Durban is losing its lustre. If there is no smoking gun behind the mysterious decline of our beloved rand, then I’m a Dutchman. While the rich (and especially the very rich) get richer, the poor get more and more baffled about the meaning of life. Faced with a government that while not exactly telling them to go and eat cake when bread gets too costly, nevertheless has very few words of sympathy
and comfort to offer, the people of the inner city find themselves with nowhere to turn to but Bamba Zonke Cash Loans and the Universal Church of God.
How, apart from finding someone or something to point fingers at, do you explain the steady deterioration of the quality of life of those who are still living just inside the margins of desperation in post-apartheid South Africa?
Take Durban, just as an example. A year or so ago the casual traveller couldn’t find accommodation for love or money in the Banana City. There was just too much going on ?conferences about organising conferences, hysterical bathing on the Golden Mile, bush safaris, Zulu dancing, snorkelling, scuba diving, you name it. Foreigners were tumbling out of ships and aeroplanes to sample the balmy sunshine and the sunny Zululand smiles. And, being an international seaport and clearing house for goods coming into and out of much of sub-Saharan Africa, a city full of roistering sailors and loitering babes, Durban’s kiss-me-quick sub-culture was a multimillion-rand industry in its own right.
Today Durban’s central business district is dying. I suppose its decline is a mirror of what has already happened in Johannesburg, where decent people don’t venture into the city centre any more if they can possibly avoid it.
But Durban has always been different from Joeys. Its melting-pot profile and laid-back tropical air made it a byword for a relatively chilled lifestyle even in the bad old days, and a template for the successful Africanising of our cities under the new dispensation.
Downtown Durban could have become an unselfconscious, lively and interesting post-colonial African city like Dar es Salaam or Maputo or Abidjan. Instead, the politicians and their buddies in big business have fumbled the ball once more and the place has become a post-apartheid twilight zone, like the rest of the country.
I had been wondering if my eyes had been deceiving me. Even a walk in the night had been disappointingly uneventful. The warnings of dire threats to my personal safety if I stepped out of the hotel lobby after dark proved to be exaggerated. The post-midnight streets near the notorious waterfront were sullenly respectful as I passed by, knots of yawning Nigerians in sleeveless T-shirts giving way without challenge as I padded past. I could have waved my wallet and cellphone in the air, hollered out “Take me, I’m yours” and still remained unmolested.
The next morning a casual conversation with an Indian woman with yellow eyes like a cat enlightened me as to what was actually going on. She was a poll surveyor and begged me to let her fill out a form with my impressions of Durban because she got paid for every form filled out.
I think I got more information from her than she got out of me. She explained that the reason this survey was being conducted was that business had noted a severe decline in turnover in downtown Durbs. Hotel beds were lying empty for the first time in years, restaurants were closing and even the city’s enterprising robbers, desperate to make a living by any means necessary, were resorting to washing people’s cars and helping old ladies across the street.
Serious business of any kind was relocating to the North and South Coasts?long since playgrounds for the better heeled. Durban itself, with its mass of ugly 1960s and 1970s mini-skyscrapers crowding out the few interesting remnants of art deco architecture, was being left to the street urchins, their wayward parents and the last of a once proud race of Zulu rickshaw drivers.
The rickshaw drivers themselves are a sign of the decline of downtown Durban as a playground for the merry hordes from the Transvaal. Back in my day dozens of these strapping chaps would prowl up and down the streets in their foul-smelling regalia of feathers and cowhorn stuck together with bits of dazzling cloth and leather. They would ride their terrified passengers up and down the esplanade, leaping in the air and balancing their screaming cargo on two wheels while still rolling recklessly ahead, the passengers seemingly poised to tip over backwards at any moment. But they would always bring them safely back down to the earth, shouting and grinning at their own prowess. It was a primitive kind of black empowerment ? a reversal of the power roles for a few happy moments.
Today there are no more than half-a-dozen rickshaw runners, waiting half-heartedly for business, their clothing shabbier than ever, their carts emasculated by the addition of safety wheels at the back, put there to reassure the few tourists who might take a spin that there was no chance of falling backwards and sprawling on to the tarmac. The fun has gone out of what few pleasures downtown Durban might once have held.
At the same time the port of Durban is groaning under traffic loads, the like of which it has never seen before. Goods are flowing in and out to the point where the resources of the harbour are buckling under the strain. Hard currency is flooding in with these goods, and into the pockets of the mariners who bring them.
And yet the inner city is dying. What happens to the money? Why are there no signs of an inner-city renewal?
In another time and place, Durban’s burgeoning fortunes would have made it look like a thriving metropolis of fat cats and boomtown rats.
As it is, the cats have all left, and the few rats that haven’t followed them are looking decidedly down at heel. You have to wonder who cares, and what is going to happen next.
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