Pointillism

by Alex Park | 2008

The ride into town is always an event with a hundred minivan taxis swirling around you at high speeds. Most are nondescript Toyota vans, but some are elegantly painted, with names posted on the side — Rock & Roll, Tsunami, Bhai. In the City Center, they go only as fast as traffic will allow, passing within inches of each other and the other cars, as well as pedestrians weary of getting slammed. I took one in and found some fish and chips on Prince Alfred Street near the beach for 15 Rand and sat there until I had finished it. The sun was shining brightly, as always, and the sea breeze was close enough to offer some pleasant relief. It was enough to lull one to sleep, or just make them blow off the rest of a perfectly good day. To that end, there was a bar on the beach in front of the hotel I knew of, where Emma had stayed her last few nights in Durban, but it was a little far and I wanted to see something new, so I walked to the beach, pacing along the ocean front in the direction of the Point neighborhood, by the harbor.

People had been telling me since my first visit to the city four years ago to avoid the area. "Well there's Point, by the docks," one person had said at the time. "The Nigerians control that place, so you don't want to go over there." ("Nigerians" is generally code for organized crime in South Africa). But I figured if I was going to learn anything real about the city in which I was living, I had to get beyond its downtown.

It was odd, how different Durban was from Cape Town. In Cape Town, where I had stayed a few weeks some years earlier, the contrast between the rich and the poor was geographical. Even in fourteen years after the fact, some in Durban called it "Apartheid in microcosm," with each neighborhood divided up by race and class and connected only by freeways and train lines. And the townships always register on your consciousness: if nothing else, it is where the majority of people live in Cape Town.

But in Durban, you hardly ever hear about the townships. I've never met anyone from one, never been to one myself. Everyone I talk to in the residence halls comes from this village or the next in KwaZulu-Natal province or the Eastern Cape. That they do their laundry in the bathtubs and hang it out to dry on clothing lines while free washers and driers stand idly in an adjacent room is proof of that. In this city, it seems, there is a decrepit but bustling downtown, a beach. Somewhere else is the homestead, the Zulu village, the place where the people who work here send there money, or who go to school here are expecting to send it in due time, when they have some money. Anything else in Durban has to fit in the margins. This is what I thought about as I started walking.

...

I decided I'd walk towards Point until it started looking especially sketchy or I felt unsafe, and then turn around and find a beer or hit the beach. That morning I had looked up things to do in the city and had found a blurb about a new art gallery, café and restaurant development in the neighborhood, so perhaps with any luck I could end up there. The recently constructed uShaka Marine World had also found a locale in Point, with white, conspicuous looking tourists coming from around the province and passing through by the thousands daily.

Walking down the beach I noticed a white family of five and decided to keep them in my sights: regardless of who was there or what they might want from me, I figured they were smart enough not to try anything with that many tourists around.

I was surprised by some of the people I saw. Not all of them were Nigerian, as I had been told, though honestly I couldn't tell a Nigerian from a Congolese, a Mozambican, a Cameroonian or all the other stripes of immigrants who have come to South Africa in the past fourteen years. There were more coloureds (mixed race) in Point than I had seen elsewhere in the city. Unlike some other neighborhoods, a lot of people were laying in the median, which ran inside the main road. Equally numerous were the people on the sidewalk itself, who I tried to avoid any eye contact with if possible.

"What are you looking for?" a coloured woman in a bikini asked me after following my pace with her eyes for a minute. I shrugged my shoulders and kept going.

The architecture was probably one good reason I had been told to stay away. It could have been Kinshasa, or Luanda or any other port city in some far more derelict and bankrupt country than the one I was walking through, and for moments at a time I imagined it was. There were old, towering colonial buildings, all falling apart as they decayed from the inside out. Between the beach and whatever lay a block inland was a whole broken down village of them: old warehouses, municipal offices, banks and merchant stores. Some time early in the last century, development had shifted away from this area entirely and the new builders had forgotten to so much as tear these buildings down, so it was a ghost town of a bygone era, when sugarcane was like oil, and the Indians were not doctors and entrepreneurs but indentured servants toiling in the plantations a little to the north and a little south of here.

The paint was peeling on all the buildings; the doors were rotting off their hinges. Some still had their shudders, still hanging by rusted hinges but open, letting in the daylight and the Indian Ocean's salted breeze, filling the empty space as it ate the walls slowly. This is what "international business" had meant, once: a beach-side office three stories from the street, overlooking the water as steam ships left the harbor carrying that precious white powder back to whatever place the English called home before their arrival and probably still did. At that point, it was not so much the beach that mattered but the cane fields, and for the men who occupied these buildings, the Zulu villages far away and over the hills were probably little more than an afterthought.

Away from the beach and more towards the harbor, sometime after I made a turn and walked into the interior of the Point neighborhood, I found another warehouse; this time, only half of it remained as two of its walls and most of its roof was caving in. I put my hand on the edge of the wound and pressed my head inside. Only a few blocks from a theme park, you could see the tropical vines taking hold and crawling over one side of a splintered wooden windowsill. The light shone through the vines and the rafters, which had merged together after a century of conscious neglect, combining with the light that streamed through the window to dazzle the eyes on a pile of bricks on the floor. It was nearly silent there, except for a bird chirping from somewhere, perhaps inside. Humans had ignored this place for generations but they were the only ones.

But that will change before too long. Further down the street was a warehouse-sized nightclub called Cape 2 Cairo—a curious nod to Cecil Rhodes' vow to build a railroad from Cape Town to Cairo entirely on British soil. On a beach enclave a farther down the road, a new housing development was taking shape, built partly in the restored colonial houses like the ones I had seen. Along the road you could see as the little two story buildings became progressively more derelict until finally they started to look greatly improved, even livable, with new doors and windows and roofs, fully restored and awaiting tenants for the first time in a century. Even the street signs indicating the neighborhood's namesake street had had their name crossed out, with another sign declaring it "Mahatma Gandhi Road," after the city's famous former resident posted above it. Now all the signs indicated was change.

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