VUYO MVOKO | Remember the past, reflect on the sobering present

Anniversaries are beautiful occasions. They’re times of joy, where people reminisce about the good exceptional times in their lives.

The next 12 months of celebrating 120 years of New Brighton are going to 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 one 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 was to become the first black editor of the now defunct Evening Post, formerly The Herald’s sister newspaper.

It was also the camera lenses of photo journalists 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, a student newsletter.

Up the road from the school was one of the township’s most elite shebeens, kwa 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 be 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 folk’s veins. I still brag about the fact that, for two decades, a choir I belonged to, the Mathews Singers, held a record for having the highest number of “podium finishes” (positions one, two and three) in the history of the national choir festival.

Sport was no different. Read Dr Buntu Siwisa’s book “Rugby, Resistance and Politics: how Dan Qeqe helped shape the history of Port Elizabeth”, and you will understand why the township has hitherto produced the still small crop of black people who have risen to occupy positions once preserved for whites only — Dr Mtutuzeli Nyoka and Gerald Majola, who became president and CEO of Cricket SA respectively; Zola Yeye, the first black Springbok team manager; former Springbok players Tando Manana and Solly Tyibilika; and current assistant coach Mzwandile Stick.

New Brighton was also a place of urban legend, where the truth was often stretched, like the story of Bhut Nanyongo, a car mechanic who was once renowned for his brute strength and someone never to mess with.

Legend has it that he once “klapped” a donkey so hard he gave it a bloodied nose and it nearly fell on the ground.

What’s not legend though is that in 2023 — thanks to marauding gangs of trigger happy youngsters, some of whom are available for hire — New Brighton is now officially the murder capital of the Eastern Cape, and among the top 30 police stations with the highest murder rate nationally.

Little wonder then that the once bustling Embizweni Square — which was once home to a Barclays Bank branch, a thriving KwaMantuntu Butchery & Supermarket, KwaNgqungqumbane restaurant, a pharmacy and dry cleaners — now boasts not one not two but four funeral parlours within such a small area.

As a youngster I walked in and out of my next-door neighbour Sis Nowandile’s house.

It is where I took the call that changed my life when I was granted an interview in Johannesburg, which subsequently gave me my break into journalism.

Such was the sense of community across the township.

Neighbours who were fortunate enough to have a telephone knew that their landline was the neighbourhood’s.

Today though, Sis Nowandile’s doors and 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.