“Of Barberton, Ruins and Scarred Memory”

“The old town calls,
Its walls still echo with laughter and dreams,
Yet shadows linger,
Filling the silence with what once was.
Faded photographs,
Frayed edges of memory,
Whisper tales of loss,
Of what could have been.”

Nadine Murtaja writes about loss and decay as a Palestinian, grappling with an occupied homeland. Her words resonate with my experience of Barberton, a place I call home—even if these changes weren’t born from direct conflict. I was born in Barberton, a town that feels more like a memory now than a place on the map. Alongside my father’s, stillborn son’s, and three siblings’ graves, my own grave will lie in that soil. I may not know precisely where or how I will die, but I am certain that Barberton will be my resting place.

What is Barberton to us? It’s more than a small dot on the map. White settlers arrived here around 1880, but by then, the Swati people had already made this place their home under King Somhlolo, arriving some 30 years earlier as part of the expansion of the Swati kingdom. These settlers, unmindful of the existing name, Emjindini, renamed it Barberton after Graham Barber and his two cousins, who had come during the gold rush of the late 1800s. Their arrival—whether as part of the Great Trek or the Gold Rush—profoundly affected the indigenous Swati people, bringing moral decay and economic hardship to the community. In 2017, the DA leader Ms. Helen Zille claimed colonialism was not all negative, citing the independent judiciary, trains, and piped water. But long before Europe touched Africa, there was civilization. Zille’s statement was no different from the racist belief held by National Party leaders and some Afrikaners that this land was devoid of light and order before they arrived. The settlers held little regard for the Swati kingdom, undermining it even while holding their own European royalty in high esteem.

For those of us born or raised here, Barberton is layered with memories—of childhoods, beginnings, and a deep sense of belonging. So much has changed in the past 30 years, and the unspoken trauma apartheid inflicted on the Swati people lingers still. The ANC, sadly, has failed to heal and restore; instead, it has destroyed at a massive scale. No sooner had they attained power in 1994 than the corruption and exploitation you see around us began.

The Barberton I knew may be gone, buried beneath layers of time and history. I wonder if the town has changed, or if I have changed too much to recognize it. Lately, I am less sure of its identity—less certain of the essence it once carried. Perhaps, like so many things we lose, Barberton didn’t die in a physical sense but in a more symbolic one. The Barberton we touched, the one we grew up with, has slipped away. Apartheid cast a long shadow over South Africa, and in its wake, it stole our full understanding of what Barberton truly meant. We are left with fragments of a place we can never fully reclaim.

And yet, despite all of this, Barberton remains a steadfast reality for me. It was my first and only early reality. If you ask me about home, Barberton always comes to mind. No matter how much time passes or how far I go, Barberton is the place that echoes home within me. It’s where I first understood the world, where the foundations of my life were laid. It shaped me before I knew I was being shaped.

But it was not always like that. When we are born, the sun had already risen and set many times before. There are existing and continuous stories already. Barberton existed long before me, alive with the lives and histories of others. Some of these lives were fractured under pressure, bent forever, since their roots never stood a chance in the moral decay of apartheid. I was simply born into that setting, into a world already spinning with its own rhythm and narratives. My first memories were not the beginning, just the next chapter in a much older story. The people, the streets, the buildings—they all carried a history that I would come to know only much later.

We are born and brought up within these narratives. Some of them are good, but some are bad—and some are even worse. These stories shape our view of the world before we have the language to question them. The weight of the past becomes part of our inheritance, whether we want it or not. Apartheid’s cruelty, the divisions it created, the lives it distorted—they became part of the narrative I was born into. Some of those stories were filled with pain and injustice, shaping our lives in ways we couldn’t fully understand as children.

The Barberton of my childhood is gone. It is gone forever. My children are growing up on the same foothills of the Makhonjwa Mountains, which still cast their steady gaze. Those mountains have seen what our eyes have not. They knew this place when it was barren when only the sounds of nature intermittently broke its silence.

However, in the post-apartheid era, Barberton’s landscape has shifted dramatically. Foreigners from Pakistan and Somalia have arrived, establishing businesses that often seem isolated from the community. They are strangers—strangers who, like the government, care little for the soul of the town or the people who have long called it home. So much for the promise of a new South Africa that would revive and heal. By turning a blind eye to the proliferation of what are effectively illegal shops, the government has created an economic environment where local people are marginalized, overshadowed by survivalist businesses largely selling everything cheaper and thereby thwarting any reasonable competition. The proliferation of these shops has led to tension, violence and distrust and compounded by the rotten politics of the ANC as evident in the criminal and political expedient dismantling of a viable Umjindi Local Municipality—a clear manifestation of corruption schemes that has contributed to the disintegration, decay, and decline of our communities. The facts stare us in the face as they did in 2016 when Barberton was merged into Mbombela: Barberton was better run than Nelspruit. The community was not consulted in the merger. It was the ANC that destroyed the town if indeed it had miraculously become unviable as a separate entity. Instead of supporting stability and continuity, the ANC’s decision stripped Barberton of its resources and autonomy, replacing its viable management with an uncertain future.

Even though it lives in these stories, I cannot escape the truth: Barberton is dead. It has died. The Barberton of my childhood, with its familiar faces, shared stories, and magic has ceased to exist. So many of the town’s sons and daughters have prematurely passed on, and with them, thousands of words—thousands of untold stories—have vanished. The narratives that once filled the town, the voices that echoed in its streets, have grown silent. And with that silence, Barberton, as I knew it, has disappeared forever.

Curiously enough, the story of Barberton is the story of our country. South Africa, too, finds itself at a crossroads. Like Barberton, it struggles with an identity shaped by pain and silenced stories, with an uncertain future looming ahead. The divisions, the sorrow, and the perseverance are not just Barberton’s stories but those of a nation still waiting to heal. South Africa’s Constitution in its Preamble says: “We therefore, through our freely elected representatives, adopt this Constitution as the supreme law of the Republic to heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice, and fundamental human rights.” The sadness is that the representatives have become corrupt and indifferent, available to the highest bidder. There is not much healing taking place—instead, massacre follows massacre.

The Barberton I once knew was filled with laughter—the innocent sound of children at play, families sharing moments, and community. That laughter, though, has been replaced by a new laughter. But this one is different. It is drunken, hollow, violent, and youthful. The joy has been stripped away, and violence has become a new language. Where there was once unity, there is now fear. What was once familiar has become alien, a place where the bonds of community seem frayed, if not broken. The streets that once carried life and conversation now echo with different sounds—ones of anger, pain, and desperation.

In the end, we do become narratives—stories that are told by others. Barberton, too, becomes a story, a town held together by the threads of memory. What we lived and experienced there, what we’ve lost and can never quite recover, all of it turns into a narrative we carry with us. And perhaps that is how Barberton lives on: in the stories we tell, the memories we share, even as the town itself transforms and fades. The same might be true of South Africa—its past, its present, its future—woven together by the stories we tell, the ones we pass on, and the ones we have yet to create. It is undoubtedly stories of courage, resilience, brutality, racial hatred, struggle, conquest, corruption, hope, and love. And what are we without these stories?

Barberton remains my only true home. I have laid my family to rest in its soil, leaving behind pieces of myself in the process. This bond transcends mere geography; it is rooted in the memories we shared and the stories we lived. As the town transforms and fades, the essence of Barberton persists in my heart, bound with the lives of those I’ve loved and lost. In this way, even as the town transforms and fades, the essence of Barberton persists in my heart, bound with the lives of those I’ve loved and lost. In this way, even as I carry the weight of loss, I find solace in the enduring connection to a place that shaped me, reminding me that home is not just a location, but the echoes of laughter, love, and belonging that forever resonate within me.

Jack Mapanja’s words capture the haunting beauty of Barberton in my heart—a place woven from the embers of memory, whose essence lingers in those dusty streets of Dindela, eStandini, White City, New Clare, Spearville, the river Umgwenyane, and the solid gazing Makhonjwa mountains. For as long as its history remains etched within us, Barberton’s spirit lives on. Reflecting on political persecution in the 1990s in Malawi, he writes on memory and meaning so powerfully:

“Ah, the past is always with us;
its passion still flames,
its embers never die.
They lurk in our streets,
haunt the huts of our homesteads.
They probe our rivers and alleys,
and roam our memories.”

Perhaps Don Mattera was indeed right after all, that memory is a weapon.