Dispatch from Mariannhill, Tuesday, May 10

Durban is a fascinating African crossroads city with a huge port (the sixth largest in the world) where all sorts of people and cultures meet. We experienced various sides of the city the past couple of days. Sunday we went out in search of an Internet cafÈ that could handle my "memory stick" (not all do since they’re afraid of viruses). We landed in one of Durban’s two huge glitzy Malls, the Pavilion. It can be seen from miles around, a huge complex set on one of Durban’s many hills. Unlike American malls, which tend to more businesslike, this Mall was obviously planned as an escape. You enter from the parking lot patrolled by armed guards, through an entrance of waterfalls and a fake tropical forest. Once inside we faced a dizzying array of stores, restaurants, bowling alleys, miniature golf courses, a Cineplex (with a mixture of Hollywood and Bollywood), and who knows what else (the other big Mall has a huge pool with a wave maker producing waves big enough to learn to surfboard. Our guidebook quite accurately describes these Malls as places "where the wealthy minority hides from the poor majority, in a glitzy local version of the American Dream." Except it was bigger and glitzier and with more activities that I’ve seen in any American Mall, granted, however, that we are not Mall people.
The next day we made an excursion into "downtown" Durban for a completely different experience. It’s a typical big-city downtown with lots of high-rise buildings, some rather new, but on the street, we hardly every saw a white person. The streets are lined with shops—not the big name ones you see in Chicago or London, but mostly smaller shops filled with clothes, cheap electronic stuff, ethnic goods. The sidewalks were jammed with people, and for blocks and blocks the street side was lined with street merchants, selling everything from fruits and vegetables to phone calls (about 25 cents) and various kinds of clothes and luggage and just about everything else. We encountered no beggars; everyone was selling something. And the mixture of people was amazing, from Zulus, to other Africans, to many Indians (a large group that has been here since the late 19th century) to Arabs. But there were very few whites, making us, me especially, an object of intense sales pressure. We had lunch in a lovely, well-kept tropical park across from the city hall. There was a menu from which we chose a traditional Zulu dish (phuphu, I think), and a bottle of local beer, but we couldn’t help but notice that we were the only ones eating at the traditional lunch hour. All the other patrons, mostly young people, were drinking from huge liter bottles of Amstel lager, many of the tables with several empties lined up like trophies.
We made our way down to the Victoria Street Market, a huge warren of little shops that winds through buildings, alleys, and out into the surrounding streets. It’s one of the markets Jeanne loves, but I’m always trying to keep track of some daylight so I know where to escape. What a contrast to the pristine Malls, here were stalls with exotic spices, piled high with pots and pans, and booths piled high with African souveniers (carved ebony, baskets, bead work, etc.)
I spotted a young Arab store-keeper wearing a long white "dishsasha" (he called it something else). I told him I’ve always admired these long cotton robes and like to wear them at night in the summer at home. (I used to have one but it was too small and shrunk further in the wash, and now Jeanne wears it.) We were immediately led through a series of nearby shops catering to Arabs, till we found one with bigger sizes. A young man with shaky English tried to help me, and then out of the back room there silently emerged a woman, completely covered in a "chador"(if that’s the spelling) from head to toe, to the black cotton gloves on her hands, sparking dark eyes and a little bit of black skin around them visible from the little opening. She spoke to the Muslim men and to Jeanne, but never directly to me, and seemed to have some authority in the shop. One of the men asked me, "Are you a Muslim?" I said no, but I just liked to wear these clothes. He couldn’t help smiling the whole time, as did the woman only whose laughing eyes could be seen. I must have been the talk of the dinner table that night. In the end I didn’t find one I liked (most were polyester and not what I wanted to wear on a warm summer night).
The trouble is that in this great market there were no tourists in sight, except us. "Pay no attention to prices marked, we make good deal," was the mantra of the shopkeepers. Tragically, this vibrant inner city becomes ghost town at night, because of rampant crime. The wealthy (black and whites) flee to the suburbs for restaurants and entertainment.
For all the persistent problems, from AIDS to racism to crime, I still get the feeling that SA is a country on the rise. There’s a feeling of energy here. Despite it all, there seems to be a determination to work out a messy democracy in a land filled with immense resources of people and raw materials. More and more the divide isn’t between black, colored, and white, but between the rich and the poor. In Durban you’re just as likely to see a black as a white driving a huge BMW (its biggest market in the world) or Mercedes. But you don’t see any white setting up stalls on the sidewalks of the city center.
Christianity has a big presence here too. As we drove around the city we saw several huge mega-church buildings, like "The Church of all Nations" advertised as the place where miracles happen. Watching TV, there are lots of religious programs, most slanted toward the "God can do a miracle for you today" variety, with pictures of people falling into frenzied trances after being touched by the evangelist/pastor. Remember too that it was the church, especially people like Desmond Tutu, that led the country through the post apartheid period with its amazing demonstration of Christian ethics in the "Truth and Reconciliation Commission." It may well be that Christianity saved the nation from a bloodbath of recrimination and revenge.