Description
We hold that the proposed name Azania:
- Has no linguistic, genealogical, or territorial connection to the indigenous peoples of Southern Africa;
- Does not feature in the oral traditions, cosmology, toponymy, or sacred memory systems of the First Nations of this region;
- Was imported through ideological frameworks that are disconnected from the indigenous knowledge systems and the lived spatial relationships of African First Peoples.
By contrast, the name Borwa is a living indigenous toponym grounded in the linguistic, genealogical, and historical traditions of the Sotho-Tswana peoples. It honours the Barwa, the earliest recorded inhabitants of this land, known in Western ethnographic classifications as the San and reflects a naming convention that predates colonial and postcolonial constructs.
