As a sometime international travel journalist (I was one of the founding editors of the US magazine Conde Nast Traveler and group travel editor of the UK’s Telegraph newspapers) I often see it as my duty to seek out the positive aspects of a city or a country. Every city has its downside but to encourage readers to visit a particular destination (to use travel-writing vernacular) travel journalists are inclined to accentuate the positive.
My recent visit to Durban provided a stern test of this mantra. What I saw before me was a city coming apart at the seams, a lawless place where civil order was eroding as quickly as the city’s infrastructure was crumbling. No doubt last year’s looting rampage has accelerated the former and the recent floods have worsened the latter, but at the core of this once great city’s disastrous decline is incompetence, as well as mismanagement and corruption at national and municipal level. It seems to be the story of SA’s rapid decline in a single city.
Ironically, I was in the city to attend a conference celebrating one of its finest initiatives during the apartheid era. The Durban Moment was a period in the early 1970s when university intellectuals, white law students and black workers came together to create the black trade union movement. The pressure created by the rolling worker actions forced the government to take the black workforce seriously and it has been argued the Durban Moment created the first irreversible cracks in the apartheid edifice.
The inspiration behind this movement, the Natal University lecturer and political philosopher Dr Richard Turner, was assassinated on the doorstep of his home in 1978, proof as if it were needed that the apartheid regime indeed feared this worker movement.
I was a political reporter on the Natal Mercury covering the worker uprising and my proximity to the movement and the key players led to the government deporting me in 1976. As I sailed from Durban docks on the last voyage of the Pendennis Castle I felt I was leaving behind unfinished business and, indeed, despite the best efforts of the government, momentum towards the democratisation of the country had begun.
Many of my old Durban friends and colleagues say they have left it too late to leave the country and describe themselves as ‘prisoners of the rand’.
This recent return to the place that was frequently described as the last outpost of the British Empire, has confirmed what many fellow exiles now scattered across the UK, Canada, Australia and the US believe to be true. The slow decline since Mandela took office in 1994 has become a collapse and as Prof Thandwa Z Mthembu, the vice-chancellor of Durban University of Technology, told the Durban Moment conference, SA is “a degenerative economy and a morally debased society”.
It’s there for all to see in Durban. The once majestic Durban City Hall has foliage growing out of the cracks in the walls; the grand old colonial buildings that marked the city out as one of prettiest in the empire are shabby, unmaintained and falling apart. Along what was once the main thoroughfare, West Street (now Dr Pixley Kesame Street) in the centre of the city, my old friend who was driving me around urged me to stop taking photographs out of an open window as smash-and-grab robberies are now common downtown. “And please lock the car door,” she implored.
At night in the formerly affluent white suburbs on the Berea the streets are empty and silent, the remaining citizens safely cut off in their homes by electronic cordons sanitaires. After a pleasant early dinner at The Glenwood Bakery we drove home at around 9pm and there was not another car on the road. At that dinner the chief topic of conversation was the latest carjacking in the middle of Glenwood of a friend, this time a female lawyer. Just days earlier, she had been held up at gunpoint and then driven around Durban by her assailants for more than an hour before they dumped her without cellphone, wallet or cash in the middle of Umlazi township at 7.30pm and drove off in her car.
Many of my old Durban friends and colleagues talk about emigrating abroad (or at the least semigrating to the Cape), though most say they have left it too late to leave the country and describe themselves as “prisoners of the rand”. Admittedly, that subject has been circulating among the educated, and thus mobile, white middle classes since I left more than 40 years ago. But this time there’s an urgency to the conversation, the argument being that with SA’s continued economic decline will come a substantial weakening of the rand, and thus fast diminishing opportunities of establishing even a half-decent life in the West.
More decrepit
Many of the younger, and thus more mobile, taxpaying South Africans are making that move and this will have a further negative effect on a floundering economy. According to National Treasury data SA has 7.4-million individuals earning taxable income and of that group only 1.4-million pay 71% of all income tax. Given that SA has 29-million citizens who receive monthly government grants, the flight of that relatively small number of taxpayers will have a profound effect on the state of the nation. This is another major topic of conversation among the early diners in Glenwood and adds to their unease.
Like the old Rhodesians who are making do in Zimbabwe in an even more decrepit postcolonial economy, these more mature citizens — my generation — are beginning to believe they will be here until the end. I find the comparison compelling, having grown up in Rhodesia, but when I put it to the distinguished author and columnist RW Johnson, that I thought SA was heading in the same direction as Zimbabwe, he accused me of being facile. His argument is that in elections the ruling Zanu-PF simply would not, and this year will not, allow the opposition to win, whereas in SA there is a commitment to constitutional process.
“Here at least at provincial and municipal level if the opposition win, they get in. And the press is very critical of the government whereas in Zimbabwe the government has just shut opposition down. In general, liberal freedoms are better established in SA,” he said.
That may well be, but however accountable the machinery of state is, the future will surely be decided by the economy, and the ability of the state to provide power, maintain public infrastructure, and create an environment in which citizens can earn a living creating things. That does not seem to be happening here. The pavements of Dr Pixley Kasame Street are lined with merchants selling tat, recycling someone else’s old belongings in an endless cycle of subsistence trading. Nothing is being created. It is exactly the same in Bulawayo.
Back at the Durban Moment celebration, the conference had only been going for an hour when the power failed, the lights went out and the debates were temporarily suspended. It didn’t last long and the generators kicked in and discussions resumed but it was a reminder to the celebrants that their brave and brilliant initiatives of half a century ago, in the dark days of granite apartheid, may have been squandered.
It was a point not lost on one of those Natal University activists, the academic Prof Gerhard Maré. Asked what he made of such a conference he said, “It seems like a working subtitle of a book: Painting a Sinking Ship Blue.”
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.