Mthatha: The River That Takes

Jeff Brown and Claude (WildCoast WebWorx) · Sunday 11 October 2026, 00:00 SAST

Umtata, renamed Mthatha in 2004, carries a name that official records trace to a sneezewood tree or a flooding river. Transkeian schoolchildren of the early 1970s were taught something older: a prayer spoken over the dead at the river's edge, Um'tata Bawo. The isiXhosa verb at its root, -thatha, to take, has since been given a demonstration by thirty years of governance that no linguist could have predicted.

The Invocation at the Khambi

Northwest of the town, toward the Khambi mountains, the river formed a contested frontier between the abaThembu of the Ngangelizwe lineage and the amaMpondo. Cattle raids and territorial battles left casualties along its gorges and drifts. In Nguni cosmology, deep pools were the home of the abantu bomlambo, the river people, and a threshold to the ancestors. AbaThembu clans committed their dead to these waters, a necessity when war made burial impossible. As the body was given to the current, the living addressed the Father directly: Um'tata, Bawo.

The historian H. L. Potgieter, writing as Mlungisi in The Transkei and its Places (1960), recorded this testimony from the Khambi communities and became the source of what rural schools taught. Spocter and Donaldson (2021), drawing on Mabandla (2012), derive the name from the same abaThembu custom. Leiden University research on related rites records the same phrase at river burials. The Mthatha Museum, per Tru FM, treats the sneezewood account as secondary to the invocation. Missionary diaries from the frontier, rich on stations and botany, are largely silent on native funerary rites, which is why the prayer survived in oral memory rather than in print.

Four Syllables, Two People

The grammar is precise, and more intimate than English can render. The subject concord u- (you) fuses with the object concord m- (him) and the verb -thath-e (take): umthathe, you take him. In that single opening syllable, the one being addressed and the one being given are already bound together before the verb begins. Bawo, Father, names the one addressed a second time.

IsiXhosa adds a quieter irony. Tata is father; thatha is take. The only difference is the aspirate, the breath on the "th". Spoken over a body in the water, Um'tata sits on that edge between the two words, which is likely why the schoolroom spelling, with its plain "t", held both meanings at once.

The British surveyors who laid out a buffer post in the 1870s, on land Richard Calverley obtained from Chief Ngangelizwe, could not hear the aspirate and dropped Bawo as unnecessary. What they kept, unknowingly, was the u-: the name entered the 1882/83 municipal charter as Umtata, Father still addressed in its first letter. The colonial gazetteers then filled in origins they could document: the umThathi sneezewood tree, recorded as the "Sneeze Wood River" in 1827, and the river's flash floods.

The Verb Enacted

In 2004 the Geographical Names Council restored the aspirate and deleted the initial vowel, part of the same correction that returned Butterworth to eGcuwa and King William's Town to iQonce. The aspirate settled the old pun in favour of taking. The deleted u- removed the Father from the word. What was left on the road signs began with m-, him, and ended in the verb: take him, with no one left to ask.

By then the state had spent a decade demonstrating it. The Transkei's 1993 budget was approximately R12.2 billion; the consolidated Eastern Cape budget afterward, four times the area, came to roughly R8.8 billion. Those figures have since vanished from the digital record. The 1994 choice of Bhisho as capital had already begun draining Mthatha of administrative spending.

Attrition became policy after 1996, when Bantu Holomisa told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Stella Sigcau, by then Mandela's Minister of Public Enterprises, had taken R50,000 from Sol Kerzner. He refused to retract it, was expelled from the ANC, and co-founded the UDM in 1997. The former Transkei backed him overwhelmingly, and from that point the region's starvation was deliberate. Radio Transkei closed. Transkei Airways was liquidated. Vulindlela and Zamukulungisa withered as incentives lapsed. State payments dried up, and businesses toppled like dominoes.

I watched this from inside one of them. In 1997 my company, Computer Business Systems (Pty) Ltd, installed a twenty-five station computer laboratory at the University of Transkei and waited six months to be paid. The roads decayed into trenches, and the KSD municipality buckled under deployed cadres. An ANC source in the OR Tambo district later told the Mail & Guardian that the party's strategy to frustrate the UDM was "not premised to benefit the poor." That article, like the budget figures, can no longer be found.

The Semantic Circle

The abaThembu bound their dead to the Father in a single syllable and asked him to take them gently. The colonial scribes, deaf to the prayer, kept the Father by accident. The democratic state heard the grammar perfectly: it took the capital, the airline, the radio station, the factories, the payroll, then struck the Father from the road signs and left the dead alone with the verb. Um'tata Bawo was a petition. Mthatha is an order, and it has not stopped.

References

• Potgieter, H. L. ("Mlungisi"), The Transkei and its Places (1960)
• Spocter, M. and Donaldson, R., Mthatha (Umtata): From Tribal Buffer, to Homeland Capital, to Regional Integrator (2021), citing Mabandla (2012)
• Leiden University Scholarly Publications, on lahla ngubo and river burial
• Mthatha Museum, as reported by Tru FM

Further reading on this site

• Development in the Transkei
• Human rights abuses in the Transkei