The South African city no one can pronounce, but everyone should visit

Gqeberha is a mouthful: the first syllable is a glottal click, the last a guttural rasp. Though a multilingual lot, many South Africans stumbled over Port Elizabeth's new moniker - the isiXhosa word for the Baakens River - when it was gazetted in 2021 as part of a program to decolonise place names. Still today, even some isiXhosa speakers remain sceptical.

"Ah, no, no, no. People, they don't know how to say Gqeberha," says my Xhosa Uber driver, the byname flowing like honey from his tongue. "So we say still, 'Port Elizabeth'."

As it turns out, the port by any other name is just as sweet - and discreet; vainglory, it seems, has no place in this city's complex lexicon. Foreigners were mostly oblivious to the settlement's history when its tongue-twisting new name made world headlines. After the global attention abated, PE - Port Elizabeth's colloquial designation - retreated into its sunny, sea-breezy, unassuming ways.

But the dearth of attention is perplexing, given the city marks the eastern endpoint of South Africa's fabled Garden Route. For road trippers, it's mostly a thoroughfare leading them towards Addo Elephant National Park - or home via Chief Dawid Stuurman International Airport, an edifice also renamed to better reflect the country's past. Stuurman, a local Khoi chief, rebelled against colonial rule and twice escaped incarceration on Cape Town's Robben Island. He was exiled to the NSW penal colony and died in Sydney in 1830.

Such symbols of resistance vibrate gently through the city, which lies within Nelson Mandela Bay Metropolitan Municipality on the southern curve of Algoa Bay.

From the air, it appears that a giant great white shark has taken a bite out of the coastline. Lacerations have become ports and rivers like the Baakens, which empties into the harbour near the CBD; north of here, the shifting, 50km-long Alexandria Dunefield swells beneath the shore's flayed skin.

From the hillside ruins of Fort Frederick - built by the British in 1799 - I spy cruise ships at port and container ships anchored in the bay. This is one of Africa's busiest ports; manganese, vehicles, fruit, veg and seafood are loaded onto the docks and shipped abroad.

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"See those small boats out at sea, like tugboats?" asks Sean Mitri, guide and founder of Mosaic Tourism. "Those are 'chakka' boats, they trawl for calamari and squid. Calamari is known as the white gold of the ocean - it's an extremely lucrative business."

This abundance of seafood attracts bottlenose dolphins in numbers so great Gqeberha is known as the "dolphin capital of the world". It also sustains the 3000 critically endangered African penguins inhabiting St Croix Island, which lies off the Port of Coega and forms part of the Addo Elephant National Park Marine Protected Area.

"Port Elizabeth is marketed as having the Big Seven," Mitri says. "The Big Five [lion, leopard, elephant, buffalo, rhino] are the land animals in Addo, and the other two are the white shark and the southern right whales that come into the harbour."

I'd hoped to seek out this marine wildlife but the bay, though sun-soaked, is too tempestuous for today's Raggy Charters cruise. My attention pivots inland instead.

Says Mitri: "We want people to experience PE not only as the beachfront. They aren't aware that there's a whole different dynamic here."

This energy's locus is the ruins of St Peter's Anglican Church, now part of a redeveloped heritage site in the inner-city precinct of South End. It's a tangible reminder of the multicultural community that thrived here before the apartheid-era government bulldozed homes and evicted residents not classified "white" in the 1960s.

"It was a real cosmopolitan area - in our street alone we were Indians, Muslims, Portuguese, Chinese, Saint Helenans, the Guiseppe family from Mauritius," says Norah Thomas who, with husband Hudson, volunteers as a guide at the South End Museum. "I was born here - the Indian corner shop was my second home. It was terrible having to leave all that and be scattered. All our friends weren't on our doorsteps anymore, you know?"

Housed in the heritage Seaman's Institute building, the museum safeguards these memories, reminds future generations of the evils of prejudice, and presents a blueprint for hope. Hudson lived in nearby Central, which was also turned into a whites-only suburb.

Across the CBD, beauty - and reconciliation - now arise from the destruction. In a deft stitching together of historical threads, the Route 67 Art and Heritage Walk meanders uphill from the pierside Campanile, which marks the spot where British settlers came ashore in 1820. Artworks along the trail commemorate each year of Eastern Cape-born Nelson Mandela's 67 years' service; the murals and multi-dimensional artworks climb the hill, summiting it in a lifesize metal frieze of the statesman and a blaze of mosaic-painted stories that appear to spill from the lighthouse still named for 19th century governor Sir Rufane Donkin. PE's title, it turns out, honours not royalty but Donkin's wife Elizabeth, who had recently died from "the fever" in India.

"Sir Rufane came here and he stood on this hill and said, 'From this day on, this place will be called 'The Port of Elizabeth'," says guide Tony Neveling. "He also made a rule that nothing would be built in this area. Thanks to him, there's nothing here."

Nothing but the now-defunct lighthouse, the pyramidal monument constructed by Donkin as a mini "Taj Mahal" for his late wife, and the lofty art gallery that remembers the past - and breathes life anew into this city of myriad names.

The writer was a guest of South African Tourism and the Africa Safari Co.