Remember the past, reflect on the sobering present
Anniversaries are beautiful occasions. They’re times of joy, where people reminisce about the exceptional times in their lives.
The next 12 months of celebrating 120 years of New Brighton will be no different.
I’m always filled with pride whenever I think about my township’s list of illustrious ancestors.
I was 12 when John Kani and Winston Ntshona appeared in their first big-screen roles, after many years of stage performances that thrilled the local scene, all the way to international audiences.
And for them to star in The Wild Geese, a 1978 Swiss-British war film, alongside some of the biggest names at the time, Richard Burton and Roger Moore, was simply special.
For people my age at the time, it was the moment of “see, black child, it can be done”, “Viva New Brighton” and other such exclamations.
The two veteran actors had built on a legacy of many luminaries, like that of George Pemba, a painter today regarded world wide as a master, but who for many decades in his 89-year life remained unrecognised until a few decades ago.
“Pemba’s beginnings as a painter occurred at a time and place not only highly unfavourable, but well nigh impossible,” writes Prof PA Duminy on the sleeve of Sarah Huddleston’s book on the life of this versatile man, who was also the writer who penned and staged at least two seminal plays — The Story of Nongqawuse and The Xhosa Prophet Ntsikana.
The documentation of our history, people’s stories and social conditions is what inspired those of us who followed in the footsteps of our township’s most distinguished journalists, among them Mono Badela,
Jimmy Matyu and Satch Saliso, all now deceased, and Mandla Tyala, who would become an assistant editor of the now defunct Evening Post, formerly The Herald’s sister newspaper.
It was also the lenses of photojournalists Elijah Jokazi, George Luse and others that brought township stories to life.
And thus, people like me, with the help of our maths teacher Zola Topo at Cowan
High school, got to publish The Cowanite newsletter.
Up the road from the school was one of the township’s most elite shebeens, KwaZach, where the township’s professionals and socialites hung out and listened to jazz.
There aren’t many bands in SA that can boast of being a “jazz university” in the same way that The Soul Jazzmen can.
Established in Red Location, the oldest part of the township, the outfit produced “graduates” who would become the genre’s finest — among them trumpeter Feya Faku, and the late drummer Lulu Gontsana and saxophonist Zim Ngqawana.
Music ran in New Brighton folks’ veins. I still brag that, for two decades, a choir I belonged to, the Mathews Singers, held a record for having the highest number of podium finishes in the history of the national choir festival.
Sport was no different.
Read Dr Buntu Siwisa’s book youngsters, some of whom are Rugby, Resistance and Politics: available for hire — New
How Dan Qeqe helped shape the Brighton is now officially the history of Port Elizabeth, and murder capital of the Eastern you’ll understand why the Cape, and among the top 30 township has produced the still police stations with the highest small crop of black people who murder rate nationally. have risen to occupy positions Little wonder then that the once preserved for whites only once bustling Embizweni
— Dr Mtutuzeli Nyoka and Gerald Square — which was once Majola, who became president home to a Barclays Bank and CEO of Cricket SA respectively; branch, a thriving KwaMantuntu Zola Yeye, the first Butchery & Supermarket, black Springbok team manager; KwaNgqungqumbane restaurant, former Bok players Tando Manana a pharmacy and dry and Solly Tyibilika; and current cleaners — now boasts not one assistant coach Mzwandile not two but four funeral parlours Stick. within such a small area.
New Brighton was also a As a youngster I walked in place of urban legend, where and out of my next-door neighbour the truth was often stretched, Sis Nowandile’s house. like the story of Bhut Nanyongo, It is where I took the call a car mechanic who was that changed my life when I once renowned for his brute was granted an interview in Johannesburg, strength and someone never to which subsequently mess with. gave me my break into
What’s not legend though is journalism. that in 2023 — thanks to marauding Such was the sense of community gangs of trigger happy across the township.
Neighbours who were fortunate enough to have a telephone knew that their landline was the neighbourhood’s.
Today, Sis Nowandile’s doors, and those of many others, are always closed, as people live in fear that amaPhara could break into their houses, steal everything, and the community can do little, if anything.
Thugs raid clinics for anything from computers to copper pipes, even mugging professional staff.
The Red Location Museum — opened in 2006 as a tribute to the people of the township, their place in the struggle for freedom and as a repository of knowledge — lies desolate.
Once upon a time no child in New Brighton would go hungry when others had something — I could go to another neighbour Sis No-Amen, for a pint of marhewu, or to Msimka Street to raid local doctor Sipho Sishi’s mother Nosidima’s food cabinet. Today people go hungry — even as we spend on expensive alcohol, drugs and the latest designer clothes.
Yes, for 120 years New Brighton proved to be a place of incredible human ingenuity, capable of kindness and ubuntu.
We should therefore be allowed to wax lyrical about our good experiences, so let the good times roll. Let’s celebrate!
But we should also use this time to reflect on the negatives and the wrongs, keeping in mind that while the township may have given some of us everything, generations that follow may tomorrow write about a township that took away their youth and their future.
History will judge us — if all we are obsessed with during these commemorative events are romanticised descriptions of a place that once was.
That would be a travesty.