Talk:List of colloquial South African place names

Untitled
The Borders entry is plain wrong when refering to the origin of the East London area as the Border region. It is far older than the Bantustans of Transkei and Ciskei, and dates back to the days when the British were pushing out of the Cape Colony eastwards along the coast when they ran into the advancing native Xhosa heading west. Hence this area was called the Border. Also called British Kaffraria (short for Kaffir Area).

202.72.164.103 13:01, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

"Mzansi - South Africa (uMzantsi is Xhosa for 'south'). Invented by journalist/ editor Thami Masemola while working for the now-defunct South African youth publication Y magazine in 1999. Taken from the isiXhosa words 'Mzantsi Africa', meaning 'South Africa' but without the 't', hence the difference."

This is also wrong: (1) 'Mzantsi' as a name used to refer to South Africa was already around by 1997 (at least). 'Mzansi' seems to occur from around 1999. So Masemola may have popularised its use, but he certainly didn't 'invent' in 1999. Around then, it was also being popularised by means of TV channel SABC1's catchline 'Mzansi fo sho'.(2) The difference between the two forms of the word (in quotation marks) is that the former (with a 't') is isiXhosa and the latter is isiZulu. The isiXhosa name for South Africa is 'Mzantsi Afrika' (note spelling of both words). In isiZulu it's 'Ningizimu Afrika'. It would seem that the isiXhosa term was 'Zulufied', so that today the vast majority of uses is of the 'Mzansi' form. Sha'p.

Andreniemand (talk) 13:02, 28 June 2013 (UTC)