R1.3bn town of Rama City set to put itself on the map
Approval has been granted for the registration of Rama City as a geographic place name.
An application for the registration of the name was submitted to the Tshwane Metro Council on behalf of developers Rama Horizon Development.
The company is developing the R1.3 billion town on a 450 hectare site south of the Medunsa Campus which was restored to the Rama community in 1998 after they had been forcibly removed during the apartheid area.
According Rama Horizon Development, Rama City will have houses, schools, a community centre and parks.
It is expected to take about 15 years to complete.
External advisor George Khomo, who was commissioned by the municipality to investigate the renaming of the area, said Rama had been a Tswana village established in the 19th century.
Khomo said that because of the separate development policy of the apartheid regime of South Africa at the time, the villagers had been forcibly removed from the area.
"The original Rama village was one of several Tswana villages which were converted to the Christian faith in the 19th century," he said.
The Lutheran Church predominated in these Twsana villages.
"Because of the influence of the Lutheran Church, most of these villages were 'christened' with biblical names," he said.
Khomo said that in the vicinity of the area where Rama City is to be, there are village names derived from the Bible such as Hebron, Jericho, Bethanie (originally Bethany) and Kanana.
Rama City currently falls under councillor John Barendrecht's ward four and councillor Naldo Mokoena's ward 32.
Barendrecht said that if one read through Khomo's report, "one gets a feeling that by calling the area Rama, justice is served and the people on the ground are given back something that has been unjustly taken away from them".
"By finding consensus on the name 'Rama' and listening to the Batswana people living there since the 19th century, we are showing that we can work together across racial divides of the past and party- political divides of the present," said Barendrecht.
Pretoria News
Posted at 07:54AM Mar 04, 2010 by Editor in Market |