Tell positive truth about Bay
THE “Friendly City”, the “Windy City”, the “ghost by the coast” or the “armpit of South Africa” – if the label sticks to your shoe like bubble gum, is it true? In March 1488, under threat of mutiny, Bartholomew Dias and his crew did a tot-hier-die-punt-en-nie-verder-nie (to this point and no further), planted a wooden cross on St Croix Island, a stone cross at Bushies, dubbed it the “bay of rocks” and tootled back home.
Why the about-turn? Because Algoa Bay, in the minds of the Portuguese sailors, marked the end of the world (sail any further and they’d fall off the edge).
The bay’s Khoikhoi residents must have shaken their heads at the oddity of it all – come all this way to plant a dead tree on a piece of rock in the sea?
Ten years later Vasco da Gama demonstrated that there was life beyond Algoa Bay by sailing on to Natal, and then India.
Subsequent navigation charts simply listed us as “a landing place with fresh water” – a bit of a come-down from “edge of the world”.
Fast forward to1820, when our hamlet of 35 people was given a boost by the landing of more than 4 000 British settlers to act as a buffer in the border area.
It’s at this point that a heartbroken Sir Rufane Donkin (the acting governor of the Cape Colony) named the emerging port after his very beloved late wife, Elizabeth, and the name stuck.
Eighteen years later, in 1838, James Backhouse described Port Elizabeth as “much like a small, English sea-port town . . . contains about 100 houses, exclusive of huts . . . The town is said to have been chiefly raised by the sale of strong drink”.
Who would have guessed that our city was built on the sale of alcohol?
Fortunately, our reputation was saved by feathers, wool and access to the diamond fields via the railway line to Kimberly, allowing us to give up booze as our main habit.
So successful was the turnaround that by the 1870s, we were dubbed the “Liverpool of South Africa” and had overtaken Cape Town as the colony’s premier port.
But changing circumstances left us stranded soon thereafter.
Through a combination of Cape Prime Minister Cecil John Rhodes pushing for a Cape-to-Cairo railway line and the Johannesburg gold rush, the eminence of the Cape Town-eGoli-eThekwini triad became rooted in our consciousness.
Is that the moment we became the “armpit”, a backwater inhabited by the ghosts of white elephants?
For some, we’re literally at the end of the world.
If you live in New York and are contemplating a holiday on a beach, getting to Nelson Mandela Bay (according to the Skyscanner travel app) will take you two stops, 27 hours travel time and a whack of dollars, whereas Cancun (Mexico) is a four-hour direct flight and will set you back a quarter of the price.
Getting to our bay from London will cost you a minimum of 16 hours travel time – a four-hour direct flight and a third of the price will get you to the port of Izmir in Turkey. Are our beaches worth the premium? If you’re in business and looking to set up a manufacturing operation somewhere in the developing world, one of your greatest obstacles (and competitive advantages) is getting your goods to the world’s biggest markets: the US, Europe and China.
Packing your goods into a container and then shipping them (at 15 knots per hour) to Europe’s biggest port, Rotterdam, will take 18 days to cover the 7 774 nautical miles from Port Elizabeth.
It will take 14 days to get to the world’s biggest port, Singapore; 20 days to Shanghai; 27 days to Los Angeles and 19 days to New York.
By comparison, goods shipped from Mexico (Veracruz) will take five days to New York, and from Turkey (Istanbul) goods will take eight days to get to Rotterdam.
The simple reality is that our (emerging economy) competitors are closer to the world’s markets (and tourists).
The advantage – at first glance – is theirs.
What can we do to give us the edge? Perhaps the answer lies with why more than 1.1 million of us persist in calling this place home?
Is it because we’re a “gateway” to the Garden Route, a “doorway” to Karoo tranquillity, or a stone’s throw from getting up close and personal with Hapoor’s descendants?
Or is it due to the fact that we have the sea on our doorstep (and all that comes with that: swimming, fishing, diving, sailing, kayaking, surfing, ice-cream and sun)?
Our beaches (and reefs) surely rank among the most beautiful in the world (not to mention being the bottlenose dolphin capital of the world)!
Or is it because this is a 15-minute city and late-because-of-traffic excuses hold no water?
Or is it because we’re a premier nursery to scholars, artists, athletes and politicians? Is there a more active city in the world? It isn’t by chance that the Ironman (and women) is at home here. Or do we stay because we’re trapped?
Do we stay because we don’t have the means to extricate ourselves from this ghost town – a city still divided on racial lines, a city that features on the global list of most dangerous places, a city that murdered Steve Biko and the Cradock Four, and massacred 20 people at KwaLanga?
So when a brash DJ, suffering from PE-ness envy (thanks to the Brothers for the coinage), calls us the “armpit”, do we drop our heads and shuffle our feet because, in truth, we agree?
Labels stick because they grasp a truth, a view that is then maintained by many.
If we want a different truth to be told about the place we call home, the first step lies with each of us understanding (personally) its uniqueness and casting that as the centrepiece of our story.
If we can think differently about this place, the world will follow.
We are the edge of the world – if we can’t see why that’s a good thing, who else can?
If we want a different truth to be told about the place we call home, the first step lies with each of us understanding its uniqueness