This was a first among a couple trips I would make to Jo’burg. It was a rousing 4 hour flight from JKIA heading to the legendary- South Africa, to the cradle-land of the Zulu – Kwa Zulu Natal. As I checked in O.R. Tambo International Airport, it was all smiles and Unjani all the way to Kwa Zulu Natal, also known as Durban. That was back in 2010, good times to remember, the outwardly peaceable place, incapable of this lunacy we now call Xenophobia.
Coating the thought away, was the nostalgia of Mombasa in the 1990s – fresh and exotic. Somehow Durban gave me the same feeling. What could possibly loom beneath this serenity? What was the beginning of this epidemic hate?
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Some argued that companies would give out their jobs, to cheap labor from illegal Zimz, Malawian’s or Mozambican immigrants to evade the complexities of affirmative action. On the other divide, the foreigners – they just thought of the black South African as unschooled, lazy criminals. Well, I am not sure of whichever divide, all I know is that I met some really cool and some pretty normal people in South Africa.
I remember the positivity we read over tête-à-têtes during my stay. We talked of the new age South Africa, post-apartheid through the wilderness on toward the Promised Land. The progressiveness of the new South African. Their inspirations drawn from Rastafari, made on show by dreadlocks and reggae songs. We spoke of legends that once were – Lucky Dube, (then still were – Mandiba). We gossiped of the bitterness of the old racist Boers, and how they now have to deal with it. What optimisms we had, they had, the new South Africa, just through rose colored glasses.
WAXSPELL 