Today we escaped our yachtie's compound for a guided tour of Durban's surroundings. Durban itself is a good sized city, vibrant but it gives the impression of impending decay. There is plenty of life on the streets and from the waterfront you see a familiar high rise skyline, but get up close and you see fading glory. Most of the business and commerce seems to have moved out to the suburb of Umhlanga, of which more anon.
Five of us piled into a minivan and headed forty miles out of town to kwaDukuza to visit Shaka's grave. Shaka, or more properly Shaka kaSenzangakhona, is credited with establishing the Zulu nation in this part of South Eastern Africa in the early 1800's, around the time the colonizing Europeans started arriving in force. He was quite a character and his name, and his mother Nandi, are still held in high esteem. Next week is the anniversary of his assassination by two of his half brothers, an event marked by the attendance of hordes of Zulu dressed in traditional tribal garb. We are told you can't get near the place then. The site is a modest and tasteful park and museum set in the middle of a bustling small town which rather detracted from my ability to project myself back into the high veldt of two hundred years ago.
From there we took off to Groutville to visit the Albert Luthuli museum, most of you are excused for thinking "who?" (Gary, you are not excused at all). Luthuli was a black African statesman and contemporary of Nelson Mandela who was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 1960 but who was not allowed to leave the country to receive the prize. He was a staunchly anti-violence in the mold of Gandhi and in contrast to Mandela who sought a more robust response to violent oppression. Under mounting international pressure he was very grudgingly allowed to go to Oslo in 1961 to receive the prize. The USA piled on the shaming pressure in 1966 when Kennedy sent his brother Robert to visit Luthuli at his very modest village home.Today the museum homesite is still set amid a gritty township neighbourhood which I found far more appropriate than some spiffed up park setting.
Up next was Mohandas Gandhi's home site. Gandhi arrived in South Africa in response to a petition from Durban's ex-pat Indian population who sought some legal representation to counter the oppressive regime that had brought them in to cut sugarcane; the African population having declined to make themselves available for the work. Gandhi came from a very well heeled Indian family and bought the 100 acre Phoenix Plantation for his homestead. At that time he was completely pro-British. Legend tells that his Damascene moment came when he was turfed out of his first class railway seat in Pietermaritzburg for "Riding The Railroad While Coloured". His wealth notwithstanding, the home site (reconstructed following it's destruction in 1985 during the death throes of Apartheid) is also a modest affair. He described it as a pleasant spot with a stream at the foot of the hillside teeming with fish. In the years since a very rough and ready township has grown up to surround it, the stream is now muddy and loaded with trash. I should note that this has been a very wet, windy and grey day. All the rivers we saw were muddy carried a heavy burden of trash. For all that I found it a very evocative spot to contemplate the history and the rain didn't detract from that one whit.
Up next was the site where Nelson Mandela went in 1994 to cast his first vote in the newly democratic and emancipated South Africa. The prospect of visiting this place did not excite me at all. Surely a place of only symbolic significance after all the hard fights had been hard won in places far more significant and poignant than this. I found myself in Ohlange Secondary School, aka the Zulu Christian Industrial School founded by John Dube, one of the founders of the ANC, in 1900. The story of the school is worth looking up and it continues to operate today though clearly it is struggling. Having cast his vote, Mandela walked to Dube's grave on the Ohlange property to report to Dube that Africa was now free. Now I don't know how this happened, but I found myself quite choked up by this experience, and even now, hours later as I write there is a lump in my throat. Even though I had no part in it, I remember well the my initial awareness of the Apartheid issue in South Africa, it's development and resolution. To stand there on this perhaps "after the fact" and perhaps "only symbolic" spot was profoundly moving.
No comments:
Post a Comment