This is an old topic by now, but the issues are timeless.  I personally don’t have a major problem with names changing.  There are some name changes that I don’t think are necessary and there are others that surprise me, from time to time.  I guess it depends on one’s perspective, but I don’t understand why any street or any place is named after any apartheid era Prime Minister, President or leader.  They all led a morally corrupt system and they should not be recognised in any way at all, whether they were a Prime Minister or a President.  Nobody who believes in democracy in any event would ever believe that any of them would have ever been Prime Ministers or President if there was true democracy in South Africa at the time, so with the exception of F W de Klerk, who at least had some sense and saw that changes had to be made, I cannot believe that any of them deserve any credit at all.  

I have not spent as much time thinking about people from 100 or 150 years ago either, but if history shows that they made their money illegally, or they made it by injuring others (I think of the makers of cigarette and alcohol products) then I don’t have any problem either with anything named after them being changed.  It is very nice that they were charitable, but one must also recognise that there are a lot of people who do a lot of wrong in their lives, who towards the end of their lives try to make up for it with charitable donations and I am not saying that that is the reason that they set up the various foundations and charities that they have, but it may well be one of the factors.  The bottom line is that there are people amongst us right now who we acknowledge, that we praise and who one day will be looked at in a new way because that is how history works, it is rewritten by the winners and it is also rewritten as we achieve a greater understanding of things.  I don’t have a problem with all the statues of the past going into a wonderful old museum, where they can sit together with statues of people who were once acclaimed for their scientific knowledge of proclaiming that the world was flat and I have no doubt that one day they will be joined by, amongst others, highly revered businessmen that make all of their money by selling nicotine-delivery products that cause cancer. There are far too many fake idols, false stars and people who are given credit for things they either never did or have everything brushed over, and I don’t really see any problem with correcting history in time.  That does not mean I think they are particularly serious issues, and there is no doubt that the students of today have much less to protest about than they might have some 25 years ago when I was at University, and that they may soon, once they have resolved these issues, have to move on to the quality of food in the canteen, but that is the nature of the young – to complain about what they think is not acceptable and to express their opinion.  Invariably as they get older, they often have a new view on many things and that too is a part of life.