Port Elizabeth became Gqeberha, the Xhosa name of its river
Eastern Cape's largest city and Nelson Mandela Bay's seat was founded in 1820 as Port Elizabeth by Cape governor Sir Rufane Donkin, mourning his wife Elizabeth. In 2019 the provincial names committee urged Gqeberha—the Xhosa and Southern Khoe label for the Baakens River—and the change was gazetted on 23 February 2021.
Algoa Bay's shores hold deep time: Howieson's Poort yields bow-and-arrow and shell-bead evidence from about 65,000–62,000 years ago. San ancestors arrived at least ten thousand years back; farming peoples ancestral to the Xhosa absorbed them around two thousand years ago. Dias landed on St Croix Island in 1488; da Gama noted Bird Island in 1497. British troops raised Fort Frederick in 1799 against a French landing scare, and the stone fort still stands as a monument above the later harbour.
Four thousand British settlers landed in 1820 to stiffen the Cape–Xhosa frontier; Donkin named the seaport for Elizabeth Frances Markham. Xhosa speakers also say iBhayi from Afrikaans die Baai. Edmund Roberts saw growth from four houses to over a hundred and some twelve hundred residents by the early 1830s. Municipality status came in 1861. After John Molteno's Cape railways reached Kimberley in 1873, the harbour earned the nickname Liverpool of South Africa for hinterland trade.
Nicknames Friendly City and Windy City stick beside blue-flag beaches 770 kilometres east of Cape Town on the Indian Ocean. Under apartheid, Group Areas relocations from 1962 remade South End and Fairview into a model segregated plan. Earlier, on 26 July 1952, Raymond Mhlaba's New Brighton volunteers entered a Europeans Only station platform, opening the Defiance Campaign nationwide. Sixth-most-populous in South Africa, the port remains the province's cultural and financial hub under its river name.
Source: Gqeberha
