PAINT POWER: Gqeberha artist turns vandalised mural into an ocean-themed second chance

Gqeberha muralist Muneeb Wassin has answered the vandals who defaced his Bayworld mural in the language he knows best: paint.

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Muneeb Wassin saw it coming.

“Honestly, I was waiting for it to happen. Not my first rodeo,” says the Korsten artist, whose mural at Bayworld was defaced in mid-October, only a few days after he had finished it.

Wassin took to Facebook, where about 9,400 people follow his work, with a defiant message: “Vandalise mine… now taste my wrath, round 2. You won the battle, I win THE WAR.”

Then came a promise: “Bayworld… I’ll be out there fixing it for you GQ. I honour my word for the kids. It’s time to fix the mess. Unleash the beast.”

The beast, it turns out, has sharp teeth and stinging tentacles. Wassin painted a shark and a jellyfish over the offending graffiti, and he admits there was no grand plan behind them.

“I just needed to get rid of that ugliness,” he says. “I drove past and thought, I’m stopping now and I’m doing it.”

Nelson Mandela Bay Beachfront Cluster lead Glenn Pappin gave him what Wassin calls “the ocean life hint”. Part of the NMB Business Chamber, the cluster is trying to improve the beachfront precinct, and it contributed towards the cost of the respray.

‘Great improvement’

“The recently painted wall is a great improvement from the years of neglect that wall endured,” says Pappin.

The Mandela Bay Development Agency (MBDA) commissioned the original mural, with a brief to capture what Bayworld holds within its walls as well as the ocean on its doorstep.

Wassin does not take the attack personally.

“Nothing to do with me. They don’t even know me,” he says, though he believes the culprits left enough of themselves on the wall to be traced. 

He wants no revenge, only an apology.

“I’m not here to hurt you. I want them to publicly apologise to the people of GQ, and that’s it.”

He knows this fight. In October 2021 his neon mural under the Humewood Beach bridge at Happy Valley was sprayed with graffiti days after the paint had dried, and vandals recently struck a corner of it again.

The former newspaper graphic designer, who once declared himself unafraid of heights “because I am Spider-Man”, has learnt to keep his most precious work indoors. Four paintings he made for the South End Museum, on the forced removal of about 11,000 people from the area between 1963 and 1975, hang in its gallery.

He calls them his “four babies”. 

“So the murals outside… go ahead and mess ’em up,” he says. “It’s these four that will break me, maybe.”

The Bayworld wall is not finished yet, and he hopes that children will help finish it. A woman who kept him going with cool drinks and food while he worked told him about a group of Walmer children who longed to paint with him. He plans to bring them to the wall on a Saturday morning.

‘More fun’

“When the kids come, we can have more fun,” he says.

They will not be the first young visitors. In September, while he was sketching a caravel and an African warrior on the wall, a group of about 30 learners from Pretoria stopped to pose with him in front of it.

“Kids are the main thing with me,” he says. “Big people come with stress. With kids, there are more laughs, and we roll like we have no worries in the world.”

That instinct has taken him far beyond Algoa Bay. As the official artist of Gift of the Givers since 2023, Wassin has just returned from a two-week road trip with the humanitarian organisation through Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, Pretoria and Limpopo. At one stop the team handed over a crèche, and he painted with the children there.

“I’m the mural guy,” he says. When Gift of the Givers builds new classrooms, he adds a feature wall, or something more playful, such as the giant chessboard floor he painted at Paterson High School in Schauderville.

“I go in just before Doc flies in. I put the cherry on the cake,” he says, referring to founder Dr Imtiaz Sooliman. “Then the Doc comes in, hands it over, and Bob’s your uncle. I’m the last man.”

For every wall Gift of the Givers commissions, Wassin paints another free of charge. In January he flies back to Pretoria to paint a mural at a school where the organisation runs a coding class.

As for Gqeberha, he is keeping his cards close to his chest.

“For GQ there is something. I’m not going to say much… follow my social media pages.” DM

Nelson Mandela Bay

Muneeb Wassin

Bayworld

Gqeberha

art

Nelson Mandela Bay

Gillian McAinsh