J Rose: still barking up a wrong tree and deeply affected by the removal of the derogatory racist street name ‘Hottentot Crescent’.
Hottentot, a name given to the indigenous people of South Africa, the Khoisan, by the Dutch colonists in the 1650s. The name having the same meaning as nigger, kaffir, boong.
J Rose does not seem to realise that the ‘Moonlight’ in ‘Moonlight Close’ is the botanical name of the Australian Moonlight Grevillea tree in keeping with botanical names of streets in Tallowood.
There is a Khoisan prayer that goes:
‘When the moon in me dies every month,
Let all the sin in me die.
When the moon is born each month
Let all the good in me be reborn with it’.
Moonlight Close is a fitting name to bring closure to the use of this racist derogatory word ‘Hottentot’ and in so doing honouring the dignity of the Indigenous people of South Africa. By embracing the name Moonlight Close we are making a statement of reconciliation and respect for all members of our community.
It is also a small way of saying sorry to Sarah Baartman, a Khoisan woman, known as the ‘Hottentot Venus’. She was taken as a slave to Europe in 1814 and paraded like an animal in a zoo. Her body was later cut up in the name of science and placed in jars, preserved in formalin, displayed in the Musée de I’Homme’s archive 33 in France.
Her body was repatriated to South Africa in 2002 and buried in her native village in the Gamtoos Valley, on August 9th of the same year. This was in the presence of Nelson Mandela, himself related to the Khoisan people. A symbolic ending to colonialism.
The street sign Hottentot Crescent will be sent to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa, where it will be on display in honour of a small town in Australia which took action to eradicate the remnants of apartheid and its cruel legacy.
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