A different view on current affairs & history
The Young Women’s Christian Association of Southern Africa (YWCA) was originally founded in Cape Town in April 1886. Thirteen years later in March 1899, moves were afoot in Port Elizabeth to establish another facility under the YWCA banner.
In 1988 the building, Lester House, was extensively renovated as chambers for the legal firm of Pagden and Christian.
This blog is a brief resume of the YMCA, its original home, Lester House to Pagdens Court.
Main picture: Lester House
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During a visit to the town in 1861 – 1862, Thomas Bowler painted the Town Hall which was in the process of being erected with scaffolding surrounding the building. An insignificant yet unplanned feature was included in that painting; a small cupola supported by pillars. As it was never included in the design and never existed, why was this appendage depicted? The reason why was it included in the painting was only uncovered by Dr. Joseph Denfeld some hundred years later. The answer lay with a non-Port Elizabeth photographer by the name of William Roe.
If Denfield is correct, what did William Roe do that compelled Bowler to inaccurately amend his painting?
Main picture: Painting by Thomas Bowler entitled Main Street Port Elizabeth
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The ANC has a symbiotic relationship with shit. In the 30 years in charge of the country, the ANC has created a pile of doggy do and then has fed off of that individually and organisationally. Jacob Zuma is the embodiment of that. He has been both the creator in chief and the parasite in chief. He has also been the main shit stirrer. No more so than when he shocked the ANC and political commentators just before Christmas by announcing that he is going to vote for the MK Party while remaining an ANC member.
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2023 saw Biden play hide and seek with the exit from the podium a number of times while Trump played hide and seek with the truth, the Republication debates and his innumerable court cases.
Internationally, the ‘special operation’ in Ukraine droned on, much to the horror of around 300,000 Russian mothers, not that Putin cared. His ‘chef’ Prigozhin tried to execute a coup d’etat and failed. It didn’t take long for Putin to execute a coup de grace and change him into pulled beef by placing a bomb on his plane. He got off lightly. He was dead before he knew it. Normally it takes years to die in a forgotten Siberian Gulag, or between minutes and weeks to die by Russian poisoning as you reflect on your reckless ways, or about 3 seconds of wondering what the world record is of surviving freefall onto concrete from your 10th floor apartment.
It was turning out to be a boring year until Hamas put on their one act production of egregious killing, rape of the most sexually repressed kind, beheadings, mayhem and hostage taking of innocents across the age spectrum. The Israeli response to the deaths of about 1400 was, “We raise you 20,000.”
On the home front, things meandered on and one could just platz from all the platitudes spewed out in Squirrel’s ‘Family Meetings’. He did once wistfully wish that we could be less negative like the Chinese. What planet does he live on? Negativity and criticism results in immediate cancelling by the state and strenuous re-education to teach you the error of your ways. Just ask Jack Ma, probably China’s richest man.
6 years after it began and 18 months after the last volume of the Zondo Commission into State Capture thudded onto Squirrel’s desk, 5437 pages in all, the Prison’s Department still has to put out a tender for orange jumpsuits. Ho, hum.
2023, though, will be remembered as the year the electricity died. Future parents will tell their kids about how tough it was growing up without electricity and how they went through gate and UPS batteries like Malusi Gigaba goes through teeth whitener and baby oil.
So Much for 2023. The forecast for next year is mild with a chance of meatballs, or big Macs with a side order of bone spurs if Trump wins, but the coming years don’t look good – actually, sunny, too sunny.
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These are the highlights of the recollections of Port Elizabeth in the 1830s and early 1840s by the Rev. Canon Hewitt. The extended full-length version has been lost over a century ago. Notwithstanding that, this brief summary provides yet another insight into the life and times of our ancestors in Port Elizabeth.
Main picture: The Commissariat building in Baakens Street
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This blog is based entirely upon an article entitled Christmas at Port Elizabeth from the defunct magazine An African City in 1913. What I have done is to insert comments regarding changes or to emphasize differences between then and now. In some ways it is familiar and in other ways so dissimilar.
Main picture: Aerial view of Humewood#03 1935
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David Livingstone (19 March 1813 – 1 May 1873) was a Scottish physician, Congregationalist, pioneer Christian missionary with the London Missionary Society, and an explorer in Africa. Livingstone had a mythic status that operated on a number of interconnected levels. As a result, Livingstone became one of the most popular British heroes of the late 19th-century Victorian era.
Main picture: David Livingstone
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I thought the (Mis)Advent(ure) Calendar was to be the last SMAC for the year but, while popping antacid tablets like smarties after overindulging on Christmas eve with family and contemplating a huge Christmas lunch with friends, I was inspired by an aspect of Trump. Perhaps my distended stomach triggered an uncomfortable association with the detestable man.
Trump is a runaway shoo-in for the Republican nomination and he’s getting itchy bone spurs at the thought of sticking it to all his enemies when he returns to the White House. At his rallies, he has been testing out the various borderline dictatorial actions he will take and has found that his band of cult followers lap it up. With the exception of Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney, all the Republican Grandees have obsequiously acceded to his de facto leadership and the Republicans have essentially become the party of Trump or a T party.
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South End, its people, its mosques and churches were all sacrificed on the altar of Apartheid. The people were relocated, a settled harmonious community was cast asunder, the buildings bulldozed. All except some places of religion escaped the carnage. Now in an island of destruction they represented no congregation as they had been transported to the northern most part of the metropole.
But survive they did. The Pier Street mosque suffered further threats as it forlornly stood erect in the path of the proposed freeway. It survived its near death experience as the route was amended to skirt the mosque but St. Peter’s Church barely survived as it was vandalised to within an inch of its life.
Main picture: A wantonly vandalised St. Peter’s Church
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In the nigh on 30 years of ANC misrule, it desperately tries to convince everyone and itself that it has done a good job. The two main metrics they quote are that they have rolled out electricity and water to virtually the whole population. True, but they are both running sores and for similar reasons – corruption, incompetence and cadre deployment.
Yes, they rejigged the racial distribution of wealth but mainly by making a few black people fabulously wealthy and giving a multitude of overpaid sinecures to black people in government while unemployment rose to amongst the worst in the world. Our consistently world beating GINI ratio changed from reflecting the black/white wealth divide to reflecting those who got to eat at the trough and those who missed out and are jobless and rely on a variety of grants.
By most other metrics, SA is a failing state.
Unfortunately, SMAC can offer no solace and only a cynical view of what will be a cheerless Christmas for many as they face a bleak time with nothing but Cyril’s platitudes to sustain them.
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