We need to add value to our heritage attractions and create community partnerships to help us secure them, Nelson Mandela University heritage expert Dr Denver Webb said on Thursday.
Speaking at the Mandela Bay Heritage Trust Hard Talk at the SA Institute of Architects Eastern Cape in Central, Webb said the challenge with vagrants at Fort Frederick, as exposed by The Herald earlier this week, was symptomatic of a wider SA malaise.
“People are poor and need housing. They don’t feel connected to these structures.
“We need to find a use for these sites, to contextualise them and form a partnership with the local community to create an economic spin-off.”
As Port Elizabeth’s oldest building, erected in 1799 during the Napoleonic Wars, Fort Frederick already had a defined use as a tourism landmark, Webb said.
“To support this use, we need to take care of it and to do that we need to invest in security. The money spent would be justified by the improved conditions and increased attraction to tourists.”
The chosen security strategy could be creative and spark further opportunities, he said.
“People from the local community could be trained as guards and guides.”
Lastly, interpretive boards could be erected to complement the existing brief information plaque at the fort.
“There is plenty of information in Port Elizabeth’s Africana library and [historian] Margaret Harradine has much of it at her fingertips.
“An appropriate selection of paintings could also be introduced. The fort is so much more than a pile of stones and we need to explain its full significance.”
Nelson Mandela Bay Tourism database co-ordinator Erenei Louw said: “We need to turn each of our heritage attractions into experiences and use them to tell stories.”
Discussing colonial and apartheid statues and the move in recent years to deface or remove them, Webb said the issue was common around the world as governments, politicians, popular heroes and value systems came and went.
Approaches involved removing the plinths of the offending statues to make them less imposing or consigning them to museums, public gardens, theme parks or simply to the scrapheap.
Alternatively, new statues celebrating heroes of the incumbent regime and its electorate could be introduced alongside the heroes of the past “to let them have a dialogue with each other”, he said.
Thuso Moruri, 26, of Archworx, said during a break that he did not believe the “statues in dialogue” approach would work. “It would create more conflict, more ‘them and us’.”
Heritage trust member Rod Philip said owners leaving buildings to decay and then using that as an excuse to drive applications to level them for parking lots was unacceptable.
Philip was part of the team that developed the school at Mvezo, the Transkei birthplace of Nelson Mandela.
The initiative was shaped by the local people and he was struck by the clear view they had of their traditions and their connectivity to the site.
“We need to recognise that same significance and spirituality in the streetscapes of Port Elizabeth,” he said.