Are We There Yet? (19 page)

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patt erned capes of glass beads and towering headdresses comprising ostrich feathers, bulls horns and leopard skin have been replaced by security guards.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”.

A fortnight later he set out to Pretoria for the case. A first-class seat had been booked in his name on the train, but when it reached Pietermaritzburg a white passenger entered the compartment and promptly went off like a prawn sandwich. Livid at the idea of being made to share the journey with a person of colour, he returned with two rail officials who insisted the lawyer shift into cattle class.

His first-class ticket counted for diddly in their eyes and Ghandi's protestations saw him tossed from the train with his luggage.

For reasons that remain unclear to this day, the railway officials on duty deemed it necessary for Gandhi and his bags to spend the night in separate rooms. Bitterly cold and fearing the possible repercussions of asking for his overcoat, he endured a sleepless night during which he had ample time to consider his future. A return to India was one option, but cowardice was not in his nature. After being met in the morning by some local Indian merchants who shared their tales of bigotry with him, Gandhi did not have the epiphany that has been widely mythologised. There was no grand vow to spend the remainder of his life fighting prejudice and working for racial harmony. In fact, a year after the incident on the train, Ghandi was back in Durban preparing to head home to India. During a farewell bash thrown by his boss, he was shown a newspaper article dealing with a bill seeking to remove the rights of Indians to elect members to the Natal Legislative Assembly.

As the canapés were circulated, a local businessman asked if he would stay for an extra month to help the community mount a legal challenge. Gandhi agreed and although the bill was eventually passed unopposed, the Indian movers and shakers who had attended meetings presided over by the young lawyer knew they had someone special in their midst and begged him to stay on to fight for civil rights. Gandhi and his cohorts then set about forming a permanent lobbying organisation called the Natal Indian Congress.

After three years of eloquently agitating for the rights of Indians, Gandhi realised that this was not going to be a short African sojourn and he returned to India to collect his family. When news got back to Natal that this coolie had developed a severe case of the uppities and was telling anyone who would listen about the mistreatment of his countrymen, newspapers exaggerated his statements and anti-Indian demonstrations erupted in Durban's CBD.