Taken from our archives, the picture this week features the Executive Hotel in uMlazi and was published in the Daily News on August 30, 1974. The caption reads: “The R700 000 executive hotel for Africans opened in Umlazi this week. It is likely to be the first of several such developments. The next hotel on the Bantu Development Corporation’s drawing board is for a holiday resort at Umgababa on the South Coast.”
The imposing building high on a hill in W section, uMlazi, was owned by businessman and entrepreneur Thalente Goqo, who also owned seven bottle stores, two supermarkets and an Ijuba and a paraffin wholesale business.
He also built AA Shopping Centre which had a bottle store and a Spar supermarket but helped establish new entrepreneurs and brought essential services like a doctor’s surgery close to the community. It included a butchery, clothing boutique, pharmacy, dental surgery, an optometrist shop etc.
Goqo owned Durban Bush Bucks football club and, together with Lawrence Ngubane, built Bucks to be one of the top clubs in South Africa, winning the league a couple of times and the JPS Knockout cup.
Goqo opened the township’s first nightclub called Speak Easy, in D section, where local and international artists performed. Brenda Fassie recorded a video for one of her songs there. Sakhile and Sipho Gumede performed there, as did Eddie Harris and CL Blast from the US.
Growing up in uMlazi, Independent executive editor Mazwi Xaba remembers Speak Easy and the bar at the Executive Hotel.
“Speak Easy was the place. It was the Florida Road of uMlazi. But it was difficult for us to get in because we were poor and unemployed. At the time I was very interested in blues. While we couldn’t get in, just to know CL Blast was here and had visited a place near us, we didn’t stop talking about him for weeks and months.”
He remembers the bar at the Executive being “a shisanyama before the time of the shisanyama craze”.
“Remember, townships were a place for people to sleep and go to work. So opening Speak Easy and bringing formal entertainment into the township was a radical idea. Previously people had to go into the city to have a good time,” Xaba said.
Goqo was an active member of Inyanda Chamber of Commerce and Ukhamba Liquor Association. He was also on the Southern Natal Finance and Fundraising Committee of the recently unbanned African National Congress. He was killed by an Inkatha mob on May 31, 1990, in Folweni, near Amanzimtoti. He was married to Smangele who passed away a few years ago. They never had children, but they raised a number of relatives and other destitute children.
Today, the building is the Executive Residence for the nearby Mangosuthu University of Technology. On the outside little has changed as Shelley Kjonstad’s pictures show.
The Independent on Saturday