Changing the guard…

CHRIS BENNETT has been celebrating the reintroduction of one of the oldest business names in his part of the Lower South Coast.

QUITE a lot, actually. Take Gate Store for instance. I became familiar with the name over the past few years during my periodic visits to friends in Inzimakwe, the village in which Gate Store is a prominent landmark.

Heinrich Kaiser was an early German settler in the Munster area.

Sometime around 1918, after being released from internment during the First World War, Heinrich Kaiser opened a butchery and store on the road from what is now Palm Beach connecting to the main road from Port Edward to Ezinqoleni.

He called his business Sangweni Store; sangweni, I am told, is the Zulu word for ‘gate’, and before long that English name was in use and is still in use today.

I can only surmise that there would have been a gate at this point on the road, or track, perhaps dividing two farms or parts of farms. This was subsequently confirmed on my enquiries.

Before researching Desirée Joubert’s excellent little book Munster and its Pioneers, as well as the equally excellent memory of Rod Kinsey, better known to some, perhaps, as the Herald’s Motor Racing correspondent, I had rather blandly assumed that at some point there was a Mr. Gate.

I was delighted to find out how wrong I had been.

It is refreshing to find a business reverting to its earlier name, thus continuing the history of the venture for future generations. More common these days is the abolition of old names for more modern and fashionable ‘sound bite’ names, as was the case with the Munster Trading Post which, a few years ago, became the Spar supermarket.

The trading post had been so called for many years, and Mrs Joubert’s book contains a photograph of a railways bus standing outside the building in1925.

Gate Store performed an important service to the people living in and around that part of Inzimakwe.

In 1985 the little store was destroyed in a fire, but the presence of the name continued, as it had achieved some geographical identity.

The following year the land was acquired by the brothers Dave and Rod Kinsey, descendants of the Deeks family who were among the first settlers in the area before the turn of the 20^th century. The family has long been respected for its constructive role among the Zulu inhabitants of this area.

The Kinsey bothers built new and larger premises on the land. These were let to a storekeeper and renamed Brown’s Cash and Carry; but, it need hardly be said, the crossroad continued to be called Gate Store. Old habits either die hard or go on forever.

Today Rod Kinsey is an advisor to the Mpenjati Trust, the present owners of the site. In essence this means that the enterprise is held to benefit the people whose interests it serves.

Following recent renovations Rod suggested that the store revert to its earlier name of, a suggestion which was eagerly accepted by the trustees.

The people, of course, still refer to both the store and its crossroad as Gate Store, so the renaming is all the more appropriate and practical.

The road from Inzimakwe to Palm Beach is currently undergoing major reconstruction and in the New Year it will be tarred, making life a lot easier for the inhabitants of this village.

I am grateful to Rod Kinsey and Michael Nkosikathi Diya for their help in writing this piece.

CB