ABSTRACT
Durban, on the eastern seaboard of KwaZulu-Natal, is the third city to have been considered in a recent research partnership between Switzerland (University of Basel) and South Africa (Universities of the Witwatersrand, Cape Town and KwaZulu-Natal) in which I was involved. In other words, the cities of Johannesburg and Cape Town were each given research attention as ‘cities in flux’ and literary influences before Durban. This is traditionally, within South Africa, the position of Durban in terms of its perceived national importance: Johannesburg is the economic powerhouse, an urban edgy metropolis; Cape Town is the tourist destination, a geographically beautiful city with a cosmopolitan, even ‘European’ feel; Durban is the Cinderella city – subtropical, slower, spread out. However, like Cinderella, Durban holds surprises. One of them is the life story and career of one of its most famous literary sons, Lewis Nkosi. In the paper that follows, Nkosi’s fictional reconstruction of Durban as an Indian Ocean city in flux will be examined through two of his works – his award winning novel Mating birds (Nkosi, 1983) and a newspaper article which appeared in Neue Zürcher Zeitung as ‘The freedom of the disillusioned’ (Nkosi, 2002). Durban, it emerges, through both the apartheid and post-apartheid eras, acted as a gateway to the outside world for Nkosi – in this case, the outside world meant the North: Europe, North America.
