“I got to put my name on a love letter to the place that has made me who I am in so many ways. If it is a slightly compromised love letter, I am okay with that,” says arts writer and culture producer Peter Machen about his book Durban: A Paradise and Its People, released recently.
The glossy coffee-table guide to Durban/eThekwini/The Bull’s Bollocks (or whatever the city fathers are intent on calling the East Coast harbour city this week) is the culmination of a two-year, R300 000 project involving Machen and the eThekwini municipality.
While the free-spirited, freeÂÂthinking Machen and the occasionally myopic municipality may seem as unlikely bedfellows as Moby, Advocate Barbie and a few slabs of prime rib, the end result is an intimate invitation to the city — enhanced by the 35-year-old’s cultural knowledge and unconditional love for a place called Durban.
Flicking past the obligatory city propaganda on municipal core values, economic plans and platitudinal references to “inclusiveness”, one stumbles across some of the city’s lesser-known secrets: working-class vegetarian eateries such as Little Gujarat; bus artists like Nishal Ramdhin who splash Sai Baba and Manchester United homage across the sides of local buses, adding kitsch vibrancy to the city’s roads; and maskanda guitarists Madala Kunene and Shiyani Ngcobo, whose music is a true soundtrack to the province.
Machen admits that he began the project “with an understanding of what the book was supposed to be: a celebration of Durban, and I understood, also, that this was not the space for a critical evaluation of the city’s actions”.
So while one won’t find pictures of police tearing down shacks inhabited by an eight-person family, many people and places, by the mere fact of their inclusion, do help in his stated aim “to present how things are, rather than some sanitised, official version of how they should be”.
Machen says his major constraints were those of “positivity” rather than political or propagandist, that he was “in no way censored. In fact, I marvel at the fact that there was no editorial influence from the city.”
Machen, who has held two well-received exhibitions of his photography (The Corduroy Man and The Love We Leave Behind together with Fran Saunders), is ubiquitous on the Durban cultural landscape: explanation enough for why the sections on artists, theatre, dance, fashion, graphic design, music and architecture — areas in which Durbanites such as fashion designer Amanda Laird Cherry or design houses like the award-winning Disturbance Design — are so well represented.
On why Durban is consistently setting standards in these fields, Machen says: “In all the time I’ve lived in Durban cultural production has constantly faced challenges and conflicts and has never been very well funded. And yet Durban remains a profoundly nurturing space for creative talent, even it is difficult to make a living as a creative person.
“And so I sometimes think that creativity might thrive in Durban precisely because there is less money here than in the other large cities. I think it’s true that creativity often performs well under duress. On the other hand, I dearly wish that some of our most gifted talents didn’t have to struggle to make ends meet.”
For whatever faults, Durban: A Paradise and Its People remains a more authentic option than a Lonely Planet Guide to the city.
So what would its author do on his very last day on Earth? “I would certainly spend a good portion of that last day in the water at Battery Beach and, to be honest, I can’t think of a better place to be in those final moments.
“I would also stop off at Little Gujarat in Prince Edward Street for a final curry. (Hopefully the world will end on Tuesday or Friday so that I will be able to have biriani and patha curry as my last meal).
“I would also feel compelled to spend a few long hours on my balcony looking out from the ridge over Reservoir Hills, KwaMashu, Phoenix and beyond to a series of plateaus one behind the other that I think might correlate to the series of gorges that runs through KwaZulu-Natal.
“I would also go for a long drive up the north coast,” he says.
Durban: A Paradise and Its People retails at R185 and is available at Exclusive Books, various shops and art galleries around Durban