Durban

Durban Map

Durban is a major holiday resort, with high rise hotels crowding each other for space along the 'Golden Mile' beachfront. It has long been a favourite seaside escape for the landlocked residents of Pretoria and Johannesburg, offering a vibrant (if slightly kitsch) packaged seaside experience on its golden beaches.

Durban has a number of attractions including the enormous Shaka Marine World, but it also functions as a convenient jumping-off point for the attractions of KwaZulu Natal: the Battlefields, game reserves like the Hluhluwe Umfolozi Park and the Greater St Lucia Wetland Park, the spectacular countryside of the Natal Midlands and more golden beaches to the north such as Umhlanga.

The wide Durban promenade is full of Zulu ladies selling hand-woven baskets and beautiful beadwork, while the men try to lure you into a rickshaw for a ride around town. These comfortable contraptions are brightly painted and decorated with tassels and mirrors, while the puller is adorned with a flamboyant head-dress almost tall enough to topple him over backwards.

Rickshaws are more commonly associated with India and it would not be out of place, though a trifle insensitive, to call Durban the 'Curry Capital of South Africa' due to its large population of Asian Indians, who originally came to work in the sugar cane fields. Durban has a peculiarly Asian flavour: the marketplaces and streets of its Indian area are redolent with the scents and scenes of the subcontinent.

White settlers arrived at Durban at the beginning of the 19th century. The warring Zulus had become a strong and successful trading nation and merchant ships came from the Cape to trade. During a storm these ships were forced into the river, where they found a perfect harbour, completely protected from the weather.

Tentative friendly relations were forged with the much-feared Zulu King Shaka, and some bush was cleared for a settlement. Shaka tolerated this as it was convenient for the ivory trade, but kept a sharp watch on the whites with a troop of fearsome warriors named uKangel'amaNkangane ('watch the vagabonds').

As a result of the chaos that Shaka's militarism sowed in the area, the settlement was slow to flourish. However, by 1835 a small town with a mission station had developed, and it was named D'Urban after the governor of the Cape Colony.

The following years saw a huge influx of Voortrekkers into Natal, who founded Pietermaritzburg. When the settlers evacuated Durban following a Zulu raid, the Boers claimed control of the port. They were finally dislodged by the British, who annexed the area in 1843, and Durban began to grow in earnest.

The first indentured Indian labourers arrived in 1860, entering a labour system that bordered on slavery. Mohandas (Mahatma) Ghandi arrived in Durban in 1893. Upon experiencing the harsh racial discrimination under which the Indians suffered, he eventually became the spokesperson for the Indian community in South Africa, and the founder of the nonviolent resistance movement.

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