Gillwell should inspire Ebuhlanti

THERE have been two important events in the city this past week that deserve comment. The first is the completion and opening of the R316 landmark Gillwell Taxi Rank Park at the western entrances to the city. This is worth celebrating because it is first significant investment in the CBD since the 1960s.

The second is the on-going squabble about Ebuhlanti and the rights of its patrons to consume liquor over the Christmas season.

Both areas are absolutely critical to black empowerment and identity in the city. The transformation of the western entrance through black capital investment perhaps offers some direction for the possible future development of Ebuhlanti.

The word Ebuhlanti means kraal and when you ask people there why they think the term is appropriate for the place, they often say that the place looks like a kraal and is surrounded on all sides by bush. Others say that the “smell of braai meat and fire” reminds them of their home kraals in the rural areas and gives them a strong feeling that they are at “home”.

One man said: “When we slaughter a sheep or a cow in the rural areas this is exactly how we sit in the kraal and enjoy the meat with umqombothi (traditional beer).”

Another said he felt at home there because “the braai areas here are similar to izithebe (braai or serving area) in the rural kraals” and that made him feel at home.

African “home-coming” on Eastern Beach has been a long time in the making. Township residents had relatively easy access to this beach during the middle decades of the century and used it as a place of leisure and relaxation, especially in the 1940s and 1950s.

The white city council also allowed black beach use on the far corner of Eastern Beach because they were convinced that healthy outdoor activity would keep African youths away from radical politics, alcohol and crime.

However, this came to an end in the 1960s when beach apartheid was implemented and it was made illegal for any black person to be on that beach.

Reclaiming the Marina Glen as a space for black recreation and occupation became a priority after democracy because the beachfront was a powerful marker of the “whiteness” of East London.

But, while the hotels are exclusively for the new black middle classes and the government workshops, there is more of a feeling of open access and freedom at Ebuhlanti. No departmental invite is needed to go there.

Technically, all you need is a meat pack to braai and a bottle of beer or scotch to drink. Yet access is not quite as open as it seems because socialising occurs around automobiles, and not everyone has one of those. The place is, in fact, more about car culture than beach culture because hardly anyone there wears a bathing suit or swims in the sea.

So while the place invokes the culture of the kraal and tradition, it is also filled with African middle class ambition and desire for freedom and fun.

In his essay, Driving While Black, the Caribbean writer Paul Gilroy speaks of the power of autofreedom and its special significance in black popular culture in the US. He argues that the car represents “compensatory prestige” for those with “status injury and life experiences of deprivation”.

The “shiny authority of the car”, he says, is not just a symbol of black involvement in consumer society, it says something much more. It says that black people had acquired the “pleasures of auto-freedom, mobility, power, and speed”.

Similarly in South Africa, for those who had been historically denied such freedom there has been nothing as effective as a fast sleek motor car to symbolise their arrival as free, aspirant middle class black citizens.

In a motor city like East London, home of Mercedes Benz, there is, of course, no small contradiction in the uncritical adoption of a luxury city cars, produced by exploited black labour, as a primary symbol of power and status.

So there are two versions of African nationalism being expressed in this space, one is an automobile-driven black nationalism which celebrates middle class membership, urbanity, global citizenship through consumerism.

The other is a narrower exclusionary local version of African nationalism and ethnicity – expressing Xhosa-ness – and projecting the kraal as the symbol of the nation. The kraal is not uniquely Xhosa and has a wider resonance for black South Africans in general, which is also why the president’s home at Nkandla is both so powerful and contested a symbol. Ebuhlanti, therefore, invites Africans to come “home”.

For many Ebuhlanti is the replacement of their rural kraals as the preferred home-coming space at Christmas.

But at the same time the place is a physical mess, an undeveloped littered eyesore, which is hardly an asset to the city.

The answer at Ebuhlanti requires a shift from the current rights-based recreation culture, which states that we are black and we will do what we want here because we have a right to the city, to a new developmental model which embraces the home-coming spirit of the place and its cultural vibrancy and works on developing that into a range of facilities and services which help to entrench the homecoming brand of the city.

As in many other areas of urban life in South Africa, there is an urgent need here for a shift to occur between the assertion of rights to a process of genuine and sustainable development.

I believe the Gillwell Taxi Rank Park, which has radically transformed an informal, littered and degraded city space into a shining example of black empowered development perhaps provides a model for Ebuhlanti too.

Ebuhlanti now needs to move beyond its current definition as defiant hub to assert the right to the city, to a properly planned and developed precinct, which is a genuine long term asset to the city.

Professor Leslie Bank heads Fort Hare Institute of Social and Economic Research.