Are We There Yet?

by David Smiedt

  Economists, too, have been furiously waving the flag with the National Press Club naming the rand as the 2002 Newsmaker of the Year for gaining almost 40 per cent against the US dollar. Unfortunately it’s 40 per cent of sweet fuck-all.

  A small but conspicuous number of black movers and shakers have been catapulted into the highest strata of society and have made millions since apartheid ended. However, according to a survey by Statistics South Africa, many of their brethren were actually better off under the old government. Between 1995 and 2000, the average black household was slugged with a 19 per cent fall in income, while the average white one enjoyed a 15 per cent increase. In 2000 the average white household earned six times as much as the average black one. In 1995 the ratio was four to one.

  The real-world results of these inequities are hunger – a study by the University of the Western Cape’s School of Government found that 70 per cent of the 750,000 residents in the greater Nyanga area had insufficient food last year – crime and the other calling card of Third World destitution, child labour. According to the Department of Labour, 36 per cent of South African minors are engaged in labour that by its own definition is “exploitative, hazardous, or otherwise inappropriate for their age, detrimental to their schooling or social, physical or moral development”.

  Nowhere was the disparity between the fat cats and ferals more obvious than at the turn-off to Umhlanga, a resort town where I had spent a number of Christmas holidays as a child and which is a mere twenty minutes from downtown Durban. The moment I pulled up at the traffic lights my car was besieged by four filthy children begging for coins. Distended bellies inflated their threadbare shirts. Glassy eyes stared at me from sunken sockets, and beneath their snot-crusted nostrils lay streaks of the spray paint that offers a diverting intoxication when sniffed from a bag. The light changed as I was fumbling for a donation and as I drove away, the coins failed to land in the palm of the intended recipient and scattered on the road instead. I heard a squeal of brakes behind me and in the widescreen format of the rear-view mirror I saw the kids scrambling for silver amid flying fists, utterly oblivious to the vehicle that had almost ploughed into them from behind.

  Within minutes I was surrounded by palatial holiday homes propped on a lush spur garlanded with mauve Star of India and surveying 180 degrees of placid Indian Ocean. These worlds of opulence and poverty were no more than a kilometre apart.

  The handful of hotels I remembered from my childhood had become a ritzy conglomeration of tiered town houses, corporate headquarters inspired by the “who gives a fuck as long as it’s shiny” school of architecture and a shopping mall so vast it could have qualified for its own postcode. The beachfront strip was, however, much as I recalled it. My family always stayed at the Cabanas, a twelve-storey faux-Mexi-can casa grande where I would routinely catch head lice in the swimming pool and spend the rest of the holiday reeking of carbolic acid shampoo. Which was just what I needed at that hormone-soaked juncture in my life when a holtday romance was a priority for the first time and my best efforts at wooing were hampered by a larynx that leapt between registers of its own accord.

  My other most distinct memory of the Cabanas was the discovery that guests – even young ones – could order whatever their sugar-craving hearts desired and sign them to the room. It was only at the end of one three-week stay that my father was presented with a bill that included almost fifty chocolate sundaes, whereupon he had a conniption so fierce that I couldn’t wrench my gaze from the vein that was throbbing in his neck. I could tell that he was mad because he used the phrase “with all due respect”. Refusing to pay for items he was adamant he had not ordered, he demanded to see the bills. These were duly produced and when he caught sight of the signature at the bottom the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. Thus began the great pocket money drought of 1980.

  With nostalgia seeping from every pore and a suspicious itch in my scalp, I enquired about the price of a night at the Cabanas. The response made me instantly realise why Dad had chucked that tanty. For a fading four-star resort that had a TV blaring in the lobby, the room rate took the concept of exorbitancy into a perverse new realm.

  Flanked by an embankment of waxy green shrubbery on one side and a blanket of champagne sand on the other, the concrete beach path hadn’t changed a smidge. The air tasted like the rim of a margarita glass and the spray threw misty drapes over the breakers. I walked the length of the beach shin-deep in warm water with a mild sun on my face. It was fourteen types of marvellous.

  On this Friday evening in low season, the handful of pubs a block back from the beach were occupied by locals flushed with hard spirits and the contented countenance of those rich or lucky enough to call Umhlanga home. I wandered into a bar with a crowded terrace overlooking a seascape iced with pink meringue clouds. Here I wiled away the evening as a middle-aged cover band ripped into “Hotel California” and “The Boys are Back in Town” while I did likewise with a laager or three.

  Between songs, the balding troubadours made “this is one of our personal favourites and we hope it’s one of yours” in-jokes. These were mainly for the benefit of a table of brassy blonde groupies in lycra, Wonderbras and the throes of hormone replacement therapy. Having spent most of their lives in the seaside idyll, they had skin like Louis Vuitton luggage.

  This was a clear sign that it was time to call it a night. Ditto the fact that it had reached that juncture of the evening where a number of the single male drinkers began playing air guitar in their seats.

  I was collected the next morning by Andy Heimann, an old family friend who had kindly offered me a lift into Durban. On the way he switched on the news. The top story revolved around a minister who was negotiating with a large German vehicle manufacturer regarding a defence contract and had accepted one of their flashy cars as a heavily discounted sweetener.

  An ebullient, gregarious type, Andy had spent his two years’ compulsory military training either running “get captured and we’ll deny you exist” insurgency raids into Angola or guarding the apartheid era state presidents under constant threat of assassination. He rolled his eyes at what he described as “daily reports of government corruption”.

  “Of course it also happened under the white government,” he said, “but few of us thought it would be so prevalent under the equality that so many of the current ministry suffered for during the Struggle. Maybe I was naive, but I expected more from the government after what its elected representatives went through in the past. Instead a lot of them have been tearing the ring out the chicken.”

  It was an expression I’d never heard before but which required no explaining.

  “When the government changed over in 1994, there was so much reorganising going on that anticorruption mechanisms weren’t high on the agenda in the new constitution. Certain black politicians who were suddenly in positions of power and influence made a lot of illicit money very quickly. The nobility of the struggle against apartheid led many of us – of all colours – to underestimate human nature and assume that the new regime would somehow be immune to public officials on the take. But it happens everywhere else, so why not here?” he asked as we made our way onto the Durban foreshore.

  If the city were a woman, she’d be wearing too little clothing and too much make-up. Despite the skullcap of dark roots, desperate attempts at flirtation and breasts bubbling from a mutton-as-lamb top, it would be clearly evident that in her day she was a stunner. Now she’s more like Lola at the Copacabana with faded feathers in her hair and a dress cut down to for-God’s-sake-put-it-away.

  It is a sad shell of the playground city that so entranced me as a child. The wave-shaped Elangeni Hotel, once the zenith of sophistication, still presides over the Golden Mile – which is actually four – on Marine Parade. But it is now a Holiday Inn. The same fate has befallen the Maharani next door whose neon outdoor elevator had provided me with hours of gawping entertainment as it glided heavenward to a disco on the roof. The rickshaw drivers
lined up out the front in intricately patt erned capes of glass beads and towering headdresses comprising ostrich feathers, bulls horns and leopard skin have been replaced by security guards.

  At one stage there were 1500 rickshaws ferrying visitors along Durban’s subtropical boulevards and I remember squealing with glee as our driver leapt into the air between strides, sending my mother and I sliding about the zebra-skin covered seat. With its beaming rickshaw drivers (many standing over ten feet with their headdresses on), neon-trimmed roller-coasters, beachside slippery dips, reptile parks and dolphinariums, a childhood trip to Durban was like stepping into a fantastic story – except you were in the illustrations.

  For adults it was a hedonistic playground where pith-helmeted doormen waited to welcome you to a day at the races or the Georgian grandeur of the Durban Club where women are still not allowed to become members and can only enter the premises in the company of a male.

  A few handsome Art Deco apartment blocks in pale pastels still stand on the beachfront but they look like ageing actors who’ve mistakenly wandered into a casting for a grunge video. Despite names like Seaspray, Blue Waters, High Tide and, oddly enough, Las Vegas, most of the waterfront is taken up by red-brick boxes with rust-blistered gutters. The funfairs and putt-putt courses have long since gone and the mini town replica of the city we faithfully made pilgrimages to – although neither ever changed – is boarded up.

  After trying briefly to talk me out of my intention to stroll around the precinct that had so enchanted me as a child, Andy dropped me off at a once-grand hotel with ocean views. The grassy promenade between the street and the beach was awash with fast-food wrappers, beer bottles and young alcoholics with old faces. The pristine sunken garden built by the unemployed during the Great Depression and given a Tuscan pep-up by Italian POWs during World War II was as magnificent as ever, but I couldn’t be certain whether the most rudimentary maintenance had merely made it appear so against its surroundings.

  Things improved marginally at beach level. Dreadlocked surfers with boards tucked under their arms lounged at ramshackle fast-food kiosks scanning the break. I had been warned that a stroll in this area would most likely result in me requiring a blood transfusion before nightfall, but in fact, it was almost pleasant. Homeys with their underwear showing cruised by on skateboards, pausing to bob along to the freestyling rappers busking. Families kicked around footballs near public barbecues and omigods – a collective noun I’ve just invented for teenage girls because it’s their most pre-dominant call – stole surreptitious glances at six-packed lifesavers.

  Hauling flailers from this stretch of water presents the kind of challenge that would have your average Australian or Californian lifeguard hanging up their Speedos. Aside from the constant and abundant threat of sharks, those who decide to take a dip here frequently don’t know how to swim. When the whites-only signs came down, tens of thousands of black South Africans descended on beaches they’d previously been forbidden from. Christmas and New Year’s Day are particularly popular and archived press photos show bathers standing forty or fifty deep and shoulder to shoulder like peak-hour commuters in a train carriage.

  “How many rescues do you think we performed on this stretch of beach on Christmas Day last year?” asked Eric Themba, a lifesaver in his late teens. Not wanting to dampen his justifiable pride I responded on the outlandish side with a figure in the low two hundreds. “Try a thousand,” he beamed. “And we only lost thirteen.”

  The city’s harbour precinct has been touted as the genesis of a process of urban revitalisation, but the once-magnificent maritime buildings festooned with arches, domes and fluid fretwork still share the dilapidated air of the Nigerian prostitutes who occupy them. This part of town is the province of cashed-up sailors who routinely drop anchor in the largest port in Africa, the hookers who welcome them and the pimps who prey on both.

  The only evidence I could find of the promised renaissance was a shudder-inducing sign on some vacant land informing passers-by that this was soon to be the home of the Shaka Island Casino.

  At the water’s edge stood a modest collection of restaurants that Andy had instructed me to visit for a seafood orgy. Overlooking the shipping channels beside the cigar-shaped hill known as the Bluff, these eateries were all he had promised. Fresh oysters accompanied by the sight of a curious sea lion and salt water paved diamante by a high sun – Durbs still had some threads of the old magic in her fraying coat.

  The ninth-largest harbour on the planet, Durban lacks one of the natural attributes most crucial for its purpose: deep water. As a result, a network of lanes were dredged into the sand. At low tide it is possible to walk ankle-deep to the edge of these precipices and dozens of fishermen over the years have been taken by sharks who leapt from the opaque darkness at their feet.

  In the 1850s the virgin bushland around Durban gave way to sugar plantations and the harbour witnessed an influx of indentured labour from India. Back-breaking toil for a pittance held sweet FA in the way of allure for the local Zulus, and so land barons turned their attention to the Empire’s most abundant source of labour: the slums of Delhi, Madras and Calcutta. For ten shillings a month, hundreds of thousands bade their families farewell, lost their names – henceforth being referred to as Coolie Number whatever – and boarded cramped vessels for a month-long journey into the unknown. Motivated by starvation, they accepted a deal whereby they were to be indentured to a particular planter for up to seven years. After this period, they were obliged to remain in Natal for a further five years as a ‘free labourer’, after which they were made an offer: gratis passage back to India or a small grant of Crown land.

  By law they were meant to be provided with food, clothing, medical attention and an annual increase of a shilling a month after the first year of service. In practice the attitude towards these labourers was neatly expressed in an editorial in the Natal Witness: “He is introduced for the same reason as mules might be introduced from Montevideo, oxen from Madagascar or sugar machinery from Glasgow. The object for which he is brought is to supply labour and that alone. He is not one of us. He is in every respect an alien, he only comes to perform a certain amount of work and return to India.”

  The fragmentation of families was common, as was the deportation of ill children and wives. Few complaints ever made it to the authorities as the labourers were forbidden from leaving estates without an employer’s permission and absconding warranted terrifying retribution. When the overworked coolie immigration agent did make it to plantations to check on the wellbeing of these units of labour, his inspections were always in the company of employers or foremen whose presence ensured smiles and silence.

  Not surprisingly, many were worked to death. The customary cremation favoured in India was banned in Natal and some open ground beside a slaughterhouse in Durban was set aside for Indian corpses. The mourners, anxious not to get their scant wages docked, dug the shallowest of graves and the bodies were routinely exhumed by feral pigs who had acquired a carnivorous bent thanks to offal dumpings from the nearby butchery.

  As the Indian labour community in Natal flourished and those who had served their period of indenture began to establish modest private enterprises, a new wave of travellers from the homeland began to arrive – at their own expense. Mostly Muslims from the state of Gujarat, they were of a higher caste than the majority of labourers, had extensive education and were sufficiently cashed up to make the local retail sector their own. Employing members of their family, they could trim business overheads and undercut their opposition to the point that increasing numbers of bargain-hunting whites became their clients. Their main customer base, however, was indentured or ex-indentured labourers and these high-caste merchants associated with them only to the degree that successful business practice demanded.

  In the eyes of the whites, Indian was Indian, no matter what caste. That meant 9pm curfews, police brutality, and statutes which prevented traders from opening their stores on Sundays – the
one day that indentured labourers could do their shopping.

  These grievances formed the core of an ignored appeal this educated elite sent to the Colonial Secretary in London. When the local authorities were granted responsible government in 1893, Indian appeals to their homeland or England were effectively extinguished. If South African Indians were to combat discrimination, they had no choice but to put aside the social barriers that would have prevented them from associating in the old country and unite in a campaign for political and civil rights. Even though they didn’t know it, the Indians were at this point pre-empting Bonnie Tyler by almost a century in holding out for a hero.

  He arrived in Durban on Tuesday 23 May 1893, intending to spend no more than a profitable year in town then head home first class with a fat wallet. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in Porbandar on 2 October 1869, the son of a senior public official. He married at thirteen, became a father before his next birthday and left for London five years later to study law. Called to the bar in 1891, he returned to his family and opened a string of unsuccessful law practices in Bombay and Rajkot. Through his brother, Gandhi secured a contract with the firm of Dada Abdullah and Co. which had branches in Porbandar and Durban and was involved in a claim between two Indian businessmen for some £40,000 – serious potatoes in 1893. Gandhi’s role was to instruct counsel, dispose of English correspondence and translate Gujarati documents throughout the duration of the case which was to be heard in Pretoria.

  A bitter taste of what was to come presented itself on his third day in Durban when Gandhi went to the magistrate’s court so he could become better acquainted with South African legal procedure. Equating his traditional turban with a hat – which was required to be removed in a court of law – the magistrate ordered him to lose it. Gandhi refused. It was an act which made two papers the next day, one article carrying the headline “AN UNWELCOME VISITOR”.