The Weekend Post (This is what city wants tourists to see — December 9) views a municipal safety pamphlet as a map that leads unwitting tourists to known crime hotspots and squalor.
In fairness to city officials, safety tips cannot escape one inconvenient truth.
Tourists flock to products they want. Those wants are simple; a unique, safe and stimulating experience.
Our city centre fails to provide a good overall experience, despite a wealth of individual attractions.
Our experience with cruise liner visits to the city demonstrates the point.
In collaboration with civil society partners, the main library has been opened for the past three cruise liner visits so that a unique maritime heritage experience with cruise liner passengers can be piloted.
The late tourism doyen, Peter Myles, was right in every way about cruise ships.
They’re a mass market; seeking unique experiences, which our city has in dollops, but, we’re not seizing the moment.
Most of the cruises to Port Elizabeth (yes, that is the harbour’s name) are day visits. They cruise in the early morning and leave in the late evening.
Where ports provide what tourists want, ships stay longer.
Based on our experience, 80% of passengers never enter the city, preferring the marine marvels of Algoa Bay or the malaria-free game reserves and other attractions on the periphery of the city.
It’s up to the city to provide what cruise liner passengers want.
Ships will dwell longer, more tourists will come, and the city will prosper in every way — for everybody.
Port Elizabeth is a grubby disintegrating port — there is no other way to describe it.
Every other South African port has better facilities for cruise liners.
When the vehicle loading berth is vacant — and the port is an automotive export hub — cruise liners berth a shambolic kilometre’s walk from the nearest city facility.
The alternative is a berth where the container cranes collapsed five years ago, but that’s a 2.5km walk.
Other berths are unusable from the manganese dust, which created the country’s most profitable port while simultaneously destroying our city infrastructure.
Nonetheless, some hardy independent passengers do venture into the city, past an empty Campanile, over roads smothered with manganese dust, awash from broken municipal infrastructure, where stop signs have replaced traffic lights.
They barely notice the Dias Cross replica, which hints at the most significant event in world history — the advent of global maritime trade — and Algoa Bay is where it all started.
Our historic market square smothered in face brick, where pot plants trap litter, fail to tell the story of our toil, successes, struggles and exploitation of local people.
Historic maritime buildings are dilapidated — the Harbour Board, old Post Office, Fleming Square, Newspaper House — and fences bar pedestrian flows to prime tourism areas.
This is demolition by neglect, succeeding where the nationalist government failed in the 1970s.
The exquisite public library provides a ray of hope, just like it did in the darkest days of apartheid, now providing an experience of the rich maritime heritage of the city.
It fuelled the youthful imaginations of artists such as Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, but, remains paralysed, closed to citizens for nine years.
These are the perverse consequences of corrupted economic empowerment practices, proven instruments of enriching the elite and impoverishing the poor.
Route 67, the arts, culture and heritage route, symbolising the 67 years of struggle for freedom in SA — is mostly destroyed.
Disagreements between rent-seeking silos of governance on responsibility for maintenance of the area are mostly to blame — a blight on Mandela’s constitutional vision and city leadership.
Pockets of hope do exist, provided mainly by private sector developments, but crime remains a scourge.
The Donkin is a scamsters playground, albeit that the culprits are known, occasionally arrested, but rarely face consequences.
The walk from the Donkin to Fort Frederick, past our high court, is a cultural precinct awash with maritime heritage dating back to the very origins of anatomically modern humans.
Water was abundant and communities clustered around gqeberha, the wetland plants which founded our city.
Those stories remain untold. Crime is rampant at the very water sources which sustained ancient communities and nourished a nascent global maritime trade.
While slow and steady progress is being made to collaboratively and holistically address the crime problem, a lot remains to be done.
The cruise liners know the value of the city. They have seen the potential of our maritime heritage and have faith that we can fix this.
They’ve proven the point.
On Monday night, the cruise liner industry hosted an event at the Feather Market Hall.
The African heritage of our city was celebrated to tremendous acclaim from 350 passengers and with assistance from dedicated municipal employees.
The cruise liners are a ray of hope and the library is showing the way to the wealth of our maritime heritage.
We have all the attractions for a unique experience in the city centre with all the multiplier effects of considerable economic, social and environmental value.
In truth, it is easy to implement and fix, if the political will, unity of purpose and leadership are there.
The obstacle is our fragmented leadership, absent or unaccountable amid the squabbles and squalor of our city centre, unsupportive of stuff that works.
All the signs are there that the problem can be fixed, but it will take a collective effort, and much remains to be done!
Graham Taylor is the chair of the Historical Society of Port Elizabeth
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