THERE is a cornet called the Purple Mountain Observatory Comet, discovered at a time when individual achievement was out of favour in the People's Republic of China. But this is an exception. Comets are generally named after whoever discovers them, Shoemaker Levi and Comet Hale Bopp being examples from the recent past.
Alternatively, a comet may be named, not after its discoverer, but after someone who was the first to spot that two or more apparently unrelated apparitions in the sky were, in fact, regular recurrences of the same phenomenon: Halley was a case in point, and so was Encke. But there was one occasion when a country was named in honour of a comet.
It happened in South Africa in 1883. The previous year the skies over the African continent had been dominated by the Great Comet of 1882, and it so happened that local politics that year threw up two small Boer republics in the region where South Africa now borders on Botswana. One, for reasons that, to me at any rate, remain obscure, was called Goschen and had its capital at Mafeking.
In the case of the second, however, it proved more difficult to find a name, until someone had the bright idea - in a very literal sense - of calling it after the comet which had so recently been a feature of its skies. Thus Stellaland, "the country of the star", came into being on September 18th, 1883, and proudly established its capital at Vryberg.
The recorded history of Stallaland is short and sweet. Indeed, we know little about this tiny country, except that it appears to have done little harm to anyone, and to have succeeded during its short existence in issuing a set of postage stamps.
Its downfall in the end was geographical. Two years later, in 1885, Cecil Rhodes was organising the Cape to Cairo railway, and found that Stellaland and Goschen blocked his way. To Rhodes, such obstacles, albeit sovereign, were trivial. He prevailed on the Cape authorities to dispatch an expeditionary force to solve the problem of his right of way. Not a shot was fired in this little altercation, but Stellaland forthwith was to find itself abolished, and its territory was annexed to the protectorate of Bechuanaland on this day, February 7th, 1885.