After all the nice things we’ve said about Durban, they go and mess up the Banana City anyway. It cannot be more than a year since this column responded to outrage from some of the city’s more illustrious and intellectually grounded citizens and said some nice things about South Africa’s would-be Big Easy.
Durban could indeed have held that title. And I’m sure it will be struggling to earn that special place in the run-up to the 2010 World Cup that our country has so unfairly won against all the odds. Durban is in the running, in its own lazy way, for prime spot to receive all those overblown freeloaders who will be descending on our country over the next few years and profiting, one way or another, from our success.
Durbs must be reinventing itself as we speak as the easy-going holiday resort by the sea that it was for so many generations of South Africans of all colours, before apartheid really kicked in and made it the ugly, disjointed conurbation it has become.
But apartheid is technically over now. And we have to ask ourselves if the apartheid realities have really been laid to rest. And if so, how? Will Durban, like other parts of post-apartheid South Africa, be able to reinvent itself as a model of the post-racial, post- colonial, post-Cold War age?
Sure, take Durbs. Who can forget that in the old days there were race riots tumbling all over the place — Indians against blacks, blacks against Indians, whites against all of them with billy-clubs and tommy guns ready and willing to crack heads, and Boers standing on the sidelines just in case anything was left to chance.
Forget about the days of Shaka. Forget about Bambatha and the uprising of 1906. Durban was always destined to exist, and was set to become an English seaside town stranded willingly and wilfully on the southeastern coast of the African continent.
Durban (unless we do something drastic) will always be a little piece of a long-forgotten England, with dribs and drabs of Africa and Asia clinging forlornly to its sagging haunches. That is how Durban is.
So we had been inclined to regard Durban as a work in progress, a hybrid, an example for the new South Africa. An island of multi- culturalism on our Indian Ocean seaboard, neither here nor there, but everywhere at the same time. Very new-age, very 21st century. That is what Durban, capital of KwaZulu-Natal (the only province with a name and a surname, as some choose to characterise it) came to feel for us.
But as I say, they went and messed it all up. How?
Well, how do you explain this new development on the southern edge of the sea front that they have proudly named ‘uShaka Marine Worldâ€? This is the centrepiece of Durban’s downtown regeneration, its statement of intent, its provocative commitment to a new, vibrant, all-encompassing South Africa, free of the shackles of the past.
UShaka Marine World is a travesty of all things Zulu — let alone African. Let alone the struggle that has been fought for so many years to regenerate the African renaissance, such as it is.
So you walk along Durban’s potentially interesting, devastated, lack- lustre southern beachfront, hoping for the best, and instead you come across this billion-rand white elephant that the newly renamed Durban Metropolitan has bought in to.
What confronts you is a south-beach version of Johannesburg’s fakey, tacky Randburg Waterfront. Bad taste by the balmy waters of the Indian Ocean. Why?
UShaka Marine World could have been a triumph. Instead, they allowed a bunch of Malaysian businessmen to come in, look around, and then subcontract a bunch of international ‘property developersâ€, probably from that cutting edge theme-world space of Australia, or middle America, to define the way Durban is going to think about itself for the foreseeable future — aye, until the eighth generation, or thereabouts.
My six-year-old daughter and her school chums could have thrown this together in about 10 minutes. Instead, the Durban Metropolitan forked out something in the region of a billion rand to let international ‘property developers†design and construct a concrete mess of fake Zulu huts, imported palm trees and a Skeleton Coast shipwreck made out of solid concrete, which houses the remnants of Durban’s once-proud, formerly world-class aquarium.
Heck, I still remember the old Durban aquarium from my childhood. There was an extraordinary array of sea life in all its brilliant colours floating at you as you walked in wonder, staring through thick glass at this undersea world.
The sharks were particularly intriguing in their menacing, silent closeness, looking you right in the eye as they swam at you, then veering away at the last minute to disappear into the dark, mysterious depths.
The sharks, of course, have no access to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
If they did, they might want to tell the uncomfortable tale of how they were well treated under apartheid, and then abused under the new dispensation when a new class of crass, rainbow-coated bureaucrats relocated them to uShakaland in the name of reconciliation, in celebration of 10 years of freedom and democracy.
Most of those magnificent sharks, you see, have died of oxygen starvation since their relocation to the gaudy splendours of uShaka Marine World. They simply were not taken care of. Priority has gone to the greedy, grey, rainbow-coloured middle classes who stuff their faces at the various white franchises upstairs.
So, much as I want to love its seedy, tropical, lethargic splendour, I find myself on the verge of giving up on Durban once again.
Durbanites just don’t seem to know what a jewel they have sitting in their hands. And the rest of the Beloved Country, in its frenzy of joy and empowerment, apparently just couldn’t give a damn.