Riding a bicycle in Durban this week, Murray Williams saw integration in action.
Cape Town - It’s the final week of Le Tour, so let’s talk about bicycles. This bike in the picture is a Giant Halfway – so named because it’s a folding bike.
Just as Allied paratroopers dropped on to French soil 75 years ago with folding bikes, so did this writer arrive in Durban, this week, with a bicycle on his back.
The photograph was shot on the pier which stretches out off Vetch’s and Addington beaches. At the end, at its tip, is a Moyo restaurant, which serves a superior cappuccino, it turns out.
But my carefree meander along Durban’s beachfront offered far more important insights than the sight of the warm Indian Ocean.
It offered a glimpse which is rare in South Africa: integration.
As recently as 15 years ago, Durban’s beachfront remained a coastline of many colours. But not in the same place at the same time.
Starting in the north, Blue Lagoon was a favourite of Indians, who flocked from suburbs such as Reservoir Hills and Phoenix. The nights rocked to the sound of Bhangra, or Punjabi hip hop.
Moving south, you’d hit a beach with no name – believe it or not – which was a favourite for Durban’s coloured population.
Next came Country Club, behind which a fleet of buses would unload Zulus to trade at a car-park market.
South still, you’d hit Suncoast Beach, at the former Natal Command, which was the home of the Pirates’ Lifesaving Club. Then Snake Park and Bay of Plenty piers – favourites for Indian fishermen.
Then the central North Beach, crowned by Joe Cool’s restaurant and bar, then the world-famous surfers’ haven New Pier – before South Beach began descending into dodgy harbour territory, in winter full of Gauteng “swallows”, hoboes who’d escaped Joburg’s freezing streets for the winter.
For almost a decade and a half after apartheid ended, Durban’s beachfront remained starkly – even if not legally – segregated by race, class, and everything in-between.
Until 2010. And then a wonderful thing happened.
Preparing for the 2010 soccer World Cup, the municipal authorities embarked on an audacious and controversial plan to integrate the entire length of the Durban beachfront into an all-new, cohesive, united space.
It became a seamless ocean-front experience that Durbanites and visitors can join at any point, and enjoy the length of in full.
There’s powerful metaphoric value in that too, and riding here this week, one was struck by how much Cape Town could learn from this quiet revolution in Durban.
Apartheid spatial planning of suburbs, towns and cities did its utmost to separate us – the promenade in Durban seeks the opposite.
Life on the promenade is extraordinarily rich. You have surfers and stand-up paddle boarders, and white-robed baptisms in the relentless waves. Fit young moms pushing prams, and old Muslim gentlemen, taking in the sea air more slowly. Joggers and dog-walkers, tourists and businessmen, taking the air.
And the key point to all of that is: they’re all doing it together, without barriers to entry, all free, for all.
Riding a bicycle in Durban this week, one saw integration in action. Not through crude legislative social engineering, but through real engineering, with steel and concrete.
The Tour de France ends in Paris this week, having united a nation through two-wheeled travel.
Similarly, in South Africa, Vive la Revolution! Starting by bike…
* Murray Williams’ weekly column Shooting from the Lip appears in the Cape Argus every Friday.
Cape Argus