Letter from South Africa 1988

 

White only beach near Durban
 

South Africa became famous in Britain and the rest of the world I guess, for not its landscape beauty but for its ugly politics. The ugly politics being the apartheid system of racial segregation enforced through legislation in 1948 and abolished in 1994.

I was in South Africa with my partner in 1988 during the times of unrests and we were lucky to have protection of my partner’s family. However their daily lives were lived in fear in big houses with swimming pools behind high walls with security guards patrolling the white only neighbourhood. As I and my partner were in South Africa for few weeks by the sea side we did not let politics get in the way of our fun, there we were near Durban sharing the ‘beach reserved for white only’.

 

Durban has the largest population of Indians from India and is famous for Indian spice markets. Equipped with lots of spices, we drove to the Natal safari Park near Durban to see the rare white rhinos of South Africa and there were plenty of other wild life too. We stayed in a beautiful thatched roof hut furnished with a bed with clean white sheets and electric blanket (yes it does get very cold at night) and here the black people were the servants, living in shitty little shacks making the fire, cooking for us and the whites (we) were the masters of the land having fun?

We moved to Port Elizabeth to be with another member of my partner’s family where we wined and dined in big beautiful houses and felt a bit out of place as we were served by the black servants, not the life style we knew back home. There were times when our white hosts were uncomfortable with our presence as they were not used to having couple like us in their homes ( a coloured guest had never entered their homes). Unable to find any close relative to help us reach Cape Town we caught the only transport available to us, a local bus full of black people who entertained us by singing,  all the way to our next stop of our incredibly beautiful journey to the city of Table Mountains.

 

Freedom at last came when we reached Cape Town, the city full of mixed race people. We stayed in a hotel where the view of the Table Mountains was all around us and discovered delightful sea food restaurants and bought the T-shirt to bring home.

                                   Above photo was taken from the top of the Table Mountains