A nasty and neglected city: the Durban Moment has passed
The gains from1970s efforts that created the first cracks in the apartheid edifice seem to have been squandered
As a sometime international travel journalist (I was one of the founding editors of the US magazine Conde Nast Traveler and group travel editor of the UK’s Telegraph newspapers) I often see it as my duty to seek out the positive aspects of a city or a country. Every city has its downside but to encourage readers to visit a particular destination (to use travel-writing vernacular) travel journalists are inclined to accentuate the positive.
My recent visit to Durban provided a stern test of this mantra. What I saw before me was a city coming apart at the seams, a lawless place where civil order was eroding as quickly as the city’s infrastructure was crumbling. No doubt last year’s looting rampage has accelerated the former and the recent floods have worsened the latter, but at the core of this once great city’s disastrous decline is incompetence, as well as mismanagement and corruption at national and municipal level. It seems to be the story of SA’s rapid decline in a sing...
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