John Matshikiza’s acid depiction of Durban sinking into the post-apartheid twilight zone (“The not so Golden Mile”, March 15) preoccupied me as I walked at low tide along its beaches. Many points he makes are right: bumbling and greed are a destructive combination and its consequences are apparent in many places. But not everywhere. My concern is that the article will work against those spaces that resist the slide into commercialisation and squalor: spaces that have to be fought for.
Consider that important part of “downtown Durban”, the beachfront. There you experience something rare in South Africa people enjoying themselves. All people. People who don’t have to be described as white, black or brown. People walking, swimming, jogging, surfing, cycling or just sitting and talking.
Of course there are problems. Such diversity brings to the beachfront people with many different expectations and demands. It is a place to go after having confessed in the cathedral, or to light candles and cast fruit into the sea as offerings to the gods, or to be immersed fully robed in the surf to emerge in holy splendour to exultations, hymns and drumbeats. For some semi-nudity is a matter of indifference, for others to expose the navel is obligatory, while there are those who believe that to reveal an eyebrow is recklessly licentious.
I wish Matshikiza had not written off but written about the beaches and the people who enjoy them. They exist as a public space because those who enjoy them represent the people of Durban and its vast and varied urban periphery for whom safe places of recreation are scarce. There are many who wish to change this. They can be sensed lurking on the margins: the gambling palace built over precious places where children played and learnt; the historical perversions that underlie appeals to our heritage; the bullying 4x4s and their exhibitionist cousins the ejaculating jet skis: the intrusions of property developers working towards the erosion of a magnificent public space with the intention of turning it into a privileged, income-generating, private one.
This space for all is threatened and the best way to protect it is to use it.
My fear is that the article will persuade M&G readers not to visit Durban beaches and thus, by narrowing the diversity of users, make them vulnerable in the struggle for recreational space in an increasingly privatised, exclusive world. South Africans have a right to recreational space. May I ask Matshikiza to explore the beaches next time he is in Durban? I believe he will enjoy them. Jeff Guy, low tide, Durban Beach