Durban

The bay was known to Portuguese navigators, who are said to have sighted the coast at Christmas in 1497 and gave Natal its name, but it was a Zulu-ruled shore until a party of British traders under Francis Farewell and Henry Fynn settled at Port Natal in 1824 with the consent of King Shaka. The settlement was renamed D'Urban in 1835 after the Cape governor Sir Benjamin d'Urban. Voortrekkers established the Natalia Republic in 1839, and Britain annexed it in May 1843.

Sugar changed everything. Planters on the coastal hills could not recruit enough local labour, and from 1860 indentured workers were brought from India under five-year contracts, followed by later passenger Indians, among them traders from Gujarat. A young lawyer, Mohandas Gandhi, settled in Durban in 1893 and spent two decades in South Africa developing satyagraha, his method of non-violent resistance, partly from the Phoenix Settlement he founded at Inanda in 1903.

The harbour's sandbar was finally mastered at the turn of the twentieth century, and Durban became the busiest port in the country, with coal, sugar and manufacturing behind it. Apartheid's Group Areas Act cleared mixed districts and pushed Black and Indian residents to townships such as KwaMashu, Umlazi and Chatsworth. The city was a centre of the strikes of the early 1970s that revived the trade union movement, and of the political violence of the late 1980s. Since 1996 it has been run as a single metropolitan authority, named eThekwini from 1999; it hosted matches of the 2010 World Cup, and was badly hit by unrest in July 2021 and by floods in April 2022.

Durban's character comes from the meeting of Zulu, Indian and English worlds in one hot port city. isiZulu is the language of the streets, and Zulu culture — the authority of the monarchy at Nongoma, maskandi guitar music, beadwork whose colours carry messages, and the huge independent Shembe church whose headquarters lie near the city — shapes much of daily life. Rickshaw pullers in towering beadwork and horned headdresses have worked the beachfront for more than a century.

The Indian community, one of the largest outside Asia, has been in Natal for more than 160 years. Hindu temples and the mosques of the old Grey Street quarter are central to city life, Diwali lights the suburbs in spring, and South African Indian English has its own vocabulary and cadence. The Zulu and Indian traditions sit alongside an English-speaking settler culture of clubs, schools and cricket.

Sport is the shared religion: the Sharks in rugby, cricket at Kingsmead, surfing from the piers since the 1960s, and two events that stop the city — the Comrades Marathon in midwinter and the Durban July at Greyville. The pace is slower and friendlier than Johannesburg's, conversation is easy with strangers, and shoes and formality are shed as soon as the beach is in sight. Poetry, jazz and a strong arts scene run through the universities and the Berea.

About 4.2 million people live in the eThekwini metro, which covers some 2,550 square kilometres of coast and hinterland. The great majority live in the townships and informal settlements — Umlazi, KwaMashu, Inanda, Chatsworth, Phoenix — rather than in the beachfront and ridge suburbs that visitors see, and the journey between the two, by minibus taxi, structures the working day for hundreds of thousands of people.

The port is the engine. Durban handles more container traffic than any other harbour in sub-Saharan Africa, with the vehicle terminal, the sugar terminal and the oil refineries of the south basin beside it; manufacturing, chemicals, motor assembly and the tourist trade from Gauteng do the rest. The informal economy is vast, and Warwick Junction alone supports many thousands of traders.

The city's issues are water, electricity and the aftermath of disaster. The July 2021 unrest that followed the jailing of former president Jacob Zuma destroyed shops and warehouses across the metro, and the April 2022 floods killed more than 400 people around Durban and wrecked roads, water pipes and the port's road links; rebuilding has been slow. Electricity interruptions and failures in the water network are regular complaints. Everyday life still tilts to the outdoors: surfers at first light, the promenade filling in the late afternoon, and braais that run into the evening.

Durban food is Indian food adapted over six generations. Durban curry is hotter and redder than most, built on chilli-heavy masala blends sold by the scoop in the city's spice shops, and served with mutton, chicken, prawns, beans or potatoes. Bunny chow, the city's own invention, is a quarter, half or whole loaf hollowed out and filled with curry; the bread pulled from the middle is used to scoop. Breyani layers rice, lentils and meat; rotis wrap curries for eating on the move; and samoosas — the local spelling — are sold from every counter and stall.

Zulu cooking runs alongside it: phuthu, the crumbly maize porridge, with amasi, fermented milk; amadumbe, a taro-like root boiled or roasted; and meat grilled over coals at the shisa nyama grills that fill on Saturday afternoons. Chakalaka, a spiced vegetable relish, accompanies both. The port supplies prawns, crayfish and line fish, and Portuguese-Mozambican grills serving peri-peri chicken are a Durban standard.

The subtropical coast provides litchis, mangoes, bananas, avocados and pineapples, sold from bakkies at the roadside, and sugar cane is cut into pieces to chew. Sweets follow the same mixture: Indian sweetmeats such as burfee and jalebi, koeksisters in the Afrikaans style and the syrup-soaked Cape Malay koesister, and strong milky tea drunk through the day.