Staff Photographer
‘A beach at a leper colony,” quips photographer Rogan Ward, bettering my Jaws-with-legs analogy as our eyes scan the dismembered bodies of surfers and bathers on Durban’s Mini-town beachfront.
Supposedly a miniature version of Durban, Mini-town is a rather gormless collection of buildings peopled with figurines that appear to be victims of a chainsaw massacre. So unconvincing is this motley exhibit that it renders pointless any intention of rampaging through it like Gulliver at the rat’s end of a five-day bender with Hunter S Thompson.
Industrial quantities of hallucinogenic drugs would lack sufficient potency to effect a Godzilla moment: picking a snivelling Mike Sutcliffe, the municipal manager, out the window of his City Hall office perhaps? Or trashing through the Muslim-Miami-Vice modern architectural monstrosities on Umhlanga Ridge?
Forget about it.
Mini-town pays scant regard to Durban’s actual layout. The beach is tucked away in a corner, a seven-floor office for a welding business towering over the “Indian Ocean” in front of it.
The 26-year-old replica of City Hall faces the east, rather than the west, with the monolithic Standard Corporate and Merchant Bank head offices — which is actually based in Johannesburg — in front of it.
A “game reserve” appears to have more huts than animals and conjures images of canned hunting in a darkie reserve by the holidaying remnants of the AWB in 4x4s equipped with monster wheels.
Yet, jaded adult quibbling aside, the kids love it. Their modern sophistication accrued through interfacing with technology and consumerist popular culture melt away into wide-eyed innocence.
Ward’s two young daughters — Sadie, aged four, and Jennifer, aged eight — “absolutely loved it”, from posing as wannabe mayors, to the enraptured awe of watching trains chugging around over bridges and across the harbour or aeroplanes circling in perpetuity for take-off at the Durban airport.
It was a return to a simple joy.
The model municipality celebrates its 40th birthday next January and Brian Deonarain, Mini-town’s manager, has worked there for 36 of those years. With his 10-man staff scurrying around touching up the paint on buildings, replanting foliage and setting up a new “skyscraper” on the day we visited, he appears to run a tighter ship than the municipal manager of the Big Town.
Even the Bombay shack settlement looks as though it’s been upgraded and appears much less squalid than places such as Foreman Road.
“Companies approach us to do copies of their buildings, paying for the cost of materials [about R15 000] and they make a yearly donation towards the upkeep of the building,” says Deonarain of why Durban appears to be populated mainly by shopping malls, banking institutions and factories. This, he says, is why the Johannesburg headquarters of Standard Bank appears at Mini-town, rather than the Durban one: the Gautengers coughed up cash.
He has, over the years, overseen the changes in the city: “It’s changed a lot from what it used to be. Things like the drive-in are now gone and obviously we need to revamp here to keep up.”
Although newer additions such as the debt-ridden uShaka Marine World or the Martian art-deco SunCoast casino have yet to be included, Deonarain is planning a model of the under-construction Moses Mabhida football stadium — extravagant overhead arch included — in time for the 2010 World Cup. He says, although school tours, sometimes from as far away as Limpopo and the Eastern Cape, are the town’s staple, the Rugby World Cup in 1995 was an exceptionally busy period.
Run as a non-profit organisation owned by the Quadriplegic Society of South Africa, gate takings go to a local disabled home, Ashley House.
The man who built City Hall — perhaps the most convincing model in Mini-town — in 1982, the 56-year-old Deonarain says it takes about six months to complete a major model. He started working in his father’s carpentry business before dedicating most of his life to the minutiae of Mini-town.
He works off the original plans of the actual building, scaling everything down to a ratio of 1:24. With Mini-town on the city’s beachfront at 114 Snell Parade, it is susceptible to the ravages of weather.
Deonarain says over the years fibreglass and plywood “which rots” have given way to more sturdy material such as ABS plastic and perspex and that only stainless steel and brass screws are used to ward off rust and prevent the city from crumbling.
While Mini-town may not be spatially reflective of the city it portrays, there is a metaphysical resonance with a seedy, grimy Durban that occasionally appears as the dysfunctional, laid-back sister of places such as Cape Town and Johannesburg.
With the city intent on redeveloping the particular stretch of beachfront near Mini-town, and Deonarain confident that it will survive, one hopes this cheesy yet sincere reflection of Durban’s soul remains.
Mini-town is at 112 Snell Parade. Entrance is R10 for children aged two to 13, R15 for adults. Special group rates for schools and birthday parties. Call 031 337 7892.