Pietermaritzburg

Voortrekkers who had crossed the Drakensberg founded the town in 1838 as the capital of their short-lived Republic of Natalia, laying out a wide grid beside the Msunduzi River and naming it, by the usual account, for their leaders Piet Retief and Gert Maritz. The Church of the Vow, built to fulfil a promise made before the battle at Blood River, still stands in the centre. British troops annexed Natal in 1843 and built Fort Napier on the ridge above the town, which became the seat of the colonial government and a garrison town.

Victorian Natal gave the city its character. Red brick, cast iron, verandahs and clock towers went up through the second half of the nineteenth century, the railway arrived from Durban later in the century, and the colonial parliament sat here. In June 1893 a young Indian lawyer, Mohandas Gandhi, was ordered out of a first-class carriage at the station and spent the night on the platform — an episode he later described as the moment that set him on the path of political resistance.

The city remained an administrative centre after the Union of 1910, with the provincial government, courts, schools and a university college. Under apartheid its African and Indian residents were removed to segregated townships, and Edendale and Imbali became centres of resistance; the late 1980s and early 1990s brought severe fighting between supporters of the ANC and Inkatha to the valleys around the city. Since 1994 it has been the capital of KwaZulu-Natal, sharing provincial functions with Durban, and the municipality takes the Zulu name of its river, Msunduzi.

Pietermaritzburg is a university and school city, and much of its public life turns on that: the University of KwaZulu-Natal's campus at Scottsville, a set of long-established boarding schools, choirs, debating and a strong tradition of amateur theatre and music. The Tatham Art Gallery and the university's theatre anchor the arts, and craft and pottery traditions spill in from the Midlands studios north-west of the city.

Sport is the city's great fixture. The Comrades Marathon between Pietermaritzburg and Durban, run every year since 1921, is the event that fills the city's hotels, and the Dusi Canoe Marathon leaves from the Msunduzi each summer for a three-day paddle to the sea. Cricket and rugby are played at grounds near the centre, and the hills around the city have made it a centre for mountain biking.

Culturally the city mixes Zulu, Afrikaans, English and Indian South African traditions in a way that is visible on a single street: a Voortrekker church, an Anglican cathedral, mosques and Hindu temples, isiZulu heard everywhere, and the Gandhi statue in the centre marking a global story that began at the station. Manners are small-town and formal by South African standards, with greetings exchanged before business and a slower pace than Durban's.

The Msunduzi municipality covers the city and the townships around it, and the wider uMgungundlovu district it anchors has more than a million residents. Zulu speakers form the large majority, alongside English-speaking and Indian South African communities and a smaller Afrikaans-speaking one. Edendale and Imbali in the south-west hold much of the population; the older suburbs on the northern hills are greener and wealthier, and Hilton, higher up the escarpment, is wealthier still.

Government is the biggest employer — the provincial legislature and departments, courts, hospitals and schools — followed by the university, aluminium and timber processing, and light manufacturing. The Midlands farms and forests supply dairy, timber and beef through the city, and the N3 corridor between Durban's port and Gauteng makes road freight a constant presence.

The day starts early, with commuter minibus taxis running from the valleys into the centre before dawn and a busy street-trading economy filling the pavements by mid-morning. The centre empties after five. Municipal services are the recurring local grievance: water outages, potholes, refuse collection and financial troubles at the municipality feature constantly in local news, alongside the lasting damage from the floods that hit the province in 2022, and electricity supply has eased but remains a worry.

Pietermaritzburg eats much as Durban does, with more of the farm behind it. The city's Indian South African community, descended from indentured labourers and traders who came to Natal from the 1860s, gave it curry houses and takeaways selling mutton, chicken and bean curries, rotis, samoosas and the bunny chow — curry in a hollowed-out half or quarter loaf — as well as breyani for weekends and celebrations.

Zulu cooking sets the everyday table: phuthu, the crumbly steamed maize porridge, with beans, wild greens called imifino, or meat and gravy; amasi, soured milk, poured over it; amadumbe, a taro-like root; and umqombothi, the maize and sorghum beer, brewed for ceremonies. Shisa nyama, where meat is chosen at the butchery and grilled on the spot, is the sociable weekend meal, served with pap and the spiced relish chakalaka, and magwinya, fried dough balls, are sold everywhere for breakfast.

The colonial inheritance shows in biltong and boerewors, milk tart and koeksisters in the bakeries, and in the Midlands produce that comes into the city from a few kilometres away: farm cheeses, cream, smoked trout, free-range beef, berries and craft beer. Sugar cane and subtropical fruit come up from the coast, and rooibos and strong black tea are the everyday drinks.