Gqeberha

Gqeberha has been inhabited for 65,000 years—archaeological sites like Howieson's Poort yield some of humanity's oldest evidence of bow-and-arrow hunting and shell-bead jewelry. The Khoi people called the Baakens River 'Gqeberha'; when the British established Fort Frederick in 1799 during the Napoleonic Wars, they built southern Africa's oldest British building here. In 1820, 4,000 British settlers arrived to reinforce the eastern frontier against the Xhosa. Sir Rufane Donkin named the new town after his dead wife Elizabeth. For 200 years, that colonial name stuck.

In 2021, it changed back. The renaming to Gqeberha (pronounced roughly 'keh-BEH-hah') was part of South Africa's effort to remove colonial and apartheid-era place names. The airport is now named after David Stuurman, a Khoi leader who resisted colonialism. The city that hosted South Africa's first cricket Test match, first diamond auction, first telephone exchange, and first wireless transmission is also the site of the country's first automobile factory.

Ford established a plant here in 1924, assembling Model Ts in an old wool warehouse—the first cars ever built in South Africa. General Motors followed in 1926. A century later, automotive manufacturing accounts for 21.9% of South Africa's manufacturing output and 5.3% of GDP, and Gqeberha remains the industry's eastern anchor. Isuzu consolidated operations at its Struandale facility; Ford invested R600 million in 2024; Stellantis and Chinese automaker FAW have established presence in the nearby Coega Special Economic Zone.

By 2026, Gqeberha (population 1.19 million) faces a dual identity: the oldest continuously inhabited city in the region with the newest name. Whether the automotive industry can sustain it—or whether electric vehicle transitions will disrupt a century of manufacturing path-dependence—determines its next century.