of our lasting commitment to changing this city into a Cape Town that we all own.
Thank you.
Issued by the City of Cape Town, August 10 2012
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