Durban, South Africa, Friday Night at the Movies

By Danny Schechter, Reader Supported News

15 July 11

Reader Supported News | Perspective

 

We can't escape the tensions around us.

t's Friday night, and the motorways are packed with cars heading for the mall. Here in Durban, the Gateway Mall is the destination of choice. It's huge, the biggest of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere. It's stuffed with stuff, much of it upscale, calling itself a "theater of shopping." (It is actually built over what was once a dump.) The parking lots are packed with late model cars, many of them high end.

I have to confess, I was invited there to see America's latest high-culture import, the 3D version of the movie Transformers 3, based on a toy and cartoon, in a modern movie complex with 18 theaters and rows and rows of packed gates where you line up for endless popcorn and soft drinks.

Business was booming; the theater was full. Most of the crowd seemed to be whites and Indians, but there were also many blacks now firmly anchored in the consumer lifestyle. As I found out a few years back at this same mall, but in a smaller theater when I showed my film "In Debt We Trust," many South Africans are deeply in debt to their credit card companies with inordinate amounts of money also flowing to their cell phone suppliers.

On the way out, past the beaches, past spanking new but underused stadiums built for the World Cup, past the Sun Coast Casino and past the ICC convention center where the International Olympic Committee was still meeting, we drove by what's called a settlement, a collection of tin shacks where destitute migrants from the countryside and other African states live in squalor. It was a reminder of the deep poverty that co-exists with the affluence of the mall culture.

This is a historical irony because in the dark days of apartheid, whites ruled the cities, and used the pass system and police to make sure that "the blacks," except, of course, domestic servants, would be out of the city by nightfall.

They destroyed or "removed" stable black communities to new suburban townships like Soweto against their will. The policy was called "forced relocation."

Now, it's the whites and affluent blacks who are leaving town for spiffy "planned communities." When a low-income housing scheme was proposed for the area near the mall it was actively opposed by affluent residents.

Like Johannesburg, this city has migrated to the Northern suburbs where the new factories and gated communities are being built. The old neighborhoods like Musgrave are trying to give themselves a face-lift, but many flats, houses and businesses are empty, for rent or for sale.

The redeveloped scenic hills of Durban North, and beyond in KwaZulu Natal, seem to offer the escape path for the good life. A new billion-dollar airport named after Zulu King Shaka was recently opened miles north of the city.

An Afrikaner lawyer tells me that years ago there was a Jewish dentist in Durban who was so busy you could never get an appointment. His schedule was packed, mostly with fellow Jews. Now he's easy to book because large parts of the Jewish community have migrated or fled to New Zealand and Australia, with a few trickling to Israel.

This "transition" happened in central Joburg a decade ago. When I first came here, the City of Gold, as it was known, was the center of commerce. Today, the 120-year-old Central Business District is, in part, a ghost town, a place for the poor and immigrants.

The action was moved 20 miles north to Sandton, now an area of fantastic shopping centers complete with a Mandela Square, luxury hotels, and thriving businesses. The new multi-billion dollar Gau-Train that runs from the airport doesn't even have a Johannesburg stop yet. It goes directly to Sandton. Stops at other malls in Rosebank and Pretoria are coming, and at Park Station in Central Joburg, where there will be no connection to working-class trains serving Soweto and other black "suburbs."

The late Gill Scott Heron sang, "What's the word, Johannesburg!" Today, it's a word that has become a synonym more for an airport hub (Africa's largest) than a city. The city is still there, but it seems to have disappeared in the consciousness of many who bypass it whenever they can, although it is still home to the Market Theater and many attractions. Locals prefer to call it Jozi.

The social divisions in South African cities were structured and imposed. They didn't happen naturally, although it is hard to understand that as you whiz by on first-world freeways.

In some ways, geography is destiny. The English who eased out the Dutch in the first colonial collision had a keen sense of where they wanted people to live. The whites got the coastline; the blacks were driven into the interior.

Later, when the Afrikaners took over, their system of racial division and profiling pushed Africans further back into reserves set up to better control labor, and then into ethnic homelands as part of what they called "separate development."

The architects of apartheid created a system where whites ended up with 87% of the best land, blacks only 13%, and there's been little land reform since the outbreak of democracy.

Today something else is going on, landlords and real estate interests encourage blight as a way to drive people to leave for more expensive residences. The blight then lowers real estate values, which allows a few to pick up large tracts for a song and redevelop then.

First the artists and yuppies move in, followed by the middle and upper class. The city planners know this phenomenon well and manipulate it for commercial reasons.

Scholars Bill Freund and Vishni Padayachee recognize the way that planning from on high determines how South African cities have been organized, "These cities have strong traditions of forceful planning from above with considerable capacity to finance change. They witness industrialization, but they are also the site of massive squatter settlements and populations that fall outside the functioning of the 'formal' economy."

Chris Brenner of the University of California-Davis explains this is a global phenomenon:

"Cities are fundamentally shaped by inequality and conflict, as different social groups mobilize political and economic resources in an effort to improve their socio-economic circumstances. Rapid globalization and the rise of an information economy, however, are resulting in rapidly changing patterns of employment, economic opportunity and political power."

These divisions are intensified by policy decisions, and a lack of them, which. in turn, lead to conflict and even violence. A study by the University of KwaZulu-Natal's Center for Civil Society in Durban blamed the rise of xenophobic violence on structural problems many years in the making, as property rights were allowed to trump human rights.

These analysts show that such conflict can be expected in response to blatantly unequal and structural social arrangements that are allowed, if not encouraged, to fester in a stressful environment compounded by poverty and other crises.

As urban analyst David Harvey puts it, 'The response is for each and every stratum in society to use whatever powers of domination it can command (money, political influence, even violence) to try to seal itself off (or seal off others judged undesirable) in fragments of space within which processes of reproduction of social distinctions can be jealously protected."

The result in Durban was an upsurge of violence.

"May-June 2008 South Africa witnessed the country's worst-ever outbreak of xenophobic violence: 62 people including 21 South Africans were killed, 670 wounded, dozens of women raped, at least 100,000 people displaced, and property worth of millions of rand looted, destroyed or seized by South Africans and their leaders in the affected communities."

So here I am in one of the most beautiful corners of the world and yet under the surface, it is seething with conflicts far worse and much scarier than the ones I saw play out in Hollywood's apocalyptic Transformers 3.

It's not obvious. To "get it," you have to scratch deep to see its roots. Politicians will have to do much more to head off the social explosion and ugly violence the experts anticipate and expect sooner rather than later.

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News Dissector Danny Schechter has been involved with South Africa since the 1960's and has made many films here. You may contact him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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