THE publicity campaign to brand the province as the home of legends has met with a mixed response.
On the one hand, it has reaffirmed the central role the Eastern Cape has played in the liberation struggle of South Africa as the “home” of leaders and confirmed the potential of the province as a site for growth in the heritage and tourist sector, which has been sadly neglected in recent years.
The controversy over the campaign has centred to some extent on those who were excluded from the list and provoked a headline in the Daily Dispatch of “forgotten legends”. Foremost among these was Thabo Mbeki and his family.
To try to address this criticism, a call was distributed for communities to nominate their own legends to help populate a more inclusive list.
The other criticism has focused on the audacity of a province which fails to serve its citizens with basic services and jobs to claim its performance as legendary. How can a province, it is said, that cannot feed its children, that is riddled with corruption and inefficiency call attention to its status as a place of excellence, when so many suffer the indignity of poverty?
But there is at the same time no denying the province’s contribution to intellectual and political efforts that delivered liberation and freedom. Indeed, as Heritage Month draws to a close and we think about the future, it is worth reflecting on where East London fits into a narrative of legends.
A visitor to the city who thinks about legends, will surely find Steve Biko, memorialised through a bridge, a statue in front of the city hall and a foundation in his home settlement of Ginsberg. He is the most identifiable icon acknowledged from the modern struggle era.
But Biko was not the only legend the city produced. There were many more and their lives and stories are less frequently told and certainly not commemorated in any way in the city.
The big names that are missing from the billboards are the likes of Walter Rubusana, one of the founding members of the ANC who should have been its first president were it not for a coup from the younger and less distinguished John Dube from Natal.
Rubusana was acknowledged across the city in the early part of the century – a sports complex was once named after him in East Bank location. He is now a distant figure whose name and contribution is little appreciated.
Then there was Clements Kadalie, a Malawian who made East London his home and led the largest workers union in Africa in the late ’20s. By the ’40s, Kadalie had community halls named after him and was recognised as one of the foremost political figures, not only in South Africa, but on the continent. His organisation – the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU), which he brought to East London – was the mother of the African labour movement.
Similarly, in the ’50s, East London became the focal point of the national Defiance Campaign of the ANC where a new brand of Africanist politics had taken root and was expressed by leaders such as Alcott Nwentshe, Cornelius Fazzie and Joe Lengisi.
This trio led their communities in a bitter struggle against the apartheid state which resulted in brutal clashes with the police, resulting in the tragic death in Duncan Village of Sister Aidan Quinlan.
Yet it is the nun that we remember rather than the founders of a new kind of African nationalism, which feed into the politics of other organisations such as the New Unity Movement and the Pan African Congress.
The status of Alcott Nwentshe in particular is underestimated and his influence on city and regional politics continued long after his banishment from East London in the ’50s.
Few people are also aware of the great Fort Hare academic DDT Jabuvu who died in East London, although he hailed from the Peddie district. He was the country’s most prominent African academic of his generation, the father of author Noni Jabavu and the son of John Tengu Jabavu, who was also a towering figure in provincial politics and the founder of the newspaper Invo Zabantu.
Beyond the sphere of Africanist politics there are many more sons and daughters of the city who had made their imprint on provincial and national life.
These include Marjory Latimer, Joan Harrison, Donald Woods and many others. There are people from all communities and traditions who made their mark in various ways although it is not within the scope of an article such as this to detail their stories and argue for the significance of each.
What I would like to do is draw our attention to the extent to which many people seem satisfied to render East London a city without history, a city without significance in our modern national and regional history.
One of the reasons for this, is that we seem content to think of the province in which we are located as a place of rurality and tradition, where great men like Nelson Mandela grew up and learnt about tradition.
And the Eastern Cape we still encounter is a place of legendary chiefs and resilient settlers who struggled for land and livelihoods on a contested frontier. It is a place where legends were born and then departed for greener pastures.
But this is an image that needs to be contested through the rewriting of the history of the cities and towns of this region, in an effort to reclaim a 20th century history that remains elusive.
If East London and Buffalo City Municipality was willing to claim this history, it could show that it was much more than a rural backwater occasionally visited by chiefs and the home of settler pioneers, but a place where some of the watersheds in 20th century South Africa history took place.
To reclaim this history would require locating the city at the centre rather than the margins of the country’s 20th century history which revolved around industrialisation, African nationalism, educational struggles and homeland development.
Through such acknowledgement East London could be transformed into a “gateway”, which will not only lead to graves of Maqoma, Sandile, Hinsta and the Mandela family, but will speak directly to the 20th century history of the region and the nation.
To build such a “gateway” will, however, require new intellectual effort,
endeavour and investment. To embrace these opportunities we need to start by rejecting the idea of East London as a city without history – at least before Steve Biko came to show us the way.
Professor Leslie Bank is director and professor of the Fort Hare Institute of Social and Economic Research
City must claim spot as gateway to ‘legends’
On the one hand, it has reaffirmed the central role the Eastern Cape has played in the liberation struggle of South Africa as the “home” of leaders and confirmed the potential of the province as a site for growth in the heritage and tourist sector, which has been sadly neglected in recent years.
The controversy over the campaign has centred to some extent on those who were excluded from the list and provoked a headline in the Daily Dispatch of “forgotten legends”. Foremost among these was Thabo Mbeki and his family.
To try to address this criticism, a call was distributed for communities to nominate their own legends to help populate a more inclusive list.
The other criticism has focused on the audacity of a province which fails to serve its citizens with basic services and jobs to claim its performance as legendary. How can a province, it is said, that cannot feed its children, that is riddled with corruption and inefficiency call attention to its status as a place of excellence, when so many suffer the indignity of poverty?
But there is at the same time no denying the province’s contribution to intellectual and political efforts that delivered liberation and freedom. Indeed, as Heritage Month draws to a close and we think about the future, it is worth reflecting on where East London fits into a narrative of legends.
A visitor to the city who thinks about legends, will surely find Steve Biko, memorialised through a bridge, a statue in front of the city hall and a foundation in his home settlement of Ginsberg. He is the most identifiable icon acknowledged from the modern struggle era.
But Biko was not the only legend the city produced. There were many more and their lives and stories are less frequently told and certainly not commemorated in any way in the city.
The big names that are missing from the billboards are the likes of Walter Rubusana, one of the founding members of the ANC who should have been its first president were it not for a coup from the younger and less distinguished John Dube from Natal.
Rubusana was acknowledged across the city in the early part of the century – a sports complex was once named after him in East Bank location. He is now a distant figure whose name and contribution is little appreciated.
Then there was Clements Kadalie, a Malawian who made East London his home and led the largest workers union in Africa in the late ’20s. By the ’40s, Kadalie had community halls named after him and was recognised as one of the foremost political figures, not only in South Africa, but on the continent. His organisation – the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU), which he brought to East London – was the mother of the African labour movement.
Similarly, in the ’50s, East London became the focal point of the national Defiance Campaign of the ANC where a new brand of Africanist politics had taken root and was expressed by leaders such as Alcott Nwentshe, Cornelius Fazzie and Joe Lengisi.
This trio led their communities in a bitter struggle against the apartheid state which resulted in brutal clashes with the police, resulting in the tragic death in Duncan Village of Sister Aidan Quinlan.
Yet it is the nun that we remember rather than the founders of a new kind of African nationalism, which feed into the politics of other organisations such as the New Unity Movement and the Pan African Congress.
The status of Alcott Nwentshe in particular is underestimated and his influence on city and regional politics continued long after his banishment from East London in the ’50s.
Few people are also aware of the great Fort Hare academic DDT Jabuvu who died in East London, although he hailed from the Peddie district. He was the country’s most prominent African academic of his generation, the father of author Noni Jabavu and the son of John Tengu Jabavu, who was also a towering figure in provincial politics and the founder of the newspaper Invo Zabantu.
Beyond the sphere of Africanist politics there are many more sons and daughters of the city who had made their imprint on provincial and national life.
These include Marjory Latimer, Joan Harrison, Donald Woods and many others. There are people from all communities and traditions who made their mark in various ways although it is not within the scope of an article such as this to detail their stories and argue for the significance of each.
What I would like to do is draw our attention to the extent to which many people seem satisfied to render East London a city without history, a city without significance in our modern national and regional history.
One of the reasons for this, is that we seem content to think of the province in which we are located as a place of rurality and tradition, where great men like Nelson Mandela grew up and learnt about tradition.
And the Eastern Cape we still encounter is a place of legendary chiefs and resilient settlers who struggled for land and livelihoods on a contested frontier. It is a place where legends were born and then departed for greener pastures.
But this is an image that needs to be contested through the rewriting of the history of the cities and towns of this region, in an effort to reclaim a 20th century history that remains elusive.
If East London and Buffalo City Municipality was willing to claim this history, it could show that it was much more than a rural backwater occasionally visited by chiefs and the home of settler pioneers, but a place where some of the watersheds in 20th century South Africa history took place.
To reclaim this history would require locating the city at the centre rather than the margins of the country’s 20th century history which revolved around industrialisation, African nationalism, educational struggles and homeland development.
Through such acknowledgement East London could be transformed into a “gateway”, which will not only lead to graves of Maqoma, Sandile, Hinsta and the Mandela family, but will speak directly to the 20th century history of the region and the nation.
To build such a “gateway” will, however, require new intellectual effort,
endeavour and investment. To embrace these opportunities we need to start by rejecting the idea of East London as a city without history – at least before Steve Biko came to show us the way.
Professor Leslie Bank is director and professor of the Fort Hare Institute of Social and Economic Research
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