South African Place Names and What They Mean: From eGoli to eThekwini

By LouisN

Last updated: October 18, 2026

South African place names are a record of everyone who has lived here. A single map carries Khoisan words for the land, Nguni and Sotho-Tswana names for the same places, Dutch and English colonial names laid over the top, and a generation of post-1994 renamings that have made GPS units and government departments argue with each other ever since.

Understanding what those names mean is one of the quickest ways to understand the country. A name that looks like a random label is usually a sentence: it says what grows there, who lived there, what was found there, or how far you had to walk to find water. This guide explains the layers, gives the meanings of well-known names, and shows you how to read a South African place name for yourself.

Four Layers, One Map

The oldest layer is Khoisan. Words such as karoo, usually explained as a Khoisan term for a dry or hard place, describe the land itself rather than owning it. Many of these names survived because they were useful: they told travellers where water was, or what the ground would do to an ox wagon.

The second layer is Bantu-language naming — Nguni (Zulu, Xhosa) and Sotho-Tswana (Sesotho, Setswana, Sepedi). These names were given by the people living in a place and usually describe a feature, an event or a person. The third layer is colonial: Dutch, then British, naming towns after officials, directors and royal family members. The fourth is the post-1994 renaming process, which has restored or replaced many of the first three.

Names That Describe the Land

Some of the clearest names in the country are the ones that simply describe the geography.

• eThekwini (Durban) — from itheku, a bay or lagoon. The name describes the harbour that made the city possible, and it is now the official name of the municipality.
• uMhlanga — usually given as “place of reeds”, from the reed beds that once lined the lagoon north of Durban.
• Hluhluwe — commonly explained as referring to the thorny creeper (umhluhluwe) that grows along the river of the same name in northern KwaZulu-Natal.
• uMgungundlovu (Pietermaritzburg) — “place of the elephant”, and more precisely the secret conclave of the elephant: the name of King Dingane’s royal homestead, later applied to the city.
• Mangaung (Bloemfontein) — “place of cheetahs”, from the sighting of cheetahs in the area.

Names That Describe What Was Found There

A surprising number of South African towns are named after a mineral or a crop, because that is what brought people there in the first place.

eGoli, the Zulu name for Johannesburg, means “place of gold”. It is the most successful piece of naming in the country: the city exists because of the Witwatersrand reef, and the name has outlasted the mines. eMalahleni (Witbank) means “place of coal”, which is exactly what the town was built on. Polokwane (Pietersburg) is usually translated as “place of safety”, and Thohoyandou in Limpopo as “head of the elephant”, a Venda name of authority rather than a description of wildlife.

The pattern continues in smaller places: a town named after a spring, a ford, a hill where iron was smelted, or a tree that marked a meeting point. If a South African place name sounds like a description rather than a label, it usually is one.

Names That Belong to a Person

The Nguni prefix kwa- means “at the place of”, and it is almost always followed by a person or a clan. KwaMashu, north of Durban, is named after Marshall Campbell, the sugar magnate on whose land the township was built — a colonial name wearing African grammar. KwaZulu-Natal itself means “the place of the Zulu” joined to a colonial name given by Vasco da Gama, who sighted the coast on Christmas Day in 1497.

Tshwane, the name of the metropolitan municipality that contains Pretoria, is generally explained as referring to a pre-colonial chief named Tshwane, said to be a son of Mzilikazi. Pretoria itself is named after Andries Pretorius, the Voortrekker leader — which is why the country ended up with two names for one city, and why the road signs disagree with each other.

Musina, on the Limpopo border, is usually explained through the Musina tree or a local chief of the same name; the older spelling “Messina” was a colonial approximation of it.

The Colonial Layer

Many towns still carry the names of people who never lived in them. Kimberley is named after Lord Kimberley, the British colonial secretary of the day, not after anything in the Northern Cape. Upington is named after Thomas Upington, an attorney-general of the Cape Colony. Stellenbosch means “Van der Stel’s bush”, after Simon van der Stel, who ordered the settlement. Pietermaritzburg carries two Voortrekker names — Piet Retief and Gerrit Maritz — in one word, which is why the city has spent decades living alongside uMgungundlovu.

These names are not going away, and there is no serious campaign to remove most of them. What has changed is that they are no longer the only names a place has.

The English and Afrikaans Layer

Not every colonial name is a person. Several of the most familiar ones are descriptions in Dutch or English, which is why they sound plain next to a name like uMgungundlovu.

Bloemfontein means “fountain of flowers”. Rustenburg means “town of rest”. Table Mountain is exactly what it looks like. Cape Town grew from the Cape of Good Hope, named by Bartolomeu Dias in the 1480s for the sea route it promised rather than for anything on land.

Others carry a person. Durban is named after Benjamin D’Urban, governor of the Cape Colony in the 1830s. Johannesburg is usually explained as a compound of two men’s names — Johann Rissik, a mining commissioner, and Christiaan Johannes Joubert, a surveyor — welded together with the Afrikaans suffix for a town.

That mix is the reason South African maps read the way they do: a Nguni description, a Dutch farm name and an English official’s surname can all end up within fifty kilometres of each other, each one recording a different moment in the same story.

What the Renamings Actually Changed

Since 1994 the South African Geographical Names Council has processed thousands of name changes, from towns and rivers to individual streets. The high-profile ones are worth knowing because they affect addresses, bookings and navigation:

• Port Elizabeth became Gqeberha in 2021. The new name is the Xhosa name of the Baakens River, which runs through the city.
• Pietersburg became Polokwane, and Nelspruit became Mbombela — usually translated as “many people together in a small space”.
• Witbank became eMalahleni, and Messina became Musina.
• Louis Trichardt became Makhado, after the Venda king.

In practice, both names are still used. A courier company will accept Gqeberha and Port Elizabeth on the same parcel; a hotel will list one and answer to the other. The Department of Home Affairs, the road signs and the local taxi association are not always in agreement, and visitors who plan for that are rarely surprised.

Township Names That Carry a Message

Some of the most interesting names in the country belong to townships, and many were chosen deliberately rather than inherited. Soweto is an English acronym — South Western Townships — coined by the city council in the 1960s. Khayelitsha means “new home”. Gugulethu means “our pride”. Both were named in the 1980s, and both names were chosen by the people who lived there rather than imposed from outside.

The contrast is instructive. A township called Khayelitsha is making a statement about what it is; a suburb called Rosebank is describing a bank of roses that may no longer exist. Names are never neutral, and in South Africa they are often the shortest available history lesson.

How to Read a Place Name Yourself

You can usually get a long way with three rules.

First, look at the grammar. In Nguni languages, e- at the front and -ini at the end is the locative: “at the place of”. That is why eGoli, eThekwini and eMalahleni all share the same shape — they are places, not things. Kwa- means “at the home of” a person or clan, as in KwaMashu or KwaZulu. In Sotho-Tswana languages, ga- does the same job, and the -ng ending marks a locative, which is why Mangaung and Polokwane end the way they do.

Second, look for a verb or a noun you recognise. A name containing -dini, -hlanzi or a tree name is usually describing something that was there. A name containing a person’s name is usually claiming ownership or commemorating a chief, a farmer or an official.

Third, accept that some meanings are contested. Several well-known names have two or three explanations that different communities and different historians prefer, and the argument is often part of the name’s life. Where a meaning is disputed, the honest thing to say is that it is disputed.

Why the Names Matter

A place name is the cheapest form of history a country has. It survives without maintenance, it is repeated by everyone who lives there, and it carries a claim about who was there first and what they thought was worth recording. South Africa’s names are unusually dense with that information, because so many different people have named the same river, hill and bay.

Learning a few of them does something practical as well: it turns a map into a set of descriptions. Once you know that eThekwini is “at the bay” and eGoli is “place of gold”, the country stops looking like a list of labels and starts reading like a set of notes left by the people who got there first.

If you are naming something yourself — a child, a business or a place — the same principle applies. The best South African names are the ones that say something true about where they come from, in a language that the people who live there actually speak.